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.
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.