 a little bit after 10. My name is Mila Inveshnav. I'm a senior fellow and director of the South Asian program here at Carnegie. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you here this morning and welcome our panelists that you'll hear from for a second. We're here today to talk about a new book that the Veshkipur and I have co-edited called The Costs of Democracy, Political Finance in India, which is really a collaborative effort of several scholars who have been working on questions of Indian democracy, on money in politics, on governance and corruption. And so about a year and a half or two years ago, the Vesh and I sat down and brought this group together, not knowing what it would turn into, just to kind of have a brainstorming discussion about different aspects of money in Indian politics. And it was one of those amazingly organic projects that just kind of took off and resulted in this book that we're gonna hear about today. And this is obviously an opportune time to talk about some of these subjects. We have the 2019 elections around the corner next year. Five important states are going to the polls in December in India. And so some of these themes are going to be recurring in the press and otherwise in the months to come. Now, political finance is not restricted. Concerns on political finance are not restricted to India. Of course, we've heard in this country about allegations that the hush money paid to the Delta actor, Stormy Daniels by the President Harris Associates could be in violation of US campaign finance law. In Brazil, President Lula was convicted given a prison term for diverting public funds to benefit political supporters, which is part of a much broader corruption scandal in Brazil. And the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was being investigated on allegations that he received a 50 million euro bribe from the regime of former Libyan dictator, Mohamed Khaddafi. Now, why do we care about this nexus between money and politics? Most obviously because the numbers are economically significant. So we don't have great estimates about election spending in many developing country contexts, but most economists estimate that the Indian elections cost between five and $6 billion in 2014, which is up considerably from $2 billion in 2009. In the United States in our 2015-2016 combined congressional presidential cycle, the FEC reports that around $11 billion was spent. But obviously we care beyond reasons of just material outlays. Another reason we care is because if money is seen to be a precondition for holding office, then that means it's going to have a powerful selection effect on the type of people who are gonna run and the type of people who will end up winning office. So in some of my other research, I've shown that candidates with serious criminal cases have a significant financial advantage, which is one reason that parties recruit them. So the median criminal candidate in India, who has a serious case against him or her at the time of his election, is four times richer than the median clean candidate who doesn't have a case against them, right? So parties are attracted to this sort of muscle power in part because of the money that comes along with it. A third reason we might care is because of rent seeking and quid pro quo. If you end up spending so much money to win elected office, you're going to look at office as a way of recouping that money with interest so you can pay your debts back and to make money for the next go around. Or if you're raising money from wealthy supporters, once you get into office, you're gonna have to use the levers of power to bend the rules in order to pay back those people who supported you. There's some evidence from around the world that just the perception that money buys election can erode citizen confidence and democracy and erode the legitimacy of democratic governance. And fifth and finally, there are concerns that if wealth can influence public policy in ways that will benefit the wealthy, it can further entrench the sort of the cycle of inequality that we're talking so much about around the world. Now, the comparative literature, at least from political science, tends to look at campaign finance broadly through the lens of advanced democracies, most significantly in the United States. United States dominates this entire campaign finance literature with good reason, which is we have a lot of good data on the United States and a lot of data is open and transparent. But there are good reasons to presume that money often works very differently and to different ends in developing democracies. So advanced democracies have well-established systems of monitoring, of control, of accounting and prosecuting improprieties as and when they arise. And it's a reasonable assumption that these systems likely deter the sort of transfer of illicit funds to a great extent. Now, there's a question and hopefully we'll hear more from our panelists later today about whether recent moves in the United States are actually moving in a regressive direction away from this. But that's one stylized difference between the advanced world and developing world. In contrast, many developing democracies, you have the absence of those characteristics, right? So you have weak enforcement, limited transparency, uneven disclosure of norms, just infrastructural challenges in investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing. And you have low levels of organized interest group funding because a lot of the money, and this is one of the key difference between developed and developing good democracies is black money. So this is money that's unaccounted for, that's often sort of provided under the table, could be the proceeds of sort of ill-gotten gains, ill-gotten returns. So in India, as an example, the true costs of elections are thought to be orders of magnitude more than what people actually spend. So there's a kind of anecdotal rule of 10. Take what someone tells you they spent on elections and multiply it by a factor of 10 and then you start to get close to the actual number. So what the book tries to do and what I'll do in my short presentation today is go through the kind of motivating questions and some of our answers that we find in the book, starting with the institutional and regulatory context that governs money in politics. I'll say a little about the sources of political finance, where money comes from. Number three, what does it get spent on and why is so much being spent? Number four, how does money operate and interact with different levels of government? Remember, India is a federal system, so you have elections at the national, the state, and the local levels. And fifth, and I might skip over this in the interest of time, but I think it'll be something that we'll talk about during the discussion of if we think this is a critical public policy challenge, what do we plan to do about it? What are the reform ideas which are out there? Just to worry about India, I don't think for this crowd I probably need to justify why India is an important case. Obviously, size alone makes it important. One out of every four voters on earth is Indian. We've had a track record of 70 years of established democracy. So the lessons from India can teach us about what other developing countries, the challenges they may face. Intense political contestation. In India, we don't speak of contesting elections. We talk about fighting elections. And it's a big, large federal country, so you have all kinds of sources of subnational variation within India. And last but not least, political finance has become a salient issue. So ever since Narendra Modi decided on November 8th, 2016 to demonetize high value rupee notes in an effort to crack down on black money, the issue of money and politics and sort of cronyism and corruption have dominated public policy debates in India. So this is an opportune time to take up some of these issues. So very quickly on the institutional and regulatory context, number one is Indian democracy is not just competitive. It is hyper competitive. And this is one reason why we believe the costs of elections are going up. So this black line here is the number of political parties which are contesting looks of our national elections. And you can see a huge increase, particularly in the last three decades. The orange line is the average margin of victory in a parliamentary race. So this is the difference between the winner and the runner up. And you can see that margin of victories have been coming down, which means races have become much tighter. 