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Does Public Funding Matter? The Effect of State Subsidies to Political Parties on Political Corruption

Project description

Does public money to political parties reduce political corruption?

European politics is periodically shaken by scandals in which large donations are given to political parties in return for the award of contracts. While regulations to prevent this phenomenon are in place in all Member States, it is uncertain whether political finance subsidies reduce corruption in politics. The EU-funded PFCorr project will study whether a high level of state subsidies can diminish political corruption. Specifically, it will use the actual data on state funding provided to political parties. Until now, comparative studies have exclusively used crude measures to estimate the effect of state subsidies on political corruption. By standardising the information on state funding to parties, PFCorr will compare its impact on corruption cross-nationally and over time. Combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, the project will explore this relationship for the post-communist regimes between 1990/1991 and 2018.

Objective

The chief normative assumption underpinning the provision of public funding to political parties holds that state funding aims to diminish their propensity to engage in corruption-prone exchanges through financing from illicit sources. Yet, the empirical testing of this supposition has received little attention from a comparative perspective. At best, existing comparative studies relied on very crude measures to estimate the effect of subsidies on political corruption.
This project will partially address this gap by using better measures of both explanatory and explained variables. Unlike existing research, which employs either composite indexes of various financing regulations or binary measures of public funding (i.e. the lack vs. the availability of state subsidies) to estimate the effect of state subsidies on corruption, this project embarks on a different path. It will use hard data on state funding provided to political parties, which will be standardized to make it comparable cross-nationally and over time. It will also employ alternative measures of political corruption (e.g. experience-based, public perception, text analysis), which do not rely exclusively on expert-based evaluations.
The analysis will be conducted using an original data-set on the de facto level of state funding, operationalised as the annual average of direct budgetary subventions per voter at the national level for 27 post-communist regimes between 1990/1991 until 2018. To estimate the direction and strength of the relationship between public funding and political corruption, as well as to explain the underlying causal mechanism, according to which a higher level of state subsidies is expected to diminish political corruption, this research will employ a mixed-method research design. It will combine quantitative (panel data models) and qualitative techniques (case-studies and paired comparison) as complementary methodological tools.

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

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Coordinator

DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 184 590,72
Address
Glasnevin
9 Dublin
Ireland

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Region
Ireland Eastern and Midland Dublin
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 184 590,72
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