No Money, No Party: The Role of Political Parties in Electoral Campaigns

Pas de parti sans argent: le rôle des partis politiques dans les campagnes électorales

Chiara Destri (1)

1 CEVIPOF - Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Sciences Po, CNRS)

This chapter aims to offer a fresh perspective on campaign finance by looking at political parties as key organisations of electoral campaigns. The chapter defends three claims: (1) that parties are ideally suited to organise campaigns in accordance with the democratic principle of collective self-rule, because they realise campaigns' epistemic, justificatory and motivational functions; (2) that campaign finance regulations affect parties' capacity to fulfil these functions, as well as their mutual relations and internal structure; and as a consequence (3) that we should consider their proper functioning at least as a pro tanto reason in favour of public funding, specifically in the form of a voucher system. After the introduction, the chapter illustrates the normative conception of political parties and then shows in the third section how they are ideally suited to organise electoral campaigns. The fourth section introduces the debate around campaign finance regulations, while the fifth clarifies why normative theorists working on parties and campaign finance should talk to each other and outlines a potential benefit of the voucher system for intra-party democracy. The conclusion wraps up.

Keywords: elections; political finance; vouchers; political parties; campaigns

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Philosophy; Humanities and Social Sciences; Political science

Chiara Destri. No Money, No Party: The Role of Political Parties in Electoral Campaigns. Rutger Claassen; Michael Bennet; Huub Brouwer. Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge, In press. ⟨hal-03546900⟩