Zeit/Ort: Donnerstag, 5. Mai, 14.00–15.30, in Raum M 2.31 (Präsenz!)
The existing literature on political finance is not well integrated with more general approaches to comparative political institutions. In particular it neglects the basic metric of democracy – numbers of votes. Theoretically, I introduce ways of relating political finance to vote share. Empirically, I begin with a study of twenty two countries, comparing the disproportionality of elections with the disproportionality of political finance. I then conduct case studies of two dissimilar countries, Belgium and the UK, looking at the distributional consequences of various political finance regulations. Belgium’s political finance system is rigorously focused on a coherent bias towards smaller and weaker parties. The elements of Great Britain’s political finance system do not share a common distributive criterion. I conclude that the distributive element of political finance is democratically crucial and its elements can be easily and insightfully analysed by weighting resources by votes.