There are a lot of complaints here in the U.S., about private money, the megarich and the corporations and business interests, wielding (and, for after the election, buying) political influence through election-campaign funding and PACs. My understanding is that in the UK and France, they’ve got systems where every party/candidate in a given race simply gets the same allotment of TV time free. Do monied interests nevertheless manage to find away around that and influence the outcome of elections (and get owed favors by the winners)? The answer is important to any discussion of campaign-finance reform in the U.S.
Newspapers in the UK typically have political leanings, with the more “respectable” generally being less obvious about it and the tabloids generally just coming out and saying it (often on the front page). Rupert Murdoch owns The Times, a major broadsheet, and The Sun, a tabloid and the most read paper in the country. He also owns a significant part of Sky, the main satellite television service in the country. He can and does use his media empire for political reasons, and politicians have often tried to get cosy with him. In general, though, we don’t have big media campaigns and (in my opinion) the whole thing is a lot more civil, mature and “professional”. I believe TV time is largely allocated evenly, largely because a big chunk of our programming is from the BBC which is publicly owned and so is required to be impartial. We certainly don’t get adverts on TV “accusing” candidates of speaking French or other such heinous crimes. I think campaigns like that would quickly turn off British voters and would backfire pretty quickly.
There is of course lobbying going on in the background which will allow the rich their influence, but there is currently talk of limiting lobbying to some degree.
Rich people can also just donate money to a party’s campaign funds in the hope that party will support the causes they like. But because the publicity is much lower here our elections cost a lot less, so I’d guess campaign funding isn’t quite so vital and our parties perhaps have to bend less to the will of their donors. We also don’t have the primary system that exists in the US. A party chooses a leader, through a largely internal process, and if that party is elected into government the party’s leader becomes Prime Minister. This means candidates for PM don’t necessarily need fortunes of their own to finance their campaigns. My understanding of the American system is that, in practice, a person with modest amounts of money could not become president.
The governments of Britain and France have a lot more influence over private business than the other way around. The industrial effort of the world wars set the precedent for managed economies, and Britain in particular tried nationalization/quasi-Socialism. The governments there basically set the rules that businesses are allowed to operate under, and any really big or important business is usually in a partnership with a relevent government agency (energy, transportation, etc.)
Another thing that Canada shares with Britain, very different from the USA:
Parliamentary elections are usually called for about 6 weeks, rather than being a previous date known for years. Thus, here’s about 5 weeks or less to get the message out, rather than a year and a half evey 2 years of perpetual campaigning. There’s no such thing as primaries; the biggest nominating meeting for a candidate that I heard of was somewhere over 1000 people, not a whole state. Leadership conventions are the closest thing to primaries; they can gobble a lot of money, but IIRC it is not a tax deductible “political donation” so it’s mostly private riches. A lot less campaign money is needed.
Parliamentary elections are about getting the most seats in parliament (like congress) and less about a leadership cult of personality; so attack ads against a person are less meaningful when that leader could be gone, or their policies overriden by a foreful caucus (yeah, like that would happen).
Negative ads have a bad reputation and are seen as slimy, thanks to US politics. Sometimes they work, but the classic failure was the “is this the face of a prime minister?” ads making fun of Chretien’s partial facial paralysis.
A government has a lot more clout outside of the USA; businesses have a lot less recourse to the courts to TELL the government what to do, so a business antagonizing one side or the other may regret it. Better to build connections on both sides of the fence.
Like the USA, most business money is spent on lobbyists, schmoozing the influential people who can decide about legislation that can affect the business. Unlike Congress, a parliament - especially a majority - is dictated to by the government. The effort is spent trying to persuade the minister(s) and committee members, rather than having to lobby enough members to get a full majority for every vote. In parliaments, for better or worse, members pretty much rubber stamp the party line, the trick is to persuade the party brass. .
This isn’t remotely true these days, at least for Britain. Perhaps from the late 1940s up until the 1980s, but not now. Of course businesses operate under a regulatory framework, but that applies in the US as well.
When a General Election is called (not on a fixed schedule) there is usually about five or six weeks of campaigning. Each party that can put up enough candidates is allowed a small number of short broadcasts on the terrestrial TV channels. There are no other TV broadcast political ads allowed. Typically you will also see party-funded ads on billboards and in newspapers, and of course leafleting and door-to-door canvassing.
