Amid calls for campaign finance reform following last week’s general election, two pundits – including a former leader of a major political party – warned that significant legal, cultural and practical hurdles could hinder any effort to tighten the rules on political spending.
In an interview with Barbados TODAY, senior law lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Dr Ronnie Yearwood, said Barbados does not currently have a comprehensive framework governing campaign finance.
“In terms of a kind of comprehensive suite of laws for campaign finance, we don’t have that,” he explained. “The only real law that regulates campaign finance is actually in the Representation of the People Act… if you go to Section 48 in there, there’s a limit on election expenses, but in reality that is $10 per voter.”
In a constituency of 10 000 voters, that would translate to a spending cap of $100 000 per candidate. But he questioned whether that figure reflects the true cost of modern campaigning.
Referring to figures from the 2022 election, Dr Yearwood said reports from the Electoral and Boundaries Commission indicated that candidates of the Barbados Labour Party spent a combined $1.3m, while those from the Democratic Labour Party spent close to $950 000.
“But in reality, when you look at the outlay of what the parties produce, there’s no way that these campaigns cost almost a million on each side to run [only],” he said, pointing to the scale of social media operations, paraphernalia, stages and platforms. “Modern campaigns are almost like big music production.”
Dr Yearwood argued that beyond legislation, there must be a broader cultural reckoning about how elections are financed and what voters expect.
“I think if we are honest with ourselves… we as the public, we want to have our cake and we want to eat it too,” he said. “We want to not have parties funded by private money, but we do not want to fund the parties by state money.”
He suggested that state funding could help reduce the influence of private donations, but warned that such a move would likely face severe public backlash. “I would bet you if any government goes as far as to say they’re gonna use taxpayers’ money to introduce state funding of parties to take the private money out of the political system, they would get hammered.”
Any shift towards public financing, he added, would also require clearly defining what constitutes a political party to prevent abuse. “This would be a comprehensive reform because you realise once you move one part to do one thing, then you have to move the other bit.”
Political scientist and pollster Peter Wickham shared Dr Yearwood’s reservations, describing campaign finance reform as “a complicated issue”.
“I’d actually done a piece for the Organisation of American States (OAS) back in… 2004, 2003, that looked at the issue,” Wickham said. “It’s the kind of thing where everybody wants to do something, but the reality is that there’s not a lot that is done and can be done because it’s going to be controversial.”
Like Dr Yearwood, Wickham pointed to the possibility of publicly funded campaigns but said there appears to be little appetite for such a model.
“If you move to a situation where parties are not allowed to beg for a cent, but then the public has to fund the campaigns,” he said. “I’ve gotten the distinct impression that the public is not comfortable with the idea of paying for election campaigns.”
He also questioned whether the institutional capacity exists to properly monitor and audit campaign spending.
“The Barbados Labour Party has an accounting structure of sorts because they have a CEO and they have the resources to maintain. The Democratic Labour Party doesn’t. Where’s the accounting department of the Friends of Democracy, of Kemar Stewart’s [New National] party?”
“To have an accounting department, you then have to have the ability to pay these people professional fees… and then the EBC has to have an audit department that can audit these kinds of spending, and it’s highly unrealistic.”
Wickham noted that under the current framework, parties themselves are largely unregulated.
“The Constitution doesn’t recognise political parties and then even with individual candidates, their financing is limited. The financing spending of the political parties is not controlled. There’s no attempt to control it, so parties can do what they like.”
While both experts agreed that spending appears to be escalating, they cautioned that meaningful reform would require not only new laws, but political will, public buy-in and significantly strengthened oversight mechanisms.
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