The worthy and the fallible: Framing the issue of state party funding

Abstract

The party politics literature has shown that parties being mostly reliant on state funding (as in most of Europe) is more conducive to equal representation than them being mostly reliant on big donors (as in the US and UK). But what do citizens think? Relatively little attention has been paid to public opinion on party funding. We only know that citizens tend to instinctively oppose both ways of funding parties. Yet, party funding is not a salient issue except in times of scandal, meaning it is an issue on which citizens are ill-informed. In this paper, I test what happens when citizens in the UK and Denmark are exposed to arguments in support of state party funding, through survey experiments. I find that highlighting state funding’s ability to reduce party reliance on big donors substantially increases support for the policy, especially among low trusting Britons.