2014 is a bit of an aberration because you had such a strong wave in favor of the BJP Narendra Modi that the margin of victory actually went up a little bit. But just to put this in comparative context, in the 2016 US House elections, the average margin of victory in a congressional race was 37%. Means the winner beat the runner up by 37%. The average margin of victory in an Indian race is about 15%. It was down around 10% in 2009. The second is the state still plays a pretty heavy role in the economy. So even though in 1991, in the early 90s, India de-licensed or reduced industrial licensing a number of areas, it then came in and regulated the entry of private sector players with a whole new raft of regulations, licenses, and permissions. Number two is the state remains an important provider of inputs to business. So whether it's credit, land, natural resources, and so on. And third, even as it got rid of some old regulation, it brought into place new regulation, right? So what this means is that people who are in power, who control the public sector, have many levers at their disposal to try to punish or reward businesses. The third characteristic about India and its institutional context is the weak rule of law. So we know from the ease of doing business, State of the World Bank collects that the days to enforce a contract in India exceeds 1400, which is an outlier among the BRICS nations and in South Asia as well. And so the infirmities of the justice system I think are well known and extend across the length and breadth of the country. And the regulatory regime that's been put in place as a result has a hard time dealing with the flood of money in politics. So there's sort of three cardinal facts about Indian democracy as it relates to money in politics. The first is there's virtually zero transparency over political contributions. It's almost impossible to determine who is giving money and to whom that person has given. Number two is that there's no independent audit of political parties. So political parties are not, their accounts are not subject to any kind of independent scrutiny by a third party. And number three, there's an outdated regulatory framework. So the laws put into place to regulate money were put into place in the 1950s at a very, very different time in Indian history and obviously politicians seek some advantage in keeping those laws in place as opposed to updating them to deal with the contemporary period. So that's a kind of overview of the political, economic and regulatory context that we find ourselves in in 2018. So where does the money actually come from? So one important source is individuals. So we've seen the rise of so-called self-financing candidates. So what this data is, data from the last three general elections and the percentage of Kaurapati candidates. So these are candidates who own at least one coror of rupees, which is 10 million rupees. That's the kind of shorthand in India for a sort of a wealthy person or what we would refer to as a millionaire. And you could see that the number of Kaurapati candidates has increased, but what's really taken off is the number of Kaurapati winners, right? So 82% of the parliament elected in 2014 are so-called Kaurapatis. So we're getting to the point where it'd be unsurprising in 2019 if 100% of members of parliament cross this threshold. And what we know about money is that there's a huge wealth advantage in Indian politics. So this is data from 21,000 candidates who contested the last three general elections. And what we've done is just broken them up by how wealthy they are. So you have the poorest 20% on the extreme left, the bottom quintile, and the richest 20% on the right. And the y-axis here is their chance of winning the election. So you could see that if you're lucky enough to be in that top quintile, the richest 20% of candidates, this is based on their own self-declared wealth that they're 20 times more likely to win an election than people who are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Now, obviously people are getting money not just from individuals, but from a variety of other places. One place is business. So we know that documented private sector giving in Indian is limited because firms prefer to give donations anonymously. Partially for the reason I mentioned earlier was because the state has so much regulatory power. If you give to a party and that party ends up losing, their rival could take retributive action against you because you were on the wrong side of history. Now, there's been, and Devesh and I have talked about this in other contexts, a connection between the regulatory intensity of a particular sector and its rent-extractive potential. So things like land, natural resources, telecom defense tend to be mining where we see a lot of the corruption scandals in India emerge from. Now, when we think of business and politics, we tend to think of something like this. So this is the 27 story home of India's richest oligarch Mukesh Ambani. And I think we tend to have a mental map of these oligarchs, sort of like Marionettes, kind of puppet masters dictating how politics works. But a lot of what actually happens on the ground is not these oligarchs, but these sort of mini-garchs. So these are small to medium enterprises who have an entrenched interest at the state or local level. So think of it as sort of a mezzanine level of finance. This is where a lot of the money actually comes in. And one recurring theme is that builders and people involved in construction and real estate are one particular sector where you see a lot of collaboration between business and politics. So what we set out to do in a chapter in the book is to try to document how this cohabitation or nexus actually evolves. So we know that land, which builders rely on is a highly regulated commodity. Politicians have a lot of discretionary authority over land. And so they're in a position to supply favors to builders. And at election time, what we learned anecdotally is that builders then are required to kick back some of that money to politicians as a campaign contribution. And so the observable implication of this is all true is that at the time of elections, builders are gonna face a short-term liquidity crunch because some of that cash that's been floating around in their coffers, they have to kick out to political campaigns. Now, we know about this anecdotally. It's very hard to demonstrate this empirically. So what the mesh and I set out to do is to track the amount of cement that's consumed in the Indian economy. So the analogy is what money is to election, cement is to construction, right? We know that cement is a good barometer of construction activity in the real estate sector. It accounts for about 65 to 75% of real estate demand. There's no real substitute to cement and it tracks short-term trends because they're high inventory costs. There's a little lag time between purchases and utilization. And so what we would expect to find is that during the month of the elections, cement consumption is actually gonna plummet because again, that cash that's available in the real estate sector is gonna be going out to fund political campaigns. And sure enough, that's what we find. These dots here go from six