Political Financing in Central Europe on the National and the Sub-National Level

The project wants to look into the current situation of national and sub-national party funding in Central Europe, namely in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. GRECO's Third Evaluation Round and its published reports have fundamentally changed the legal framework within which political parties regionally finance their activities. The proposed project is supposed to be the first independent academic evaluation of the newly appearing situation. The focus will be placed on the following two aspects: First, to reveal how political practitioners themselves see the change and how they evaluate it. Second, to find out whether there are differences between the ways how political activities are run and funded on different levels (the national, state, and local ones). The two main methodological tools of inquiry will be a) a quantitative assessment of incomes and expenditures of political parties on the national and sub-national levels, and b) a series of semi-structured interviews with representatives of political parties on the national and regional levels with representatives of the state administration.

The research project has the goal of estimating or assessing:
a) The assumed discrepancies between officially reported costs of election campaigning and the real campaigning costs, especially in connection with elections of sub-national levels (the country-wide, regional, and local elections);
b) The effectivity of legal regulations aimed at increasing the transparency of party funding, particularly the funding of sub-national political campaigns;
c) The intensity of financial dealings between the parties´ central offices and the parties´ regional and local branches;
d) The differences between campaigning strategies, tools, and resources applied at the central level and the sub-national one.

Methodology

The project is planned and carried out as a series of single case analyses, mostly based on qualitative techniques, with comparative follow-ups using quantitative statistical models. It is approached via the framework of the new institutionalism, and it applies assumptions of rational-choice abstract modeling. Process tracing, backward mapping, and predictive legal analysis are used for analyzing political decisions leading to the setup of national funding regimes of both the pre- and the post-GRECO's Third Evaluation Round. The aim is to find out how political parties operate within this setup.

Literature

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Project supervisors