Party financing is an underestimated source of information. The way political parties create and keep their organization, together with the normative context in which this occurs, can shed light on historical, political, social or contingent dynamics of representation.
Even if the representative role of political parties has been questioned in the last decades, their fundamental power to organize political demands is still there. This paper is focused on the substantive political representation expressed through financial paths under the general hypothesis that the way political parties acquire and spend money defines their representational basis and their representational strategy.
The analysis is based on annual reports of major parties in 5 different European countries (Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Great Britain), covering the last two decades. The dataset has been constructed in order to show comparable cross-national variables that describe the sources of income and expenditure. A special concern is given to the role of membership fees and private donations (individual and corporate) declared by parties. In addition, the analysis has been enriched with data coming from comparative national surveys (ESS – Eurobarometer) and national election results in order to bond the information from financial reports with the degree of trust that political parties reached among the electorate.
Beyond the cartel party model, that theoretically puts distance between citizens and parties, major parties in EU suffered the fall of membership quotas but some of them are trying to replace the loss with an opening toward private donors and corporate bodies. A strategy like this can have an impact on the capacity of a party to attract and represent voters, especially when there is a mismatching between the level of private donations, membership support and social activities.