months before the election to six months after. And you can see that the month of the elections, all of a sudden you see a 12 to 13% drop in cement consumption, right? This is again, a barometer of real estate activity. And our argument is that this is happening because these builders and real estate moguls are being called upon to provide finance to political campaigns. Okay, so told you about the context, about the sources. What are campaigns actually spending on? Well, what's interesting is that while many of the sources are illegal, much of the spending is actually on legal activity. So they're pretty mundane things. Fees from rallies and processions, paying political workers, meals and feasts for your supporters. There are some interesting illicit expenditures. One which you wanted to highlight is so-called dummy candidates. So there's a phenomenon in India of fielding candidates who have the same name as your political rival in order to confuse the electorate that they may vote for the wrong Devesh Kapoor. If they're for the Devesh Kapoor is on the ballot. Or just backing potential spoilers who you think are gonna cut in to your rival's votes and then fragment the election in the hopes that you'll come out on top. One of the illicit expenditures talked the most about are handouts. What we think of is vote buying. So this is in the final 72 hours of campaign handing out goodies through political intermediaries to try to sway people's votes, right? So this could be money, it could be jewelry, it could be opium paste, if you're in Punjab, it could be bricks, it could be saris, it could be a range of things. And these tend to be distributed individually to voters. Now, why are they distributing these handouts? The conventional wisdom is they're trying to buy votes, right? They're trying to create a quid pro quo exchange where I give you a goodie and that's going to impel you to vote for me on election day because you've benefited from my largesse. The problem in India is it's very difficult to consummate that kind of quid pro quo because we have a secret ballot. And so any rational or smart voter could take money from all of us in this room if we're all political candidates and then the day of the election, both they're conscious, right? So unlike some countries where you don't have a secret ballot or where party machines are so strong they have ways of detecting how you voted in India that seems to be unlikely the case. So why is this happening? The book sketches out two possibilities. One is that what this money is doing is not buying votes, it's sharing information on candidates' viability or their credibility, both to the voter as well as to the party workers, right? A lot of campaigning in India is about trying to influence and change the minds of kind of brokers and intermediaries who might command the support of a particular community or particular geographic area. The other possibility is that this is just a standard kind of prisoner's dilemma that you give money, not because it's gonna guarantee you victory, because you're worried if you don't give money it's gonna guarantee you defeat. So under this scenario, giving money is essentially the cost of doing business. That it gives you a seat at the table that allows you to have a fair shake at winning. But if you don't give that money the perception is that you're sure to lose, right? So it's a little bit like playing poker. First thing you do in poker is you put money down, right? You ante up, you put ships down and only then do you get Delta stack of cards, right? So again, it doesn't mean that you're gonna have the best hand, but it means that you're gonna have a shot at winning. Fourth, how does this work in a federal system such as India? India has this elaborate three tiered setup where you have about 800 members of parliament, 4,000 state legislatures and 2.9 million to local elected officials who are at the district, sub-district and village levels. And these local governments are both in urban and rural areas but we don't know much about what happens at this lower level. Most of our studies tend to focus at these higher up levels. Some work by Jennifer Bacell in the book did a survey of 2,500 politicians in three Indian states, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh and asked politicians at every level of the hierarchy, members of parliament, state legislators or MLAs and district block and panchayat leaders where their money comes from. And there's sort of three interesting things from this table. The first is that it's really only politicians at the higher levels, right? Your MPs, your MLAs and so on who can get money from political parties. Political parties are not a factor at the district level or below. The second interesting finding is that personal resources are important across the board but they're especially important for the lower levels where they have much weaker reliance on other kinds of support. So for instance, private sector companies and bureaucrats which contribute money at the higher levels contribute virtually nothing at the district level or below. When you ask candidates their perceptions of the most common sources of political finance if you see something like this. So this black bar here is black money. So for the MP and the MLAs people believe that up to 50% of a campaign's outlays are coming from black or undocumented sources slightly smaller here at the local levels. At the local levels what really matters is individual donations, right? Individual donations constitute a huge proportion of campaign funding at the local levels. And then personal income, again sizable everywhere but at the lowest level personal income really matters because you have a shrinking number of other options. Okay, last is on this question of black money. So we asked people about benefiting from illicit funds and on average half of politicians believe, sorry, politicians believe half of their peers benefit from spending illicit funds that over 50% the second row feel pressure to give gifts. So again, these are the things that you hand out the last 72 hours of the campaign to get people to vote for you. And third is that on average although there's some variation across tiers at least a quarter of voters in your constituency can be expected to receive a gift, right? So if you're a member of parliament who has a constituency that's one and a half to two million people at least a third of voters they believe are getting some kind of transaction some kind of cash or inducement from the campaign. Okay, I'm just gonna end here with one final slide. And I think this is really something that we're gonna discuss during the discussion is what to do about cleansing the system. So it's clear that something needs to be done on contributions to insist that there's some kind of transparency for contributions. It's ironic that in the wake of demonetization all of India was asked to shift to digital forms of payment to carry out basic transactions, right? To buy groceries, to pay their household help and so on and so forth. Yet political parties were asked to do none of this. They were allowed to continue their business fully in cash. Second is although there are strict limits on spending most people believe that they're laughable. So the average member of parliament in 2014 officially declared only spending 58% of the allowable limit, right? We know in reality they're spending probably 10 times if not more the allowable limit and they're claiming they only spend 58% because they don't wanna run afoul of these laws. So it might make sense to give up this farce to loosen the limits but then ratchet up enforcement so that if people do violate the law there's actually some cost. The third thing to work on is party accounts. The Right to Information Act which was like our freedom of information act here in the United States. There was a ruling in 2013 that this applies to political