Zimbabwe. There are numerous aspects of party activity that can be regulated but in almost all cases, it is the financing of political parties that is the most prominent and also the most contested and controversial. 3. Models of Party Finance Political parties are first and foremost electoral machines and consequently, their major expenses are related directly to campaign expenses. One Canadian professional fundraiser, Israel Tarter once declared: “elections are not won by prayers alone”! He said this nearly forty years ago and since than, election campaigning has been very sophisticated and exorbitantly expensive. Party organisation and election campaign techniques now involve mass media advertising in the print and electronic media, including now the Internet. As can be implied from the categorisation of political parties given above, the pattern of party finance varies between the cadre and mass parties. Cadre parties tend to be largely dependent on large contributions from few but big corporate donors. These parties now often rely on professional fundraisers sometimes called “bagmen.” This pattern uses several techniques. The essential first step is this kind of fundraising is to select bagmen who have access to the financial and corporate elite: “you need millionaires to get money from millionaires,”5 one time Canadian Prime Minister once advised (Landes 1983, 280). The fundraisers would then visit wealthy individuals and corporate executives for their annual contributions. A long time practice was for the donations to be split 60% for the governing party and 40% for the opposition. Such contributions thus ensured that no matter which party won the next election, the individual or corporation, having donated to the party coffers, could count on access to the political leaders. The Conservative parties in Canada and Britain are typical examples that rely on cadre type party finance with individual and business contributions from relatively few donors. Such parties have been more than able to finance themselves and often have opposed public subsidies of political activities. It may be mentioned that this ‘bagman’ phenomenon also tends to encourage the institutionalisation of a two-party system as little parties can hardly attract enough corporate largesse to sustain the operations. In marked contrast to cadre parties, mass parties, because they are membership-driven and oriented, tend to opt for a grassroots funding methodology, relying on small membership dues from numerous individuals or on union support. This grassroots approach typically relies on two sources of party finance: annual membership dues and contributions from trade unions and interest groups. Annual membership and subscription dues are not very reliable and adequate to cover an average party’s activities, especially in-between elections when enthusiasm and zeal for party activities are relatively low. A combination of the two sources is a much more dependable avenue. It may be noted though that one Canadian mass party, the Parti Quebecois in Quebec province was so successful in mass funding that it had the luxury of not only sending back corporate donations in the 1973 and 1976 provincial campaigns, but, after winning the 1976 provincial election, went on to proscribe such contributions. The British Labour party is another typical example that relies on individual and trade union financial backing and at one time the trade unions accounted for 80% of party funds. There are many fundraising techniques used by political parties to finance their activities. Where corporate donations are not readily forthcoming, political parties, especially cadre parties, can resort to toll-gating and kickbacks. Tollgating is whereby government contracts or business would be allocated to those business firms and organisations that had contributed to the party coffers, while its related practice, kickbacks, is a scheme whereby once a firm had received government work, a certain percentage would be ploughed back to the ruling party, usually by way of campaign contributions (Wearing 1981, 58-64). Corrupt kickbacks are a very common practice, especially for governing parties. For instance, in Ghana, Gyimah-Boadi (2000) noted that the ruling NDC, by virtue of controlling the state, already had a powerfully lucrative source of funding – kickbacks on government contracts and the sale of 5 It goes without saying that for the 2005 parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe, the bagman would need to be a billionaire, if not a trillionnaire! 9