Political Corruption and Electoral Funding

• Published date: 01 March 2013
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567713476886
• Author: Nubia Evertsson
• Date: 01 March 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Corruption and

Electoral Funding: A

Cross-National Analysis

Nubia Evertsson

1

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the suspect nature of private campaign finance, understood as the

donors’ hidden intentions and delayed exchange of reciprocities with incumbents. In particular, I

explore whether electoral contributions from private corporations lead to political corruption. On

the basis of a cross-national analysis, I find that, first, private financing reduces corruption because

the use of this legal mechanism is enough to guarantee that the donors’ interests will be achieved.

Second, donors recognize that they have gained influence over policy outcomes, although in the

spirit of the electoral laws this is not intended to occur. This increases corruption because incum-

bents use their positions of power to bend the rules and to adjust regulations and decisions in favor

of their financial supporters. This paradox suggests law neutralization.

Keywords

comparative crime/justice, crime policy, courts/law, critical criminology

Introduction

Elections are an essential part of the democratic process. In democracies, citizens participate in

elections not only with their votes but also by contributing from their pockets. Citizens and corpo-

rations in general pay for the cost of elections, be it as taxpayers, party members, or voluntary

donors. However, it has been argued that when private money flows into the political system, it

usually tries to influence political parties’ decisions, and indeed, their policy-making processes

(Della Porta & Vannucci, 1999; Harstad & Svensson, 2011; Johnston, 2005; Nassmacher, 2003;

Rose-Ackerman, 1999; Williams, 2000). Thus, elected public officials bring their power and influ-

ence to bear in order to compensate their financial supporters. Favorable legislation and regulations

are introduced; contracts, job appointments, and different kinds of compensation are awarded in

return for the financial support provided.

The analysis of this problematic relationship between donors and incumbents has not been

ignored in the literature, but it has, perhaps remarkably, remained largely unnoticed by

1

Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Nubia Evertsson, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Universitetsva

¨gen 10C, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden.

Email: nubia.evertsson@criminology.su.se

International CriminalJustice Review

23(1) 75-94

ª2013 Georgia State University

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criminologists. Although this issue was initially discussed by Nelken and Levi (1996) and has been

briefly mentioned by Friedrichs (2004), Green and Ward (2004), Zimring and Johnson (2005), and

Shichor and Geis (2007), no research on campaign finance has been conducted from a criminologi-

cal perspective. Research on campaign finance has, in particular, been conducted by congressional

scholars, who have focused on the subsidiary benefits that accrue to private donors once the

politicians have entered office, taking a cross-sectional approach at the level of the firms involved

(see Smith (1995) and Stratmann (2004) for literature reviews). A limited number of scholarly inves-

tigations of this type of compensation have been studied at the cross-national level (Pinto-

Duschinsky, 2002; Stratmann, 2003). However, cross-national studies have not provided conclusive

evidence of the relationship between electoral financing and political corruption.

1

I address this gap in the literature—and in particular in the criminological literature—by analyz-

ing data from 78 countries that links the electoral financing system to political corruption. This

article is positioned among the cross-national studies on crime that set out to understand the relation-

ships between democratization and crime. This new line of inquiry in cross-national criminology

incorporates political as well as economic factors to understand the emergence of crime after the

latest wave of democratization (Stamatel, 2009). Traditional cross-national criminology usually cen-

ters on understanding homicide rates, larceny, robbery, and other traditional crimes and their causal

relationship with socioeconomic factors. In the new emerging area of criminological studies, the

focus is on offences related to corruption, property rights, and intellectual property rights (Piquero

& Piquero, 2006; Sung, 2004).

The theoretical foundations of this article are taken from Becker’s approach to crime. Becker

(1968) argued that citizens do not always obey the law. Crime can originate in both legal and ille-

gal actions; therefore, to prevent crime, resources should be allocated to apprehend, convict, and

punish offenders. In the case of political corruption, this approach was extended by Rose-

Ackerman (1975, 1999), who incorporated market structures and the institutional capacity of gov-

ernment agencies in order to explain this phenomenon. According to Rose-Ackerman, interes ts,

incentives, and mechanisms of control are the key elements behind corrupt exchanges. These ele-

ments should not be thought isolated, but rather part of the market structure that encourages

them—a consequence of the weakness in the institutions of power that corrupters use to bend gov-

ernment policies and services to their own advantage. Although Rose-Ackerman did not take the

legalistic approach when relating illegality to corruption, some scholars who have used Becker’s

approach to crime have overlooked the legalistic relationship between illegality and crime. Crim-

inologists have pointed out that this is mistaken. In this regard, McBarnet (2006) has argued that

the successful manipulation of the law enables deviant behaviors, since offenders act with impu-

nity with the protection of the law. McBarnet has called this legal neutralization.

The heart of the problem addressed in this article is the fact that a legal action can lead to illegal

results, as Becker suggested. In particular, I explore whether electoral contributions from private

corporations can bring about political corruption. I am not concerned here with presenting an ideo-

logical debate on market structures. In the case of campaign finance, electoral donors are protected

by the law because it is legal to give financial support to political candidates; however, donors

expect that their generosity will be reciprocated in the future once the candidates are in office.

2

They

are also aware that the weakness of the el ectoral system makes it imposs ible to track and take legal

action against the reciprocities delivered to their companies. So, it is not only incentives and inter-

ests that facilitate the emergence of electoral financing as a corrupt action: It is also the fact that

donors use the weaknesses of the control mechanisms to obtain favorable outcomes. This approach

complements Rose-Ackerman’s theory of corruption, while in essence following the same line as

Becker’s.

This article is organized as follows. The first section presents the previous research on the subject

of electoral donations. The reader should note that most of the studies have been produced by

76 International Criminal Justice Review 23(1)