parties. Political parties essentially said, no it doesn't, we don't think it does and so we're not gonna adhere to this. This matters now before the Supreme Court and it's for the Supreme Court to decide whether or not individuals can lodge freedom of information requests for political parties that would help to break down this opacity. Finally I'll just say a word about public funding. This is something that often gets talked about at election roundtables in India. The conclusion that we leave people with in the book is this is only a viable strategy as part of a grand bargain with parties and candidates. That if you give them public funding and you change nothing else they're going to take that white money as well as the black money. What you need to make them do is to commit to giving up some of those black proceeds if you're gonna replace them with white. So that means adhering to disclosure norms, having a kind of zero tolerance policy if people do break the law and only then should you be able to provide funds from public coffers. One thing which maybe we can talk about in the discussion I'll just leave you with is it's clear that you can't have democracy without elections. You can't have elections without money but is there a risk that the money that you need to fund those elections is actually undermining the nature of democracy? And I think that's one of the many questions that the findings of this book raise for all of you to consider. So I wanna at this time invite Annie Gowen who's here. Annie is with the Washington Post. She is the former bureau chief in South Asia based New Delhi. She's now a national reporter. She is the winner of the Daniel Pearl Prize for Outstanding Reporting on South Asia. Disappointed I think three weeks ago. And Annie's gonna be our moderator today and she's gonna introduce our fellow panelists. Thank you. So thank you, Millen, for that interesting take off campaign finance report in India and looking forward to hearing a little bit more about it. So we have Stephens Balding here from Common Cause, director of strategy if you could come up. He's gonna talk a little bit about comparisons between India and America where the campaign finance is getting ever more opaque. And then we have Millen's partner in crime, Devesh Kapoor who's with CICE, director of Asia programs for CICE at Johns Hopkins. And we also have Thomas Crothers here who's the vice president of strategy here at Carnegie and he is gonna talk a little bit about the international perspective of where does India fit in in this murky world. Where am I, I sit here, okay. Yeah, right sit in the middle. Okay, I'll sit in the middle. Thanks. So maybe Thomas you could kind of start off here and give us a little bit of a kind of broader kind of perspective of where does India fit in in regard to the world globally, well, first of all, I wanna thank the direction of democracy and its information. It's a difficult topic, hard to get the information, doesn't make you popular. Although, Millen just won a prize for his previous book so it gets recognized. But what I wanna do is just briefly put India in a comparative perspective with some other countries that one might think of as natural comparators. I'm gonna focus on Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa which are countries which in some ways, large sprawling democracies, if one wants to make an imprecise analytic category and just get a bit of a sense because there's an important trend that we need to know in these countries or at least in two of the three countries that is of relevance to India. But let me frame this by saying that the issue of corruption is lighting the world on fire politically. I did a little study earlier this year that showed that 10% of leaders in the world, in the last five years, have been driven out of power because of public anger over corruption or legal action about corruption. So if you're looking at mortality statistics and I told you you have a 10% chance that this thing is gonna kill you in the next five years, you'd pay attention to it, or you shouldn't. And so if I, you know, a leader says, what are the greatest threats to me having to leave office before my term? Corruption is by far the single most identifiable and greatest threat. So we're talking about a global phenomenon here and this extends from Iceland to Sri Lanka and everything in between. So this isn't just a certain kind of country or a certain state of development, this is all over. Now the comparators, Indonesia of course has some relevance to India because of its size, its complex electoral system which reaches many different levels of the country. In general, India is a case of very little regulation and very little success in managing political finance. There's a little article that was just published recently on Indonesia that says politics in Indonesia you could substitute in here, India. Politics in Indonesia is expensive and in many parts of the country can only be entered by the rich. Those whose total wealth is billions or even trillions of rupees. The Jakarta gubernatorial election in 2017 is a prime example and it goes on to give that. Outside Jakarta the story is the same. The total wealth of the governor and vice governor candidates in the 2015 elections was between this and this billion rupees. It's so forth. The reason for the elite's monopoly in Indonesia's political sphere is obvious. Politics in Indonesia is in practice similar to business. In order to win an election, a candidate cannot help but prepare a large capital. Become a village head costs this. Become a member of council costs this. They have priced out every office as to what it takes to get that. So Indonesia is not a good story. It's a story in which systematic corruption going back decades into previous rule has not been clarified and cured by the transition to democracy in the late 90s and early 2000s. So that's one story. Another is Brazil, which is an interesting and a different story. Brazil as we know, and of course it's on our minds today because of the election on Sunday, Brazil was swept in the last three or four years by enormous corruption scandals focused in the sense the central axis of the scandal was the Odebrecht Company, this large construction company in South America that's been corrupting South American politicians by the dozens. And Brazilian politics was devastated by this corruption scandal and it led to reforms. And so what I wanna highlight is that it's really when a country reaches a political crisis that reforms finally come and we have to think in the Indian case is what might such a tipping point or a crisis look like. In Brazil it was a scandal that took down not just Lula, but then in a sense the entire political elite and we see the results with the emergence of Bolsonaro. So in Brazil after 2015 when the tipping point occurred they imposed a ban, an absolute ban on corporate funding. They were very focused because of the Odebrecht they were very focused on corporations and they didn't really touch individual donations. Of course people said, well aren't people just gonna repurpose their donations out of corporations into individuals which is of course the concern. And they set up public funding. They also said, well what we need is white funding to oppose that. But it was sort of too little too late for the political class to start to recover its legitimacy or credibility in the recent elections and we see the result of that. Then South Africa is interesting also. What's significant about South Africa of course a dominant party system since the transition to democracy in which one party has ruled. And it was a system of not very well regulated. There was public funding in South Africa and has been sort of a moderate amount of public funding but the dark funding began to grow more and more over the years. And so as you said at the end Melan the fact of having public funding is clearly