How Should India Fund its Democracy? Lessons from the Global Experiences

Abstract

Democracy costs money. From fighting elections and to running daily political activities, political parties and candidates seek donations from all possible sources including tapping illegal and interested money. This often results in corruption and subversion of governance. In addition, the expensive nature of elections acts as a huge barrier for a lot of aspiring candidates to enter politics, thus working as an “entry barrier”. In the absence of adequate funds, smaller and new parties particularly find it difficult to run decent election campaigns. In order to reduce the dependency on big money and encourage aspiring politicians to participate in the democratic process, a number of democracies have embraced the path of public subsidies and direct funding of political parties and political activities. By effectively targeting state subsidies, leading western democracies such as Germany and United Kingdom have made impressive strides in reducing the role of interested money in elections and have brought visible transparency in their electoral politics. Looking from the prisms of India’s tryst with public funding model, the paper attempts to study the effectiveness of different public funding models, understand the context of such reforms including the reform eco-systems, identify the variations in implementation, and prepare a list of doable for India.