Suchergebnisse

In this chapter, I analyze how state crimes emerge when incumbents utilize their offices to reciprocate electoral donors with undue benefits, favorable regulations, contracts, and job appointments. The problem, as it is seen here, is that (a) while electoral donations are cloaked with legality, they facilitate corruption, and (b) the delivery of undue benefits creates social harm, because it diverts the allocation of public resources and destroys confidence in the political system. Thus, I argue and demonstrate how the money delivered as electoral donations constitutes a corrupt incentive that should be classified as illegal.

Mackenzie and Green (2008) and McBarnet (2006) have argued that it is possible for white-collar crimes to emerge from actions that are cloaked in legality. In this article I study this paradox, focusing on the case of corporate donations to electoral campaigns. In particular, I will present an intra-national study on corporate funding of elections in Colombia. The case examines the electoral donations from palm oil growers' firms to the 2002 and 2006 presidential campaigns of Álvaro Uribe. It illustrates how legal donations delivered by corporations were reciprocated by incumbents through favourable legislation and policy outcomes. Although donors were not prosecuted for giving electoral donations, since it is a legal practice, administrative and judicial authorities have demonstrated that the donors communicated with incumbents with the intention to commit fraud.

The aim of this article is to study the suspect nature of private campaign finance, understood as the donors' hidden intentions and delayed exchange of reciprocities with incumbents. In particular, I explore whether electoral contributions from private corporations lead to political corruption. On the basis of a cross-national analysis, I find that, first, private financing reduces corruption because the use of this legal mechanism is enough to guarantee that the donors' interests will be achieved. Second, donors recognize that they have gained influence over policy outcomes, although in the spirit of the electoral laws this is not intended to occur. This increases corruption because incumbents use their positions of power to bend the rules and to adjust regulations and decisions in favor of their financial supporters. This paradox suggests law neutralization.

In this research I analyse how the existence of regulations that allow private funding of election campaigns have created opportunities for crime. Three specific questions are addressed here: 1. Do electoral donations increase political corruption? 2. Why do companies give electoral donations? 3. How are electoral donors compensated? To address these questions, I adopted a nested analysis. This sequential, mixed method brings together the strengths of both regression analysis and case study research, while conducting a validity check—triangulation—by convergence of results via different methods and theoretical approaches. I first conducted a cross-national comparison of 78 countries; then, I conducted a survey of 302 private companies in Colombia; and finally, I documented one case that described how campaign contributions affect the political decision-making process. The main conclusion of this research is that electoral law creates opportunities for crime, because it legalizes the entrance of interested money into politics, disqualifies donors as perpetrators, and introduces regulations with null or limited deterrent effect on the delivery of undue reciprocities. Indeed, I demonstrated that electoral financing is used as a legal bribery by private corporations. The legal character of this political instrument is perverted when undue compensation is delivered to donors. This is not a crime with a single perpetrator; rather, donors and incumbents are equally involved. However, donors are protected by electoral law, because the money delivered as corrupt incentive is classified as legal. This suggests that the law is being used as a mechanism that neutralizes donors as perpetrators. This perspective points to the manipulative use of electoral law, or creative compliance, as the term is used by McBarnet (2006).

Mackenzie and Green (2008) and McBarnet (2006) have argued that it is possible for white-collar crimes to emerge from actions that are cloaked in legality. In this article I study this paradox, focusing on the case of corporate donations to electoral campaigns. In particular, I will present an intra-national study on corporate funding of elections in Colombia. The case examines the electoral donations from palm oil growers' firms to the 2002 and 2006 presidential campaigns of Álvaro Uribe. It illustrates how legal donations delivered by corporations were reciprocated by incumbents through favourable legislation and policy outcomes. Although donors were not prosecuted for giving electoral donations, since it is a legal practice, administrative and judicial authorities have demonstrated that the donors communicated with incumbents with the intention to commit fraud.

In this article I study why companies give electoral donations to support political leaders. I collected and used a unique data set on electoral financing at the corporate level in Colombia. The data show that firms consider electoral contributions to be "legal bribes". Consistent with the theory of bribery, these donations are made because of the low quality of election regulation, the high expectation of reciprocity, and the pre-existing relationships with incumbents. These features suggest "legal neutralization": donors can break the law without committing crime.

Although political leaders, donors and some scholars would argue that there is nothing illegal behind the idea of giving and receiving campaign contributions, this research attempts to demonstrate the contrary. Here, I claim that small and large contributions constitute representations of political corruption because they are given for specific purposes either ideological or personal. Since the relationship between campaign financing and political corruption has not been studied worldwide, in this thesis I conduct a cross-country analysis of 83 countries and find that there is less political corruption: 1) in countries where elections are not funded with public resources; 2) in countries where the impact of legal campaign financing on public policy outcomes is lower; 3) in countries where regulations impose ceilings on election expenses and on the amount of money that parties/candidates can raise in each election; and 4) in countries where regulations make the public disclosure of campaign expenditures compulsory.