Vent

Laws could be passed to attempt to remove the necessity of large funds. First we can ask why are funds needed for presidential campaigns? Generally speaking, in the US, this is for two reasons; Advertising, which consumes the largest part of the funds, and creating coherent manifesto's/party programs. In view of this, advertising, in the private domain, could be banned, which would remove large sums being directed into associated networks. VOA could host all party broadcasts, and it could in fact be reorganised into being the channel of debate and dissemination. This could potentially do a number of things, such as remove biased news coverage and remove the incentive for smear campaigns, whilst at the same time removing the fundraising needed for the air time. It could also potentially remove an incentive for large corporate raisers given for future rewards or grace and therefore at the same time reduce the number of allegations of bias and corruption. Consider the disparity, just for the sake of quantity, between, say, Obama's 2008 campaign and The Conservatives 2010 campaign; ~$1 billion and ~£60 million respectively (i see no harm in assuming that information transmission costs are the same in both nations). This leaves funding the research needed for the manifesto, which is costly, but not that costly. Fundraising would be limited to private donations, and they could be required to reveal the source over a certain threshold, say, $1 million. Detailed accounts could be another requirement of the parties; legally they should be viewed as corporations, not clubs. Of course, this doesn't prevent a big problem with party politics (nor is it an exhaustive argument obviously). The problem of the feedback of funds increasing awareness increasing the following increasing the funds… leading to the poorer political groups remaining poor and remaining a minority. This could attempted to be offset by subsidising the funds raised based on following (taken from Bogdanor, 97), so the more following you get the more you are subsidised. True, the popular parties would get more subsidy but they have more following and more funds to begin with so it wouldn't mean as much to them as it would to the lesser known and more minor parties. So basically, to sum up, remove the money and increase the law. This could, in the principle of a Republic (although not in practice regrettably), be done very quickly. On a personal note, i think plebiscites should be used far more frequently, especially on encroaching legislature, in the attempt to give power back to the people; maybe akin to that used in the Swiss Republic.