THE POLITICS OF MONEY
The role of money in politics is an issue everyone has an opinion about despite having none of the facts. The reason quite simply is that political funding in India is opaque and thus unobservable, despite the enhanced scrutiny of candidates’ expenditures exerted by the Election Commission. Political funding in India does not lack transparency. It has none.
Costs of Democracy, edited by political scientists Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav, makes a refreshing start towards addressing the opaqueness of political funding in India. The editors put together a collection of seven papers, which combine novel data with methodological rigour (both quantitative and qualitative) to seek answers to some fundamental questions. What are the sources of political finance? How (and on what) do politicians and parties spend money? What is the institutional and regulatory context that governs the flow of money into politics and why is it so ineffective?
The overarching explanation that the volume provides for the prevalence of electoral financial malpractice is that the system as a whole and in its parts offers no incentive to parties or candidates to discipline their political spending. Quite the contrary, parties and candidates are incentivised to outspend their opponents, thus creating an upward spiral of campaign expenditures.
E. Sridharan underlines that political parties remain largely unregulated as the instruments that would allow the Election Commission or some other authority to exert control over parties simply do not exist. Neelanjan Sircar analyses candidates’ asset declarations to establish that the competitiveness of elections encourages parties to rely on personal wealth.
Jennifer Bussell furthers that contribution by using survey data to reveal the extent to which electoral candidates depend on personal funding, as well as relying on the support of friends and relatives. In the process, webs of influence get woven, tying elected representatives to all sorts of local interests.
This is illustrated in turn by Kapur and Vaishnav, who use a clever research design to expose the links between the construction industry and politics. By looking at the fluctuation of distribution of cement around the electoral cycle, they observe that the amount of money invested in politics affects the ability of builders to buy raw material.
Getting elected also means entering a world of daily expenditure. The chapters by Björkman and Witsoe examine the role of money in the daily lives of elected representatives. They reveal that the use of money goes beyond the buying of votes or the financing of campaign activities. The credibility of political leaders is established by their ability to display—and disburse—wealth, through gifts, as a signal of their ability to access higher networks of power. Simon Chauchard underlines that campaigns have become more sophisticated, and therefore costly affairs, and that the rise in political expenditure also comes from legitimate forms of spending.
The implications are far-reaching and critical to the functioning and meaning of India’s democracy. Money acts as an important filter of who gets to become a representative. Money affects the ability of political actors to act independently, as it chains them to a system of obligations without oversight. By using empirical evidence to shed light on an opaque phenomenon, this book contains the best that academia has to offer to a broad audience of concerned citizens.
Gilles Verniers is assistant professor of political science and co-director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University. Views are personal.
Money affects the ability of political actors to act independently, as it chains them to a system of obligations without oversight