Fernando Casal Bertoa

Este artículo analiza el modelo de financiación de los partidos políticos en España, y ofrece una serie de datos so-bre el rendimiento de este modelo para los partidos entre 1987 y 2013. En este período, la financiación pública ha sido la principal fuente para los partidos, con un papel cada vez más importante para las administraciones autonómicas y locales. La prohibición de las donaciones anónimas fue sustituida por aportaciones privadas a las fundaciones de los partidos. En cambio, la crisis económica y la aparición de numerosos casos de corrup-ción a partir de 2011 han reducido las aportaciones públicas del gobierno central y las donaciones privadas a las fundaciones. Abstract The article analyses the party finance model in Spain, and delivers longitudinal data on the performance of the model for the political parties between 2007 and 2013. In this period, public finance has been the predominant source for political parties, with an increasing role for the regional and local administrations. The ban of anonymous donations in 2007 was replaced by private donations to think tanks linked to political parties. However, the financial crisis and the burst of corruption scandals have contributed to reduce both public subsidies from the central government and private donations to think tanks.

Party regulation in new democracies in general, and in the Spanish political system in particular, has not been a matter of concern until very recently. In order to fill this gap, this article explores the way political parties have been regulated not only in the Constitution, but also in the main laws regulating party foundation, organisation, dissolution and, not least, funding: namely, the 1978 and 2002 Political Party Laws as well as the 1985 and 2007 Party Funding Laws. The empirical part explores the impact such regulation has had on the Spanish party system as well as on the life of its party organisations.

The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we suggest new indicators that are uniform and transparent in their logic of construction, can be applied both to specific government-changes and to time periods, and are sensitive to the degree of change. The article finds a hierarchy among the components of party system closure, dominated by coalition formula. While new and established democracies can both produced closed patterns, the analysis of inter-war European party systems shows that closed systems are less prone to authoritarian takeover. The article demonstrates the power of inertia: the completely closed configurations stand out as the most durable ones.

ABSTRACT The majority of scholars agree that, both conceptually and empirically, the stability of the pattern of competition for government is an essential aspect of party system institutionalization (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995; Mainwaring, 1998; Morlino, 1998; Bielasiak, 2002; Melesevich, 2007, etc.). This approach is best exemplified by Peter Mair´s (1996, 2001, 2008) work on the closure of party competition. The present paper has two major goals. The first is to improve on Mair’s three-partite operationalization. The second aim is to map the patterns of inter-party competition which have characterised post-communist party systems over the past two decades. The empirical material is provided by a new data set on the party systems in post-communist democracies. The paper shows that contrary to most Western European countries (Bartolini and Mair, 1990; Lane, 2008), fragmentation and electoral volatility are only loosely related in Eastern Europe. Low fragmentation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the closure of the structure of competition in the governmental arena. Non-institutionalized governmental arena goes together with somewhat higher volatility, but the behaviour of parties in governments has only a modest impact on the behaviour of voters.

Party regulation in general has not been a matter of concern until very recently (Biezen, 2011; Biezen and Borz, 2012; Casal Bértoa et al., forthcoming). Un fortunately, in the most recent publications in the field scholars have tended to focus on the most consolidated South and East Central European democracies (Biezen and Casal Bértoa, work in progress) leaving aside regions like the Balkans where party regulation has played an important role in terms not only of party system formation but also on democratic transitions. In order to fill this gap, this paper explores how political parties have been regulated in Macedonia. Empirically, the paper analyses how the different types of regulation have affected the Macedonian party system in terms of formation and development. The main conclusion is that such laws have had a mixed impact on the country´s political life.