Small Political Contributions as a Source of Financing of Political Parties – the Russian Reality and the Experience of the USA

The article addresses the issue of role and share of small political contributions in total revenues of political parties of Russia. As a comparative parallel, the author presents a broad survey of the experience in fundraising by the American political parties as one of main fields of their life supporting activities and considers factors which contributed to the development of this source of party financing in the United States. In particular, the article examines financing of the US political parties through small political contributions. While discussing the features of the American model of political parties funding and its differences from existing Russian model of party fundraising, the author courts the idea of possibility of using American party fundraising experience in the Russian context and suggests certain ways of adopting some practices of the US parties in supporting their money boxes. The author comes to the conclusion that a significant proportion of small political contributions in the structure of revenues of the United States political parties comes primarily due to using the Internet fundraising techniques and facilities. Factors for developing small political contributions as a source of funding political parties in Russia depend on increasing the Internet audience, rising in the numbers of credit card users, whereas limiting factors for small contributions are the lack of legal norms that allow Internet contributions, the lack of a strong tradition of massive contributions, and small and erratic using Internet fundraising resources by political parties. The low level of confidence in Russian political parties aggravates the situation.

About the author: Fedor Dolgikh – Candidate of Science (Ph.D.) in History, Department of Theory and History of State and Law, “Synergy” University, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Dolgikh F. (2017) Mikropozhertvovaniya kak istochnik finansirovaniya politicheskikh partiy – rossiyskie realii i opyt SShA [Small political contributions as a source of financing of political parties – the Russian reality and the USA experience] Sravnitel’noye konstitutsionnoye obozreniye, no.2, pp.92–105. (In Russian).

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