Then the rich corporation who wants to influence a political party doesn’t donate money but things brought by money.
Which would still be constrained by donation limits, I suppose.
If you look at the US it’s a country of very weak parties. The head of the Republican and Democratic party don’t have much political power. To have a career as a politician in Germany you mainly have to impress fellow members of your political party. To have a career as a politician in the US you mainly have to impress corporate donors who fund your campaign.
IIUC, there are no spending limits by corporations in the US system.
Which would still be constrained by donation limits, I suppose.
No. If I hire a polling firm to gather data about the views hold by voters and hand the resulting data over to a politician that doesn’t count against donation limits.
If you want to label those acts as donations that you to be limited you destroy a lot of free speech rights.
IIUC, there are no spending limits by corporations in the US system.
There are spending limits as far as corporations donating money to political parties go. Citizens United basically says that anyone can make a Super PAC and that Super PAC is allowed to buy TV ads. It doesn’t say that you can just hand over the cash to a political party.
The US democratic party is currently chaired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. If you would make a list of the most influential US politicans I doubt that Debbie Wasserman Schultz would make the top ten. The institution of the democratic party is just to weak that heading it gives you a lot of political power.
I don’t want to say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has no political power at all but her power is miniscule compared to the head of a German political party.
No. If I hire a polling firm to gather data about the views hold by voters and hand the resulting data over to a politician that doesn’t count against donation limits. If you want to label those acts as donations that you to be limited you destroy a lot of free speech rights.
If you publicly disclose the results, then you are helping everybody. If you disclose the results only to a politician, then you are making a donation, by any reasonable meaning of the term.
I don’t want to say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has no political power at all but her power is miniscule compared to the head of a German political party.
Is there more private funding of politics, per capita or per unit of gdp, in the US or in Germany? I don’t have the data at hand, but I’ll bet that in the US corporations and wealthy individuals spend more on politics rather than Germans do.
Moreover, the German electoral system is a mix of relative majority and propositional representation, whereas the US one is a mostly pure relative majority system. Pure relative majority systems tends to produce a two parties with weak identities, with most political competition happening inside each party, and party chairpersons acting more as senior administrators and mediators rather than political leaders, while proportional representation favours political landscapes with multiple parties with strong identities and strong leaders.
If you disclose the results only to a politician, then you are making a donation, by any reasonable meaning of the term.
“Donation” conventionally refers to money or tangible resources: you can donate a thousand dollars, the use of a building, or your services in some professional capacity, but the word’s usually not used for advocacy, data, or analysis. I’m not sure there’s a word for an unsolicited gift of privately held information that you don’t intend to publicly disclose; if you did intend to disclose it at some point, it’d be a leak.
In this case you’re essentially working as a think tank, though, and I don’t believe think tank funding is generally counted as a direct political contribution. Might work differently in Europe, though.
“Donation” conventionally refers to money or tangible resources: you can donate a thousand dollars, the use of a building, or your services in some professional capacity, but the word’s usually not used for advocacy, data, or analysis. I’m not sure there’s a word for an unsolicited gift of privately held information that you don’t intend to publicly disclose; if you did intend to disclose it at some point, it’d be a leak.
I suppose that disclosing data bought from a commercial polling service would count as political donation, though I’m not sure what regulations actually say in various jurisdictions.
Anyway, certainly there are ways to perform political activism that don’t count as campaign donations, my point is that their effect on the outcome of the election is likely not the same as direct donations of money, ads, building use, and other tangible goods or services.
I don’t want to say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has no political power at all but her power is miniscule compared to the head of a German political party.
That’s because of differences in the electoral system. In the German system people vote for party lists, which the party heads choose, in the US system people vote directly for politicians; furthermore, each party’s candidate is decided by another election, called a primary, this leaves a lot less for party officials to do.
Which would still be constrained by donation limits, I suppose.
IIUC, there are no spending limits by corporations in the US system.
No. If I hire a polling firm to gather data about the views hold by voters and hand the resulting data over to a politician that doesn’t count against donation limits.
If you want to label those acts as donations that you to be limited you destroy a lot of free speech rights.
There are spending limits as far as corporations donating money to political parties go. Citizens United basically says that anyone can make a Super PAC and that Super PAC is allowed to buy TV ads. It doesn’t say that you can just hand over the cash to a political party.
The US democratic party is currently chaired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. If you would make a list of the most influential US politicans I doubt that Debbie Wasserman Schultz would make the top ten. The institution of the democratic party is just to weak that heading it gives you a lot of political power.
I don’t want to say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has no political power at all but her power is miniscule compared to the head of a German political party.
If you publicly disclose the results, then you are helping everybody. If you disclose the results only to a politician, then you are making a donation, by any reasonable meaning of the term.
Is there more private funding of politics, per capita or per unit of gdp, in the US or in Germany? I don’t have the data at hand, but I’ll bet that in the US corporations and wealthy individuals spend more on politics rather than Germans do.
Moreover, the German electoral system is a mix of relative majority and propositional representation, whereas the US one is a mostly pure relative majority system.
Pure relative majority systems tends to produce a two parties with weak identities, with most political competition happening inside each party, and party chairpersons acting more as senior administrators and mediators rather than political leaders, while proportional representation favours political landscapes with multiple parties with strong identities and strong leaders.
“Donation” conventionally refers to money or tangible resources: you can donate a thousand dollars, the use of a building, or your services in some professional capacity, but the word’s usually not used for advocacy, data, or analysis. I’m not sure there’s a word for an unsolicited gift of privately held information that you don’t intend to publicly disclose; if you did intend to disclose it at some point, it’d be a leak.
In this case you’re essentially working as a think tank, though, and I don’t believe think tank funding is generally counted as a direct political contribution. Might work differently in Europe, though.
I suppose that disclosing data bought from a commercial polling service would count as political donation, though I’m not sure what regulations actually say in various jurisdictions.
Anyway, certainly there are ways to perform political activism that don’t count as campaign donations, my point is that their effect on the outcome of the election is likely not the same as direct donations of money, ads, building use, and other tangible goods or services.
That’s because of differences in the electoral system. In the German system people vote for party lists, which the party heads choose, in the US system people vote directly for politicians; furthermore, each party’s candidate is decided by another election, called a primary, this leaves a lot less for party officials to do.