not a cure all. It began to grow. And what's interesting and I think significant to you in Dovesh is in the early 2000s in South Africa some landmark research work started emerging in the think tank sector in South Africa calling attention to the lack of transparency in political financing and the negative consequences of that. People date the reform movement back to a report in 2003 by a particular South African research institute and the fundamental work is done now. It's been a 15 year story getting from that initial work. So you have to be patient. That initial work to where we are now. But so South Africa went through also like Brazil a kind of tipping point for the last couple of years of public outrage over the dirty financing to the ANC and particularly the leadership of the ANC under the previous leader and the certain circles around him and this was business financing both by South Africans and by some offshore people as well. Again led to a tipping point in Brazil. Sorry in South Africa put into place reform legislation that's still as far as I understand still pending but this reform legislation focuses on transparency not on banning donations. So it really bothered people there with the lack of transparency in the funding. So they've focused on transparency and they've also, South Africa was unusual in that foreign donations were not illegal. Foreign businesses, foreign governments any foreign agency was able to give money to South African politicians. I think that's a bit of a legacy in South Africa the fact that the African national Congress had so many international friends and a lot of supporters and they didn't want to ban foreign funding but that's finally also being brought under control in this legislation. So they're looking for, they're hoping to get this reform bill through and it would focus on transparency requires disclosures above $7,000 continues the public funding. So it's focused on that but the bill is under pressure because of the pressures of the politicians who trying to see what's to their advantage, their balancing their lack of public credibility with their desire to try to regain that credibility without giving up their sources of financing. But both Brazil and South Africa highlight that when you go down this road to a certain point crises can come, crises of legitimacy of an entire political class, not any one side. That's what's striking. I mean, an ANC kind of represents a lot of the political class and that does finally bring at least some kinds of reforms. So the question in India in a sense is what can one imagine, what would that look like? Now there have been crises of legitimacy and reform efforts and the anti-corruption figures and parties and so forth. So I'm not saying this is new but we have to sort of wonder what point that tipping point comes. So the interesting comparators I think here are these three countries although one could look at others as well. Other thoughts, but why don't I let you go on? Yeah, that's interesting what you're saying about Indonesia particularly because I think in the book there's a, I think one of the contributors had interviewed a candidate and said, he said, I can't afford to run for office. It's gonna be $200,000 in equivalent rupees if I do that. So I think, and your fine chart showed that the core parties in parliament are rising and we all know there's lots of royals and legacies in there as well. So I think it's a time when the wealth and rich families are driving the political agenda around the world and now in America. And so Stephen, can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, sort of how wealth is driving the political discourse now and it was a huge driver in the 2016 campaign. I think you were giving me some stats beforehand about the handful of billionaires that were driving the money that was going into politics then. Thanks, Annie and thank you for the invitation to be here and congratulations to both Milan and Devesh on this book. This is also a special panel. My grandparents lived for many years in India so my only regret is I didn't get to capture their observations of the campaign finance system there before they passed. But it's again an honor to be here and to think about some of the similarities particularly during Milan's presentation as I read through the book over the past few days. Of course we both have federal systems so we have both money at the national level here in Congress and in state legislatures and in local town and county councils. And of course increasingly there is attention being paid to the sources of funding for judicial races, for state high courts where we don't tend to have that on the East Coast as much although we do in North Carolina but where judges for the highest courts in each state are soliciting campaign contributions. And so there's been some different standards there when it comes to how the Supreme Court has interpreted our laws. But it is also true that of course our system is also largely privately financed. Of course most of the political money campaign contributions in the United States comes from a very tiny, highly unrepresentative segment of the American population. It's about the latest figures are about one third of 1% of Americans are providing about 70% of campaign contributions. And that's when I'm talking about direct contributions to candidates because of course we also have the outside system, the super PACs, the so-called social welfare organizations that have taken advantage of some parts of our tax code to spend money in a different way to take unlimited amounts of money. And there for example in 2016, about a billion dollars in super PAC spending came from just 100 individuals in this country. That would be an average of about $10 million a donor. So both systems are largely privately financed. The money is coming from individuals. I think another big difference of course though is that as we saw a significant percentage of the funds particularly in national elections in India are from political parties. And that is not the case in the United States where largely we are a candidate driven fundraising model. So you have candidates themselves soliciting money. They can receive about $5,000 from political parties. They can also spend money in what are called coordinated expenditures. So they can work with political parties on certain ad buys but otherwise the political parties need to spend that money independently. So the money is coming from individuals. But I think one of our, one of the biggest differences of course is that the Supreme Court in the United States is a major player when it comes to campaign finance laws. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress updated our federal campaign finance laws. It set up a federal election commission. And there was also a presidential public financing system. But the Supreme Court for the past nearly 40 years since its landmark decision in Buckley v. Vallejo has essentially said that the First Amendment applies to laws regulating the raising and spending of money in elections. And that the only justification for our campaign finance laws is to curb corruption and the appearance of corruption. And ever since that language was inserted in Buckley, ever since the court spoke in Buckley about curbing corruption, what it said was inherent in a system of large financial contributions, the court has been engaged in a discussion about what does corruption exactly mean. There's been a elasticity to that definition of corruption. Just in 2003 when the court was considering the McCain-Feingold law which shut down the soft money system for contributions to political parties at the time, candidates were limited to a relatively low threshold of direct campaign contributions, but groups could give six-figure checks to political parties. Political parties were then seen as an entity and as a place to buy access and influence. Congress