Wealthy interests can and do donate to the political parties, and the usual political favours result no doubt. A fairly recent development, or at least it seems more visible, is the rise of lobbying groups such as the Taxpayers Alliance, who are basically murkily-funded rent-a-quotes who seem to have gained some faux-respectability in media circles. They are basically paid shills though.
There are strict limits on how much a candidate may spend on his campaign. Nor may anyone else incur expense on his behalf, whether by urging people to vote for him, or to vote against another candidate (or if they do, it counts towards his total).
Ignorance fought, thank you.
In France, for presidential elections :
-Paid political adds are forbidden on TV and radio
-Each candidate get an equal airtime on public TV and radio channels to present his programm/show videos of people unhappy with the current state of affairs/whatever.
-During the campaign, all radios and TVs, public and private, must give the exact same lenght of coverage to each candidate (There’s generally a dozen of candidates, so they must sometimes be creative to cover the most fringe candidates).
-The amount spent on the campaign is capped (*)
-Part of it is reimbursed if the candidate receive at least 5% of the votes.
-Each elector receive, at public expense, a mail containing a one page leaflet from every candidate who has provided them.
(*) It transpired recently that during the 90s, the Constitutionnal Council, a court also in charge of the presidential elections, backed off when presented with significant evidences of overspending. It apparently wouldn’t put itsel in the position of cancelling a presidential election after the fact over some millions, so it rather decided that the figures presented by its underlings and number crunchers were unconclusive. It’s true though that acting otherwise would have created a political/constitutionnal/legal crisis of epic proportions.
There are some mitigating factors.
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Elections are called at much shorter notice. Rather than a year or more of campaigning, parties get 6 weeks or so.
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There are very low limits on campaign donations. I’m not sure what they are, exactly, but in the UK they are very low.
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Again, in the UK, all parties get the same time in TV coverage.
The result is that lobbyists have a much lower influence. They still have influence, of course - but they can’t donate a fraction as much, they have much less time to do it in, and the parties can’t use it to get more airtime than their rivals.
The last time I worked in the US, everybody who worked in my building got a letter sent by a company VP urging us to vote for a certain Senator’s reelection. According to my American coworkers, this is actually legal - in Spain the screaming would have been so loud, windows in the nearest offices of the Department of Labor and of the Electoral Board would have exploded. Discussing your political opinions with coworkers is ok so long as nobody yells; telling your subordinates who to vote for is called caciquismo and let’s just say it’s not a polite word. The legal terms would involve “abuse of power over subordinates” (hence, Labor) and “attempt to manipulate electoral resuls” (hence, the Board).
On the subject of campaign lengths, it is true that formal, gloves-off campaigning only starts when the election date is officially called, but the parties start to go into campaign mode well before that. The rhetoric changes, media campaigns start to ramp up, government policy even changes (they’re less likely to raise taxes in the year before an election, for example).
That’s no longer true; Britain now has regularly scheduled elections every five years. The schedule can be bypassed only by a vote of no confidence in the government; the ruling party can no longer dissolve Parliament and call an election at will.
How about if they vote that they have no confidence in themselves? Serious question - could governing parties use this to effectively choose the election date, just like they always have done?
(I realise that this would be difficult in the case of the current coalition government.)
There are no limits on donations. What there is are very strict limits on campaign spending.
And those limits take two forms. Firstly, there is the long-established system of limiting spending by invididual candidates. The exact figure depends on the size of the electorate, whether the seat is rural or urban and the length of the campaign. (The last point will presumably be subject to minor adjustment in future, because, as psychonaut points out, the length of a Parliament is now fixed and so the likely dates of the next dissolution and general election are already known.) The illustrative example offered by the Electoral Commission prior to the last election was that the maximum allowance for an urban constituency with 70,000 voters would be between £10,650 and £28,500.
Which is tiny. All that most candidates can do is send out a single leaflet to every household (although they get free postage on that single mailshot) and print some posters. It cannot be said that many people think this a problem.
Secondly, there is the more recent innovation of limits on spending by each party nationally. That depends on how many candidates the party is fielding. (The figure used to be £30,000 per candidate.) But there is no real evidence that this creates major problems for the three major parties. That’s because the figure was fixed in line with what the two biggest parties, Conservatives and Labour, tended to spend anyway. It’s not as if there is much more that they could actually spend it on. TV broadcasts are severely limited. Tours by party leaders are inexpensive because Britain is just a small island - the most lavish transport they have ever used are small private jets and it was noticable during the last election that they often made a point of using (public) trains instead. The days when politicians wanted to be seen flying around the country because this made them appear ‘modern’ are long gone. Also, it helps them that the media is so London-based.
