CORDIS

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.