Political Party Financing in Mongolia: Strengthening a Democracy Bryan Fong, Lucia Keijer-Palau, Cecilia Andersson, Connor MacDonald, Zihang Liu
ABSTRACT Mongolia faces several challenges as a developing country and a relatively recent multi-party democracy. These include substantial levels of corporate influence in the country (due to a large and increasingly economically-critical mining sector), historical political turbulence, and recent surveys showing significant public perception of large-scale corruption within political parties. Many of these issues remain linked to the country’s political party financing practices, and so this paper aims to provide a potential means of effective review and reform for these systems. The paper explores key aspects of Mongolia’s current context and background, explaining many of the country’s unique features which must be kept in mind when developing a robust and appropriate political party financing scheme. These factors are key when exploring the main issues in Mongolia’s political party financing, including: negative influences and corruption, ineffective oversight and enforcement, a lack of democratic pluralism, and a lack of nationwide representation. Based on the best practices of other countries, this paper then focuses on solutions in relation to political party financing, not forgetting what is feasible in Mongolia’s current context. The paper also looks at alternate reforms outside of political party financing, but still related to the issues and solutions at hand, and provides an overall strategy for reformprioritisation. Among the many reforms discussed, the paper primarily proposes that Mongolia could focus on strengthening a single independent, centralised, and self-contained authority for overseeing and enforcing all aspects of political party financing legislation, implementing a dual-system of fixed and proportionate political party public funding (with proportionate subsidies equally weighted between vote-based and seat-based criteria), and conducting a thorough review and reform of the critical vagaries and omissions remaining in their political party financing legislation. Through careful contextual analysis and investigation, this paper hopes to provide a full suite of effective potential solutions for comprehensively and appropriately tackling the most critical and pressing political party financing-related issues facing Mongolia today.
The Wilberforce Society Cambridge, UK
www.thewilberforcesociety.co.uk
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October 2019