Development of the share of membership fees and donations on funding of selected political parties and movements during 1998-2013

Abstract

In this diploma thesis I reflect on recent calls for greater transparency, control, and focus on the financing of Czech political parties and movements. The main focus of this thesis is on donations by politicians and membership fees. Apart from the goal of determining the shares of these two types from total revenues the most important question was whether we can witness any significant differences between donations made by Members of Parliament and Regional politicians. Regarding membership fees I researched their amount, member´s bases and questioned raised amounts of membership fees stated in the annual income statements of all selected political parties.

For the purpose of the analysis I used elementary statistical and mathematical methods. All data were retrieved from annual income statements and manually processed by author. For the purpose of answering the question regarding donations I used Mann Whitney U-test which allows the research of two groups of data against each other in order to find out statistically significant differences. In respect to membership I used simple a test where I multiplied a number of members of selected political party by the amount of membership fees in that year. If there are were any additional conditions I also incorporated them in the test. For other statistics similar elementary statistical and mathematical methods were used to determine the shares, means, medians, percentiles and etc.

The analysis of donations approved the hypothesis that there is a difference between amounts of money donated by Members of Parliament and Regional politicians. Furthermore, this trend was found within 5 out of 7 parties on which a party-wise statistical test could be performed. In total, Regional politicians did donate more money than Members of Parliament; however this is mainly due to fact that there were 1,501 Regional politicians but only 966 Members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senators during research period of time. On the other hand the average high of donations, especially by Members of Chamber of Deputies but also Senators, was higher than the amount of donations by Regional Politicians. In the case of membership fees it was proven that that there are some discrepancies between information stated in annual income statements of some parties and actual results of the test. Moreover, it was bit surprising how difficult it was to get information about the current amount of membership fees as well as about member´s base. In this way some of the parties were not able to supply me with the data on the number of members.An important fact in relation to a member´s base is that most of the parties are facing the common trend of diminishing numbers of members. Another important outcome of the thesis is that transparency and availability of information regarding funding of the political parties and movements are big issues. A few recommendations on how to deal with transparency and availability are also presented in the thesis.

Apart from all the results of analysis and different statistics in relation to donations by politicians and membership fees, the processing of the data is a huge benefit for future studies in this area which has not been researched yet. Data are useful not only for possible use at the University as study material but someone may also build on them and use them for the purpose of deeper analysis or in their dissertation.