Abstract
In Money, Parties and Democracy: Political Finance Between Cats and Big Government, Matteo Bonotti and Zim Nwokora develop a practical analytical framework and theory of political finance. Drawing on a myriad of literature and disciplines, including party politics and political finance, this seminal work empirically unpacks the pivotal role of money in party system dynamics and democracy. The authors accentuate political finance scandals from four established democracies, which include the US, UK, Italy and Japan, to demystify the complex interplay between party system finance and institutional factors, including how they incentivise and dissuade corruption. In this influential work, Bonotti and Nwokora build their core argument on the proposition that political finance rules should be interpreted in line with the classical and established norms of the party system they co-exist with (p. 7).
Strewn into six reinforcing chapters, the authors buck the trend through application of normative theory of partisanship, which was bifurcated into collegiality and linkage while expounding how these two dimensions not only relate to party system and political finance but also lend credence to democratic governance. The authors rely on normative theory and interpretive perspective as methodological analysis to carve their theoretical framework and contributions to the party system and finance. Building on canonical and classical works of Sartori, Duverger and Taagepera, Bonotti and Nwokora’s work consolidates our understanding of the party system and normative theory of partisanship.
In chapter 1, Bonotti and Nwokora observe that normative theory emanates from political theory literature and one of the parts’ responses to the crises of liberal democracy, symptomatic through depressing voters’ turnout and decreasing political trust. While the author defines collegiality as the ability of parties and partisans to collaborate for the sustenance of liberal democracy and advancement of general goods, linkage is viewed as the provision of a channel to demand accountability between the citizens and state. The authors’ submission in this chapter that “the normative theory of partisanships operationalises these ideals for the purpose of evaluating parties and their institutional environments” (p. 12) belies the examples and illustrations on political finance controversies drawn from the four countries mentioned in the introduction of the book.
Building on the explanatory framework in chapter 1, the succeeding chapter 2, the authors not only evaluated and illustrated the concentrated party system typology, which they delineated into two-party and predominant party systems. Anchored on Sartori five party system and Downsian model, the authors argue that the two-party system is the most prominent and most intuitive of Sartori’s five-party democratic party system. They provided real-world examples such as Malta, the US, UK and Australia to underscore how the two-party system leads to a single government. Furthermore, under the two-party system, the author identifies additional criteria, which include ideological breadth and outsider party fragmentation. From the two criteria, they pinpointed “broad’ and low” variants for ideological breadth, while “low” and ‘high” are associated with the outsider fragmentation. Bonotti and Nwokora explain how the two-party system functions under the normative dimensions of partisanship frameworks – collegiality, systemic voice and systematic accountability.
In chapter 3, Bonotti and Nwokora examine multiparty systems, which were classified into moderate, polarised and atomised pluralism, which is a shift away from, but consolidation of the two-party system explained in earlier chapters. Reinforcing Sartori’s typology and explanatory framework, the authors argued that moderate pluralists could be located between two-party systems and polarised pluralist systems. However, the area of difference is that a moderate pluralist system is more fragmented than a two-party system but is less fragmented than a polarised pluralist system. The real-world examples given for a moderate pluralist’s system include Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium, while Denmark, Spain, Italy and Finland fall under polarised pluralism. Unlike the moderate and polarised pluralism system, Nwokora and Bonotti contend that in atomised pluralism, the number of parties exceeds eight and fragmentation is extremely high compared to the moderate and polarised system. According to the author, examples of atomised pluralism could be found in earlier independent African countries such as Cosmoro and Gambia, as well as non-party democracies such as Nauru, Tuvalu and Micronesia with low accountability under the system (p. 67).
Pivoting away from the party-system, chapters 4 to 6 conceptually provide a model and deepen our understanding of party finance, including a scale to evaluate the normative properties of dual sources of funding. Most importantly, it extends the framework on the normative theory of partisanship from the party system to explaining how the dimension operates under party finance. Besides, Bonotti and Nwokora intelligently capture and provide a theoretical lens on how to identify an ideal political finance arrangement, including the setup for good and bad political finance for each party system type. Similarly, the authors identified four types of political institutions ranging from electoral institutions, institutions of democratisation, government form and party organisation and how these institutions can inhibit or incentivise normative theory of partisanship (p. 134).
There are several strengths in this highly influential work. First, it clearly explains various party systems in relation to their normative theory of partisanship. Second, it deftly and systematically underlines how each party system identified performs against the three dimensions of the normative theory of partisanship, which include collegiality, systemic voice and systemic accountability. However, the major weakness and limitation is that the authors overly focus on developing polity and the dynamic of party finance in established democracies, while excluding non-democratic ideal types in their analysis. In other words, the book discounts party finance and normative theory of partisanship in developing and non-established democracies.
Beyond the limitations, the book not only contributes to our understanding of party politics and systems, but it also extends our knowledge on the theory of political finance, including normative commitment in developed democracies and functional society. Political comparativists, theorists, policymakers and non-academic interested in the nexus between money, parties and democracies will find the book relevant and useful given its simplistic and systematic writing style, non-statistical nature and mirror of contemporary politics in advanced democracies.