It’s not quite that simple, either for the official party election broadcasts or for the wider TV coverage. The basic principle is that the three main parties get equal airtime. But there is no question of every party being allowed that. A smaller number of party election broadcasts are allocated to the smaller parties, partly if they have existing MPs and partly if they are fielding candidates in a large number of constituencies. Some fringe parties field enough candidates merely to pass the threshold entitling them to a single broadcast. Not that anyone watches any of these broadcasts anyway.
The main broadcasters need not otherwise give equal airtime to the smaller parties. But they must give them some airtime. Also, any item about the election for a specific seat must mention all the candidates. But this need not be more than the statement that those other candidates are also standing. Even that was pushed to breaking point by the growing numbers of joke candidates standing against Prime Ministers. If there are numerous candidates, the broadcaster need do no more than briefly display the full list.
Slightly different rules apply in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to allow for the regional parties. So, for example, in Scotland the SNP gets equal airtime as the three main national parties etc.
[QUOTE=Baron Greenback]
There are no other TV broadcast political ads allowed.
[/QUOTE]
It should perhaps be added that this is simply a continuation of normal practice. British TV companies are not allowed to show political advertising of any sort by anyone at any time.
UK national expenditure limits - the absolute maximum for a party contesting every constituency can spend is £18.96m GB / £540,000 NI.
The law on financing - no limits, as APB says.
I don’t see why not. However, this would probably be a public relations disaster, and therefore defeat the whole point of calling an election early.
By the way, upon further research I was wrong about a motion of no confidence being the only way of calling an early election. Apparently it can also be done by simple vote of a two-thirds majority. A ruling party which commands sufficient seats in Parliament can therefore call elections at will, just like before. However, I don’t think any government in at least the past sixty years has ever had a two-thirds majority of seats.
Chancellor Kohl in Germany engineered a no-confidence vote against his own majority in the 80s, IIRC, to get an early election. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility.
In any case, I think fixed terms for parliament is stupid. It’s made it less flexible than before. Plus the lengthy electoral periods that America has may become more regular here shudder
It’s a basic tenet of parliamentary government that no parliament can tie the hands of future ones. Only the constitution (which there isn’t in Britain) can override a law. So if a government decided to call an election, they need only pass a bill changing the law. Canada ha the same system (as do several provinces) and not many have had an election on schedule yet, thanks to minority politics. We’ll see how that goes. (IIRC the no-confidence induced election resets the clock, so it’s still not like the USA.)
Of course arbitrarily changing the law to call an election would have consequences in itself, but I could imagine circumstances where it might be pulled off - say a PM resigns, a new leader takes over and says he can’t wait a year to get a mandate.
IIRC 3rd party election ads cannot push a candidate in Canada. They are protected free speech, but if they actively push a candidate (as opposed to just knocking one or more parties) then it is considered to be part of the candidate’s campaign spending.
The main point is that a business lobbying for particular favours does not have to persuade 160 members of parliament - they only have to persuade a few key cabinet ministers and committee members. Policy is dictated from the top. SO you don’t have the embarrassment of hundreds of lobbyists hitting hundreds of members for their point-of-view.
Similarly, much of the campaign money goes to the central party; members only collect money during the campaign, IIRC. So there are not 312 different people chasing major corporations or organizations for money around the clock, 365 days a year. Funny, but the laws are written by the main parties to benefit the central offices of the main parties… No loose cannons. You can give any money you want to anyone you want, but it’s not tax deductible unless it’s a registered party or an election campaign fund.
But, does all that have the (presumably) intended effect? I.e., does it prevent the rich from affecting the outcome of French elections?
In my opinion, the only time public primaries are justified is when the jurisdiction in question is effectively a one-party state, meaning that it’s virtually guaranteed that the winner of X party’s primary will win the general election. Otherwise, I think it should be the right of the party to restrict selection of its nominees to its members in a private primary or caucus or nominating convention.
While there are certain sectors in the United States that are known to be in the pocket of certain parties (Republicans: petroleum, physicians, and cops; Democrats: trial lawyers and labor unions (except for cops and teamsters)), for the most part, large corporations do contribute to both sides for this very reason.