Since the UK system also limits overall spending by parties
Then the rich corporation who wants to influence a political party doesn’t donate money but things brought by money.
You probably do succeed weaken political parties. If you are a lobbyist and want to influence politics to further the agenda of a corporation you want weak political parties.
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.
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.
In the US straightforward things such as TV ads. In the US a lot of the political ads are payed for by Super PACs that aren’t allowed to donate money to candidates or parties but which are allowed to buy advertising.
Apart from ads, modern political campaign usually depend on polling voters to target messages. A corporation can just pay a polling company to run a poll and then give the resulting data to the political party to be better able to target messages.
Of course in the moment the corporation pays the bills of the polling company instead of the political party the polling company suddenly gets interests to shape the poll to the liking of the corporation.
A politician can use more personal assistants if a lobbyist wants to serve as a personal assistant for free there often no reason for the politician to just send the lobbyist away.
The kid of the politician needs a job? The politician is probably grateful to a lobbyist who makes the necessary connections for the kid to get a good job. It’s not easy to calculate how much it costs a corporation to arrange the job for the kid and how big a favor the corporation can ask later for having arranged the job but I don’t see that it will likely be a much worse return on the money than a corporation donating money to a party to run TV ads.
Yes, there are loopholes that sufficiently motivated individuals can use to elude regulation to a certain extent, but this doesn’t mean that they are as effective as just giving cash. Cash is much more fungible than anything else.
Cash gives the person who writes the bill power. If a political party pays the money they got donated by a corporation for a polling firm to target ads than the polling firm serves the interests of the political party.
If the person who writes the bill is a corporation who then donates the resulting data, the polling firm has interests to shape the data in the interests of the corporation.
The political party and politicians prefer receiving cash. The lobbyists on the other hand don’t prefer to give cash. If you now come and pass a law that makes it harder for politicians to accept cash to use for political purposes you weaken the politicians and therefore strengthen the lobbyists.
Which is of course exactly how we get such laws in a society in which lobbyists hold a lot of political power and want more power.
The only way to get around lobbyists increase their power is to actually give other political actors more power. That means public funding of elections.
Yes, there are loopholes that sufficiently motivated individuals can use to elude regulation to a certain extent, [emphasis mine]
And that’s precisely the problem. The net affect of these regulations is to limit political influence to those who are sufficiently motivated. This is already the mechanism behind things like regulatory capture, these laws just make the effect worse.
Possibly. But the point is how much political influence you get. Influencing politics with direct donations is much more efficient than eluding regulation.
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.
The way an American would phrase it is:
To have a career as a politician in Germany you mainly have to impress the party bosses. To have a career as a politician in the US you mainly have to impress your constituents.
To have a career as a politician in Germany you mainly have to impress the party bosses.
Not completely. If I live in Berlin and want to be elected into the Bundestag for the SPD I want to get a high place of the SPD list allocated in the Berlin SPD party convention. The head of the SPD in Berlin is the person got head because they have a majority of the Berlin SPD behind them, but their power over the convention isn’t absolute. It’s like the power the Nancy Pelosi has over democratic US congressman.
To have a career as a politician in the US you mainly have to impress your constituents.
Yes, constituents weighted by the amount of political donations that they can give.
Then the rich corporation who wants to influence a political party doesn’t donate money but things brought by money.
You probably do succeed weaken political parties. If you are a lobbyist and want to influence politics to further the agenda of a corporation you want weak political parties.
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.
I prefer the incentives of the German system.
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.
Such as?
In the US straightforward things such as TV ads. In the US a lot of the political ads are payed for by Super PACs that aren’t allowed to donate money to candidates or parties but which are allowed to buy advertising.
Apart from ads, modern political campaign usually depend on polling voters to target messages. A corporation can just pay a polling company to run a poll and then give the resulting data to the political party to be better able to target messages.
Of course in the moment the corporation pays the bills of the polling company instead of the political party the polling company suddenly gets interests to shape the poll to the liking of the corporation.
A politician can use more personal assistants if a lobbyist wants to serve as a personal assistant for free there often no reason for the politician to just send the lobbyist away.
The kid of the politician needs a job? The politician is probably grateful to a lobbyist who makes the necessary connections for the kid to get a good job. It’s not easy to calculate how much it costs a corporation to arrange the job for the kid and how big a favor the corporation can ask later for having arranged the job but I don’t see that it will likely be a much worse return on the money than a corporation donating money to a party to run TV ads.
You are being hypercritical.
Yes, there are loopholes that sufficiently motivated individuals can use to elude regulation to a certain extent, but this doesn’t mean that they are as effective as just giving cash.
Cash is much more fungible than anything else.
Cash gives the person who writes the bill power. If a political party pays the money they got donated by a corporation for a polling firm to target ads than the polling firm serves the interests of the political party. If the person who writes the bill is a corporation who then donates the resulting data, the polling firm has interests to shape the data in the interests of the corporation.
The political party and politicians prefer receiving cash. The lobbyists on the other hand don’t prefer to give cash. If you now come and pass a law that makes it harder for politicians to accept cash to use for political purposes you weaken the politicians and therefore strengthen the lobbyists.
Which is of course exactly how we get such laws in a society in which lobbyists hold a lot of political power and want more power. The only way to get around lobbyists increase their power is to actually give other political actors more power. That means public funding of elections.
And that’s precisely the problem. The net affect of these regulations is to limit political influence to those who are sufficiently motivated. This is already the mechanism behind things like regulatory capture, these laws just make the effect worse.
While allowing to donate millions of dollars extends the political influence to the average person?
My point is that the barrier to entry to donate large amounts of money is lower than the barrier to elude regulations.
Possibly. But the point is how much political influence you get. Influencing politics with direct donations is much more efficient than eluding regulation.
No. Political influence tends to be zero sum, thus the fewer competing sources of influence there are, the more of it you have.
I don’t think so. If nobody spends in political influencing, people will still vote for somebody.
The way an American would phrase it is:
To have a career as a politician in Germany you mainly have to impress the party bosses. To have a career as a politician in the US you mainly have to impress your constituents.
Not completely. If I live in Berlin and want to be elected into the Bundestag for the SPD I want to get a high place of the SPD list allocated in the Berlin SPD party convention. The head of the SPD in Berlin is the person got head because they have a majority of the Berlin SPD behind them, but their power over the convention isn’t absolute. It’s like the power the Nancy Pelosi has over democratic US congressman.
Yes, constituents weighted by the amount of political donations that they can give.