shut that down with McCain-Feingold. It was reviewed and the court largely upheld the bipartisan campaign reform act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold. And there it said that the definition of corruption extended to quote the broader threat from politicians to compliant with the wishes of large contributors. Fast forward just about seven years to 2010, Justice O'Connor had left the court, Justices Roberts and Alito had joined the court and suddenly in Justice Kennedy's opinion in Citizens United, again that definition of corruption shrunk and it was limited really to quid pro quo cash for votes corruption. That is what Justice Kennedy then said, justified our campaign finance laws because quote, the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy, end quote. So we've then narrowed the definition of corruption which then was used in that case to justify striking down nearly a century of law that prohibited corporations and non-profit corporations including unions from spending money out of their general treasury funds to influence elections. The court said in Citizens United that so long as that spending is independent and disclosed it would not lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption. So the court there assumed of course that the spending would be independent and that the spending would be disclosed. That's not the case. Of course we've heard about black money in India, money that's from unregulated sources, from illicit sources. Here we have dark money as a term. I think it's now in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was coined by Eliza Newen Kearney now at the American Prospect but that's money that influences elections but the sources of that money is undisclosed. Since Citizens United nearly $900 million has come from undisclosed sources. So the spending if it's intended to influence an election is reported to the FEC but the ultimate source of that money whether it comes from a wealthy billionaire whether it comes from a corporation or a trade association that is hidden and the public is not able to quote follow the money when that amount of money is undisclosed. Again that's largely in the outside money context. In 2018 roughly about 50% of the outside money that we've seen so far has come from secret sources to the tune of about $128 million just in this cycle. So again, much of the money particularly in the outside groups is undisclosed at least to the American public. Money is coming from I think a very highly unrepresentative segment of the public and the court has really put some constraints on policy solutions that can rebalance the system to further empower smaller dollar donors and constituents. And the last thing I would just say there is that the internet has certainly revolutionized how candidates can raise money and spend money. The bulk of the money that's spent here in our elections is still spent on broadcast advertising. So it's still spent on radio and television although increasingly we're seeing the spending on digital media and on paid political staff and on canvassers but it still is radio and television that makes up the bulk of what a campaign spends in a given election cycle. And we're on pace yet again to shatter previous spending records. So we'll likely see in the 2018 congressional midterms roughly a little more than $5 billion will be spent in this election cycle which is almost $2 billion more than in 2014. So it continues to go up and up and up. Thank you. So something with big implications for 2018 and 2020 in the US and also for India. Dvesh I know you were just in the field so can you tell us a little bit about how you sort of see the election in 2019 in India shaping up and I mean I know that's like I'm not expecting you to prognosticate but what were folks saying out there and you were in Bihar and UP recently, right? Right. Well I think overall the sort of movie magic is a little dimmed and there is no doubt that it's going to be a much more competitive elections than appeared to be the case of her ago. We'll have a better sense of the mood of the electorate at the end of November. Both states go to the polls for the state assemblies and these are states where the BJP has empowered for many years. So that will sort of give us some sense of the mood of the electorate. But I think no doubt the Congress party having been out of power, very clear it doesn't have funds and the BJP is a huge financial, it's a advantage. How much that financial, it's a advantage, helps them gain or retain in the sorts of ways that Millan highlighted, campaigns, putting up the dummy candidates, all these sorts of things. No doubt it gives them some advantage. But how much of an advantage it's harder to gauge? Well I'll just say, I mean I was in Karnataka during the state election and I think you said in the book that there was even after demonetization which is when India valued some of its currency, there was still a huge amount of money that was spent in that state election. Like three, I don't know what they were. So after demonetization took place in November 2016, there were a series of states which had state elections in the early part of 2017 and what the election commission of India found is that their cash and other seizures increased threefold after demonetization when it was thought that a lot of this cash which had been sitting around was no longer available or at the ready for political parties. In fact, some people have speculated that one of the underlying drivers of this somewhat unorthodox, let's say decision was that the BJP wanted to constrain regional parties who may be more reliant on cash funding. Obviously they wouldn't have advanced notice that this was taking place. From the best that we can tell talking to political party leaders and candidates is there may have been a short-term den but political parties are pretty adaptive and not all of them are sitting, are sleeping on mattresses which have cash underneath them, right? They've diversified their portfolios to spread risk and so the election commission itself has said that demonetization, they do not believe is going to have a long-term impact on black funding of elections. Okay, so, well, I mean, on commodity, I just wanna say, I mean, I saw firsthand that the BJP, their organization just leaps and bounds ahead of what the opposition and the local regional parties seem to be. I mean, they were very professional. They obviously, they have a huge social media operation and it's all very, very well-funded and so I think the Congress party and all of its allies are really still scrambling to catch up and even- Yeah, I mean, I think Stephen can comment on this but I think we saw the Obama campaign in 2008 really pioneer new modes of kind of crowdfunding and capturing individual donations and what the BJP has done so cleverly is basically leverage technology for political campaigns in a way that had never been done before. I mean, political campaigns in India had been much more primitive. They had much more kind of door-to-door retail politics and in 2014, the BJP expended a large amount of money on doing things like investing in SMS technology so that on election day, if your name hadn't been ticked off the voter rolls at your polling booth, you would get an SMS at 2 p.m. saying, show up, there's still three more hours to vote for Narendra Modi. My sense is that gap will probably close over time but that it's still pretty persistent and when you take that technological and campaign advantage and you marry it to the financial advantage, I mean, one Congress MP told me recently that he wouldn't be surprised if the BJP has a 20 to one financial advantage on the Congress and that the Congress in state elections is cutting corners so doing things like they're unable to fly, they're candidates by helicopter because rented private helicopter costs too much so they're having to go overland so when