Relationship between the level of direct public funding of political parties, democracy and state capture by regime status

Note: The plot depicts the relationship between the actual amount of direct public funding of political parties for statutory and electoral activities (higher values - more public funding) and democracy index (higher values - more democracy), on the one hand, and state capture, defined as percentage of firms engaged in making frequent informal payments to public officials and politicians to affect the content of laws and regulations (higher values - higher percent of firms),¹ on the other hand. Additionally, it breaks down this relationship by the status of political regime according to Freedom House classification. Overall, data shows that more generous public funding granted to political parties is associated with lower percentage of firms involved in illegal payments. Use the mouse to rotate/spin, zoom in, and hover over the plot for more details. Data sources: (Coppedge et al., 2022; EBRD & World Bank, 2020; Freedom House, 2020; Lipcean, 2021; Maerz et al., 2021)

References

Coppedge, M., Gerring, J., Knutsen, C. H., Lindberg, S. I., Teorell, J., Altman, D., Bernhard, M., Cornell, A., Fish, M. S., Gastaldi, L., Gjerløw, H., Glynn, A., Grahn, S., Hicken, A., Kinzelbach, K., Marquardt, K. L., McMann, K., Mechkova, V., Paxton, P., … Ziblatt, D. (2022). V-dem codebook V12. https://doi.org/10.23696/VDEMDS22

EBRD, & World Bank. (2020). Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (1999-2020). https://www.beeps-ebrd.com/data/

Freedom House. (2020). Freedom in the world (1990-2020). https://freedomhouse.org/reports/publication-archives

Lipcean, S. (2021). Dataset on direct public funding of political parties across post-communist regimes 1990-2020. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TNHZML

Maerz, S., Edgell, A., Hellmeier, S., & Ilchenko, N. (2021). Vdemdata - an r package to load, explore and work with the most recent v-dem (varieties of democracy) and v-party datasets. https://www.v-dem.net/en/

Footnotes

1. The precise question in BEEPS asks the following: Thinking now of unofficial payments/gifts that a firm like yours would make in a given year, could you please tell me how often would they make payments/gifts for the following purposes: To influence the content of new legislation, rules, decrees, etc.