Democratic institutions and the regulation of political finance

Our knowledge of the relationship between the regulation of political finance and political institutions is underdeveloped, largely because of the previous absence of an adequate measure of regulation. For all current democracies, we investigate whether Lijphart’s distinction between consensus and majoritarian democracies and whether Henisz’s index of political constraints are associated with more or less regulation. Our dependent variable is Horncastle’s index derived from multiple correspondence analysis and model-based clustering of the latest iteration of International IDEA’s data. We control for corruption, British legal origin, the age of the democracy.