FICTIONARY: CAMPAIGN FINANCE

Election Campaigns are extremely costly and the political parties have to raise funds from several sources to pull through elections. Campaign Finance refers to the funds raised by political parties from different sources to sustain their requirements. Read further to find out how they manage to raise these funds and from which sources.

BY NANKIE BAWA | 5 min Read

Campaign finance, also known as election finance, refers to all funds raised to promote candidates, political parties, or policy initiatives. Political parties, charitable organizations, and political action committees (in the United States) are vehicles used in allocating funds to keep campaigns alive. "Political finance" is also popularly used internationally for its comprehensiveness. Campaign finance essentially deals with costs of democracy, a term coined by G. Alexander Heard for his famous analysis of campaign finance in the U.S. In simple words, it is the money raised and spent by political parties on Elections and campaigning in general.

In political campaigns, huge expenditures are incurred, such as the cost of travel of candidates and staff, and the direct costs of communicating with voters via media outlets, security and grass root communication and campaigning. Campaign spending can vary from region to region. For instance, in some countries, television advertising time must be purchased by campaigns, whereas in other countries, it is provided for free. The need to raise money for maintaining expensive political campaigns diminishes ties to a representative democracy because of the influence large contributors have over politicians. A lot of large corporate houses grant funds to political parties in order to facilitate them to run campaigns.

Although  political science literature shows that a lot of contributors give support to parties or candidates with whom they already have some sort of agreement, there is a wide public belief that these fund providers also expect Government favors in return. So people have started equating campaign finance with political corruption and bribery. These views have led governments to reform campaign financing in the hope of eliminating big money influence.