Politics and Foreign Donations

Abstract

The (potentially) disturbing role of money in politics has received quite a lot of attention in both scholarly and public debate. But these discussions typically focus on domestic contexts. Sometimes, as in the case of the Dutch billionaire Steven Schuurman, wealthy individuals donate money to politics abroad. In this article, we ask: Is there anything distinctively wrongful about billionaires and other wealthy individuals using their financial resources to influence foreign as opposed to domestic democratic institutions? Surprisingly, we find that there is nothing distinctively wrongful—of either a democratic or nondemocratic nature—about such donations. Our discussion thereby suggests that if foreign political donations are wrong, they are wrong for the same reason(s) as domestic donations. We should thus treat them symmetrically, all else equal. This means that to the extent that we want to oppose (large) foreign donations in politics—as we suspect many people want to—we should equally oppose (large) domestic donations in politics.