you could see this kind of desperation on part of the opposition, now does that mean necessarily that there's a one-to-one correlation between financial advantage? No, but I think it does give them the pretty size of a leg up. Yeah, but the other thing that, oops, sorry, go ahead. I just want to add that I think one thing that one should add is that one reason why the need for money has increased so much is that political parties have weakened hugely. So in the past for campaigns you had your party workers, you didn't have to pay them, they were driven by a sense of commitment to the party, the old style. Parties have weakened around the world, not just in India and so now the same workers that you would have as part of your party who would do it for free, you now have to pay people so you need more money. And the BJP has a double advantage. It has a far more stronger party, more dedicated carders. So in some sense they need less money for at least that part of the expense. The Congress has really allowed its base, grassroots party-based together. So the other parties need to spend more money even as the supply of money and resources. So there was one little party in India that did try to be transparent about its funding and that experiment seems to have fallen by the wayside. So Milen, can you talk just a little bit about often then we can open it up to a question. Sure, so most of you in the room would have followed the rise and then decline and then rise again of the Amadhmi party. So the Amadhmi party was born out of this large corruption protest, the kind that Tom was discussing has been so prevalent in recent years. During the end of the previous Congress-led UPA government, that movement essentially became channelled into a political party. So India against corruption became the Amadhmi party or the common man party, which campaigned on the back of a kind of singular focus on anti-corruption and kind of getting rid of the old kind of crony elite establishment that's dominated Indian politics for the previous seven decades. And they really pioneered two things. One was having robust internal democratic structures. So having things like internal primaries where there were local committees set up to vet candidates and then to recruit people and to nominate them and propose their names to the kind of party executive council. And the second was to be fully transparent about every rupee of political giving. So you could go to a website, a section of the website of the Amadhmi party's main page and find out who had given, how much they'd given, what that person's location information was and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, with each passing month, the Amadhmi party looks more and more like every other political party. So those very carefully constructed democratic structures have given way to a party which is essentially run by one man, Arvind Kejriwal, who just like most other political parties are kind of, you have a strong person on top or a family on top which drives things, a very top-down affairs. The Amadhmi party has resembled increasingly the same model. So any kind of pockets of internal descent and difference have been either marginalized or shunted out of the party. And that nice website which had all political donations, if you try to visit it today, you'll find that the page is under construction. The page has been under construction for the past several years and the reason the Amadhmi party gives is that some of their donors were victims of retribution because people from either the ruling BJP or others found out that these donors have given to the Amadhmi party and so they decided to change their model of transparency. Now, whether or not you buy that, the fact is that they've retreated from the two central claims about the party which made them different. So unfortunately, that one model, I think doesn't look like such an aspirational model several years after it's taken off. Can I make a comment on that? I mean, it's striking given the incredibly widespread public concern about corruption in so many different countries that that model of party which is just an anti-corruption party and really rigorously tries to be different from existing parties has not emerged. I mean, in fact, when the common man party emerged in India, a lot of people internationally paid attention because they're so distinctive and people said, well, maybe that's the solution. Turns out not to have been. So you look in South Korea, for example, big corruption scandal drives out the president, but the party system doesn't really change. The other party comes in and runs things and there's some attempt in reform of the existing parties. But creations of specialized anti-corruption parties is not in the way forward. Doesn't mean their own experiments is doomed, but it was very unusual in that regard. Because the powers of entry into established political party systems are difficult. The only people who have been successful at creating distinctive anti-corruption profiles are the populist politicians like Bolsonaro who say, you know, epochs in all their houses, I'm different, and I'm just gonna sweep aside this corrupt elite and just be very different. Now, it doesn't usually work that way in practice, but the only people who sort of generated a distinctive profile in this is actually the charismatic populist who sort of threatens to be very different. Often wealthy, like Braille Lusconi says, I don't need to be corrupt, I'm already wealthy. And so there's an appeal of the anti-leaders. There was obviously with Donald Trump for some people in 2016 of I'm not like other politicians, I'm wealthy, I won't be on the take because I'm my own man. So those are the, it's anti-corruption figures, but not parties who dominated the reform or not the reform impulse, but have sort of channeled the public anger into some kind of political change. I want to turn, I think one difference, especially between India and South Brazil and South Africa is that the public anger in the other two countries came amidst an economic slump. And in India, despite the high corruption, growth has been pretty robust. And I think the sort of backlash of broader public anger is very unlikely, frankly, as long as growth is reasonably robust. The other is, one of the Prime Minister Modi's big public images that was part of his pro persona is that he is personally honest. I mean, that's very much been that he's single, he doesn't have a family, so there are no, and he's tried that he had. I mean, Millan's point about that in this election, everyone who might win might be a property, except him, actually, because his declaration, and he still managed that right or wrong, a separate point, that persona that he himself is above this. Which is sort of also- It's not really single, he lives his life as a single man, but of course, we know he's actually married. Just fact-checking you a little bit there. So anyway, you had a point- I was just adding just, again, I thought it was interesting, particularly in 2016, here with the rise of populism. Donald Trump and on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders in large part, were largely running against the political parties. They were anti-establishment. They were, again, pox on both their houses will run for the party's nomination, but we are in large part running against the party. So I think that's increasingly bled over here as well. I mean, just one thing on Modi is that I think it's reasonable to say today that his brand is way more popular than his party's brand. So in some sense, they are kind of writing his coattails. If you look at any public opinion survey, international or in domestic, Modi's popularity rating is still quite high, especially relative to other political leaders who are potential prime ministerial candidates, including Rahul Gandhi, but not limited to Rahul Gandhi, where his party image may have