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Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that political parties in European democracies have become increasingly dependent on state resources, most notably direct state funding. Yet cross-national studies on parties' usage of state resources that are not earmarked for partisan purposes, which require the assessment of informal, intra-organisational practices, are still rare. This article looks at one such practice across 33 parties in five European democracies: namely the ‘taxing’ of national MPs' salaries. Under this practice, candidates who enter elected office on a party ticket are obliged regularly to donate a fixed share of their public salaries to party coffers. The empirical analysis shows that the presence of a taxing rule is more likely in parties with a strong extra-parliamentary organisation, while a leftist ideology facilitates the collection of high salary shares from parliamentarians. Moreover, where party entanglement with the state is particularly pronounced, the partisan usage of parliamentary salaries is easier irrespective of their organisational dispositions. Finally, while in unitary systems national headquarters are usually able to monopolise control over national MPs' contributions, in federal systems regional party executives are able to insist on their share of these payments.
Acknowledgements
The data collection for this article was conducted in the context of a Marie Curie Early Career Fellowship held at the University of Leiden, July 2009–August 2010. Furthermore, this work was supported by the British Academy (SG-04570) and by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-239-25-0032). I am grateful for the input of my Leiden colleagues to the project, in particular Ingrid van Biezen, Petr Kopecký and Ruud Koole, as well as for the helpful criticism of the two referees. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Notes
1. Not to mention the broader tension with MPs' free mandate that inevitably clashes with parties pressuring their representatives into giving up part of their private income. Accordingly, in Germany and the Netherlands the constitutionality of the practice was questioned as a constraint on the constitutionally guaranteed free mandate of MPs, which in the former setting could be only resolved by a ruling of the constitutional court that confirmed the legality of the practice (which is still contested by some parties, such as the Free Democratic Party, which does not however prevent it collecting taxes from MPs).
2. Through creating a new, external regulator – the Interparliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) – the political elites did not only try to make private abuse of resources attached to parliamentary office more difficult (to calm public outrage after the expenses scandal) but also their partisan usage. The latter issue had gained salient since the 1990s, visible in various debates such as the one around special advisors or in various complaints submitted to the parliamentary Committee of Standards and Privileges, the institution (created in 1995) in charge of examining misconduct of MPs.
3. One of the very few exceptions is the UK Liberal Democrats: in 2009 the party established a 10 per cent minimum tax rate on councillors' allowances to be collected by the local parties but refrained from taking money from national MPs.
4. Examples are Fine Fail or the UK Conservatives.
5. Defined broadly, parties with coalition potential (Sartori Citation1976) can be considered as belonging to the ruling cartel. Defined more narrowly, one could refer to the main government parties.
6. Grabow (Citation2001: 31) proposes the following indicators to distinguish mass (or as he calls it people's) parties from cadre parties empirically: high membership density, strong local branches, balanced distribution of internal decision-making power. Detterbeck (Citation2005: 174), in a study of party cartelisation, points to the relative dominance of public office-holders in party organs to capture the power relations between the different faces of parties.
7. Looking beyond the English-language discourse, we find elaborate debates on the Parteienstaat in German literature and on Partitocrazia in Italian.
8. This claim also holds when only comparing parties with a decentralised infrastructure operating in federal systems with those operating in unitary systems. In the former settings, regional party units find it easier to fend off centralising pressures (Bolleyer Citation2011).
9. In federal systems such as Germany and Austria, holding regional office tends to serve as a stepping stone for a national career.
10. Note that this characterisation holds less for the Christian Democrats in Scandinavian countries formed as protest movements much later than their counterparts in Germany or Austria.
11. Core comparative sources were Katz and Mair (1992, 1994) covering Austria, Germany, Ireland and the UK. Country-specific literature used to classify parties in the respective countries included: France (Demesmay and Glaab 2009; Haegel Citation2009, Knapp Citation2004); Austria (Luther 2005; Müller and Steininger Citation1994); Germany (Detterbeck Citation2002; Grabow Citation2001; Hough et al.Citation2007; Kitschelt Citation1989); Ireland and Northern Ireland (Bolleyer Citation2010; Mair Citation1987; Mitchell et al.Citation2009); UK (Scarrow Citation1996; Webb Citation2002).
12. The scale ranges from 0 (furthest left) to 20 (furthest right).
13. The British Greens entered the national parliament only recently and are not covered but, based on the secondary literature, they can reasonably be placed to the left of PC and SNP.
14. The data used by Whiteley (Citation2011) was taken from the ISSP Citizenship Study, 2004.
15. An argument referring to cultural divides rooted in religion are equally problematic: grouping Catholic Ireland and Protestant UK vs. Catholic Austria, Catholic France and mixed Germany make a systematic link unlikely.
16. From 1968 to 1971, Union pour la défense de la République; from 1971 to 1978, Union des Démocrates pour la République.
17. This does not apply to the US, where open primaries undermine any party organisational control in the first place and party taxes are generally absent.
18. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the Social Democratic Labour Party in the UK could not be covered, while for Modem and Mouvement Democrate information on tax shares could not be accessed.
19. Interviews lasted on average half an hour. Most of the interviews were conducted face-to-face and taped. Some follow-up interviews were conducted after the five field trips on the phone to close remaining gaps.
20. A ‘specific share’ can also be formulated in terms of a minimum requirement.
21. Sometimes MPs' salaries increase with seniority. In these cases the average salary is taken as a reference.
22. Including Sinn Fein, the average is 12.7.
23. Including PCF, the average is 23.2.
24. Also Plaid Cymru and the SNP as regional parties collect these payments on the highest organisational level.
25. Regional parties – such as the SNP – obviously collect national contributions regionally, i.e. do not contradict H4, since contributions are still collected on the highest organisational level.
26. It is called the Bürgerinitiativenfond and is used to finance legal support for citizen initiatives.
27. In 1986, following egalitarian principles, the Greens tried to introduce an upper limit for MPs' salaries (21,000 Austrian Schillings) but most of the MPs refused to pay and the rule could never be implemented (Sickinger Citation2009: 231).
28. The rates are different in each region, regional MPs in Vienna, for instance, pay about 10 per cent, with office-holders on the district level giving away up to 50 per cent of their compensation (the rationale being that if offices are part-time and people have another, main, income, higher contributions are more acceptable).
29. See for corresponding findings Thorlakson (2010), who assesses factors driving regional party autonomy across eight multi-level systems.
30. Another dimension worth exploring – since it shows how different party-subunits relate – is the extent to which the party membership is involved in ensuring compliance of individual office-holders. In most parties information about individual payment patterns is not made public in the wider organisation. It remains a matter between the finance officer (or in severe cases party leader) and the non-compliant MP. In a minority of parties, mostly further on the left, members (who tend to be keen that office-holders contribute their share) might be informed at party congresses to put MPs under pressure.
