Political Money and Corruption
Introduction
Political finance is influenced by, and influences, relations between parties, politicians, party membership and the electorate. Money matters for democracy because much of democratic political activity simply could not occur without it. Narrow definitions of political finance tend to focus on ‘campaign and party funding’. In fact, many extra-party actors are involved in political competition with the objective of shaping public policy agendas, influencing legislation or electoral debates and outcomes. A primary example was the Fujimori-Montesinos case in Peru. In mid-September 2000, a videotape was released that showed Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of Peru’s National Intelligence Service, apparently engaging in vote-buying by handing some US $15,000 to opposition congressman Luis Alberto Kouri to switch sides and give the government a majority in parliament. The scandal led to the resignation of Alberto Fujimori as President of Peru.
According to a typology developed by Vifredo Pareto, there are three motives for providing political funds: 1) idealistic or ideological, 2) social, aiming at social honours or access, and 3) financial, striving for material benefits. The latter comes as no surprise, but it can have major political consequences: in Germany, in July 2002, Rudolf Scharping, Germany’s defence minister, was replaced after the magazine Stern reported that he had taken DM 140,000 from Moritz Hunzinger, a PR consultant with links to the arms industry. German cabinet members are prohibited from earning anything other than their salaries. Scharping admitted to taking the payments, but said most of the money had gone to charity or had been used for ‘political work’. In another case, Kimitaka Kuze, head of the Japanese Financial Reconstruction Commission, was forced to step down in July 2000 following revelations he had received nearly US $2.1 million from Mitsubishi Trust and Banking Corp. between 1989 and 1994.
