Financing of political parties in Western Balkans: Closer to Europe, further from corruption?

Abstract

Financing of political parties as a relevant aspect of political corruption still represents a relatively unexplored ground for political science. Our study aims at addressing this phenomenon in the Balkan region by conducting a comparative analysis including a wide sample of countries. More specifically, the analysis traces developments of the all the candidate countries and potential candidate countries of the Balkan area: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia (FYROM), Montenegro, and Serbia starting from year 2002, when the Commission started to yearly report the progress of each country within the framework of the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP). We developed our research strategy as follows. Countries’ progress in adapting national regulations on the financing of political parties represents our dependent variable. The assessment of the quality of national regulations and the developments overtime are based on the European Union (EU) country reports published yearly by the European Commission. The tangible progress in the EU accession negotiations constitutes our independent variable. To determine the proximity to the EU membership we look at the state of the SAP negotiations and at one country’s status as candidate or potential candidate (formal recognition, de facto recognition, absence of recognition). The final discussion is based on a typology of the Balkan countries addressing their degree of adaptation to the EU-sponsored legislation on financing of political parties as reflected by their relative proximity to the EU membership.