Ingrid van Biezen, "Party Financing in New Democracies: Spain and Portugal," Party Politics, 6 (July 2000), 329-342.

First Paragraph:
The introduction of state subventions and the increasing levels of public money for political parties have not only made parties increasingly financially dependent on the state but have also encouraged important changes in the mode of party organization (see Kirchheimer, 1966; Panebianco, 1988; Katz and Mair, 1995). In newly emerging democracies such as those of Spain and Portugal, which were the first European countries of the 'third wave' (Huntington, 1991) to introduce widespread public funding, state subsidies play an even more influential role in the financing of political parties. Since most parties at the time of the transition to democracy lacked the organizational capacity to generate their own income, state funding was introduced to provide for the financial needs of the parties emerging in the new democratic polity. State funding was introduced without much debate on the role public money should play in the financing of political parties (del Castillo, 1989: 179), perhaps because public funding in the older democracies by that time had become an increasingly common and gradually accepted practice.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Income of Spanish parties, 1987-92
Table 2: Income and expenditure: 1995 elections in Portugal
Table 3: Income and expenditure for Spanish elections 1986-96

Last Paragraph:
The present analysis of party financing in Spain and Portugal has furthermore revealed that, while the high dependence on the state is in accordance with the general tendencies witnessed in the majority of the Western liberal democracies, Spanish and Portuguese parties do not seem to be following the tendency of an increasing predominance of the public face of the party. Rather, it is the party central office that sees its position enhanced through public subsidies. As Nassmacher (1989: 250-1) has stressed, public funding may shift the balance of power to the party bureaucracy and possibly centralize the locus of power within the party, and Panebianco (1988: 35) has emphasized that an increasing dependence on a single financier may result in a corresponding increasing of the concentration of power within the party. The consequences of the extreme dependence on the state and the peculiarities of the Spanish and Portuguese systems of party financing for the internal organizational dynamics can perhaps be best expressed by paraphrasing Michels (1992/1911: 116-17), namely that financial dependence on the state has indeed enshackled the organization as with iron chains.