Yet the raising and spending of money by political parties, and how this is regulated, are matters of importance to citizens everywhere. The citizen is entitled to ask, how best can theory inform practice and drive reform? How in practice can conflicting principles of competition, freedom, and fairness be reconciled within democratic norms? The Handbook’s contributors are aware of the problem but seem individually reluctant, and/or collectively unable, to provide systematic responses. Further, on some key concerns – such as corporate campaign contributions and party campaign spending – the Handbook presents a narrow focus that may reflect the authors’ current research agenda and methods rather than the broader interests of the reader.

Yet there is much here of value.

Jonathan Mendilow and Eric Phélippeau

The dominant scholarly explanation of contemporary party behaviour is the so-called ‘cartel party theory’, formulated two decades ago by an Irish scholar, the late Peter Mair, and his US colleague Richard S. Katz. It is a powerful explanatory narrative that deserves to be in the mainstream of popular discourse about party politics. Its broad outlines are largely confirmed by research in the Handbook, albeit in fragmented fashion across a number of contributors.

The theory proposes that political parties, at least in Western Europe, have used their position as privileged incumbent legislators to seize state subsidies, such as public funding of their election campaigns, while discouraging new entrants. Through this collusion, the process of cartelisation has changed parties from membership-based parties with roots deep in civil society to virtual agencies of the state.

Ingrid van Biezen – a former student of Mair who now holds the professorship at Leiden University he once held – confirms state subsidies have made parties financially dependent on the state and have generally increased the amount of money circulating in the system. ‘In that sense, parties appear to have made effective use of their privileged position which allows them to devise the rules of the game to their own advantage,’ she and her colleague observe.

There is an important qualification however. If this is a cartel, it is far from watertight. Research presented here shows that, in many countries, cartelisation operates inclusively, contrary to the theory, to level the playing field for new smaller parties. The regulatory mechanisms for achieving this – or what one researcher calls ‘anti-cartelisation measures’ – are varied. Campaign spending limits help stop large parties drowning out the voice of the small. Low eligibility thresholds for public funding enable small parties to enter the contest. (In Denmark, parties are eligible to receive public funding if they receive as few as one thousand votes.) Rewards for membership encourage parties to maintain their links with civil society. (In the Netherlands, parties may only qualify for public funding if they have at least one thousand members.)

In Australia, too, several states have introduced pro-competitive measures, such as funding for party administration and policy development, not just campaign expenditure (as happens in New South Wales), and paying a higher dollar amount for a party’s first tranche of votes than for the rest of its vote share (as happens in South Australia). Both work to the advantage of smaller emergent parties.

Despite these measures, and despite Australia’s history of democratic innovation, Graeme Orr (University of Queensland) argues here that when it comes to regulation of political finance, we have ‘tended to lag behind even other common law systems’. Orr critiques recent advocacy – notably by former New South Wales Premier Mike Baird – of ‘full’ public funding of parties. The proposal, since dropped, was ostensibly aimed at sanitising parties from the corrupting taint of private, corporate, and union funding. But, Orr quips, is this about cleaning up parties, or about parties ‘cleaning up’ – that is, getting another handout to guarantee their survival, regardless of their declining membership numbers?

Susan E. Scarrow (University of Houston) exposes Australia’s inadequate regulation in another aspect of party funding. Using the authoritative (and publicly accessible) International IDEA Political Finance database, Scarrow finds that more than seventy per cent of countries ban donations to parties by foreign citizens and governments. Australia is in the minority, and the Turnbull government initiative to impose such a ban is in limbo.

The Handbook brings together twenty-seven chapters by distinguished international contributors and emerging scholars. Case studies include interesting chapters on Canada, New Jersey, Singapore, Lesotho and Mozambique, and Russia, as well as the more usual suspects in developed democracies of Western Europe and the United States. The editors’ efforts to straddle the Atlantic – Jonathan Mendilow is American; Eric Phélippeau is French – is particularly commendable, as most party scholarship using data from Western Europe or Westminster-style parliamentary systems (for example, the cartel party theory) struggles to accommodate the fundamentally different United States practice, and vice versa.

It is the chapter by Robert G. Boatright (University of Arizona) that really poses challenges to our regulatory orthodoxies. Boatright notes that the term ‘party funding’ is not commonly used in the United States. Anti-party sentiment there dates back to The Federalist Papers, and US elections are centred on candidates, not parties. More recently, especially in the wake of the unprecedented fundraising success of Barack Obama and the radical deregulation of party finance ordered by the US Supreme Court, public funding of election campaigns has become virtually obsolete and the erstwhile regulator is largely dismantled, while money floods in from plutocrats and Super Political Action Committees.

The ideological argument for deregulation is not, as Boatright comments, necessarily unique to the United States. He leaves us with the question whether we should continue to see the United States as an ‘outlier’, or whether it has become a cautionary tale, a harbinger.