broken down somewhat. But this idea that he's incorruptible remains, which is why the opposition, for those of you who've been following, have been harping consistently on this defense scandal over the purchase of these fighter aircraft from Dassault, a French private sector company, alleging that there was improprieties in the way that that contract was written. That's essentially benefited the government and some of its crony supporters. This is something that I think between now and election day, we're gonna be hearing, with the volume kind of turned up to 11, to try to paint Narendra Modi as essentially a hypocrite. Not that we're any better, but he's just like us. So he can no longer be put on a pedestal to the extent that he has been in the past. Well, I think we should open it up to questions. What do you guys think? You ready? So does anybody have any questions for our illustrious panel? Just wait, there's a mic coming. You wanna come start in the front, Jim? Sasha Reiser-Kazitsky, Eurasia Group. Devesh and Millen had a question about, do you see the emergence in campaigning of social media advertising, like paid social media advertising? Certainly you have coders spreading information or disinformation on WhatsApp pretty consistently. But have you seen spending tilt towards social media expenditures in terms of paid advertisements as you have in many, many Western democracies? It appears to be more effective and much less expensive than going on TV or radio. So what politicians say is that they are increasingly spending larger shares of their overall campaign budget on digital programming, including social media. But one advantage of the Indian system is that WhatsApp has become ubiquitous and it's a free platform. So what they're actually doing is not paying for ads. What they're doing is they're paying party workers or compatriots essentially to spread news virally on WhatsApp. Now, this has had all kinds of unintended consequences including leading to pretty awful violence between communities. So it's something now that Facebook and on WhatsApp have been hauled up before, they're telecom regularly are in need to deal with so they've done things like limit the number of times a particular message or photo video can be forwarded. But a lot of the politicians I've spoken with think that they can sort of do this on the cheap. Rather than doing targeted ads on Facebook, they could just use WhatsApp and have people send out multiple messages per day to literally dozens of groups which reach different segments of their constituency. Actually, in terms of expenditure overall, it still will be a very small fraction. Actually, one of the pioneers of using mobile phones was the BSP, the Dalit Party, because they didn't have access to the networks in media. So they began with SMSs to get their supporters to come because it was much cheaper. And interesting enough, it's the weaker parties with less resources who will be using WhatsApp much more precisely because of their limited resources. And so it's bound to be much bigger in this election, but as if you, I think if you looked at slides that we learned short on what the money is spent on, gifts, rallies, all of those, those will still take the bulk of the expenses. Tom Timberg, consultant. I thank everybody for a fantastic panel, but I wanted to explore if you allow me that to some extent is the one that's been raised, but not the book they didn't write, which is the comparison with Indonesia. And I guess one could look at the financing in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and it seems to me that particularly some of the things that Milan has done, and there is a comparable literature, suggest that worth looking at, why is it that criminals themselves seem to have emerged less as Indonesian members of parliament? Perhaps it's because the criminals and the members of parliament have always been better, networked with each other in Indonesia going back to the Dutch period, unlike the Indonesian literature is full of the relationships between the equivalent of the CID, the secret police and the underworld, whereas in India it would appear that the underworld in the major cities wasn't so involved with the British secret police and so forth. But anyway, criminal, why, what about criminals and other thing, that's obviously a big question. The other possibility is one of the major figures in Indonesian politics is extremely wealthy because he was involved with the government for 20 or 30 years and he and his father in law, et cetera, already have their personal wealth, the fun things, but would you address that factor and then I guess the other factor is this question of, why hasn't an Amma Admi phenomena emerge in Indonesia and perhaps the answer is they just had elections for another 20 years, maybe it will eventually. Well, I guess the analytic question, I don't know what you think, Melan is, which is what needs to be explained, the prevalence of criminals active as Indian politicians and successfully. So for the relative absence of them in Indonesia, I think the outlier is more India and there's the question more of why has India moved down this road more than sort of comparator countries or certain countries. Just to clarify, they're not actually criminals, they have criminal charges. Sorry, yeah, okay, no, no, sorry. Because they're not convicted, if they are, they can't stand it. Yeah, so I was speaking loosely based on, yeah. Yeah, but there is, when I read your work, Melan, I must say, there's a frenetic mess to this whole scene in Indian party politics at the local level and all the levels that I just is, you know, as you say, elections have come to be democracy in India and the sort of election nearing has become a just it's up the system in a way. So the governance sort of participatory governance, which are also important in India, obviously, and there've been a lot of useful developments in terms of participatory governance, but elections themselves have reached a kind of the entry of money into this as well as India's, you know, economic revolution of the last 27 years that has brought more money into the society and more concentrations of wealth and so forth. But I think the question more is why this in India? So I think, you know, in my previous book on the subject, you know, one of the things that I document is that there has been an evolution over time. So the particular equilibrium that exists today between criminals and politicians where the criminals are the politicians didn't always exist. So if you rewind the clock and you look at the earliest general elections in 1952 and in the early 50s and 60s, what you see is that criminals were around very actively on the periphery of politics. So they were hired guns by the Congress party. It would be brought out on the evil elections to mobilize voters, to suppress voters if they thought the section would not vote for them to hand out freebies and goodies. Over time, several things happened. Political parties began to weaken organizationally. These individuals had accumulated a lot of resources, a lot of personal clout, and they could no longer rest easy at night knowing that the Congress party would come back in the morning. Right, they could always be rest assured that that would be the case. But particularly at the state level, that monopoly started to break right in the 1960s. And so the calculation they made was if we go for the Congress or whoever the dominant party is, and that party loses, we've lost all of our protection, we've lost all of our access to the resources of the state, and now we're subject to punitive action by the state and by our rivals. And so they decided essentially to vertically integrate themselves into politicians. And I think one thing you see in many parts of the developing world, whether it's in Africa, in a place like Nigeria, Kenya, Southeast Asia, is that kind of competitiveness is simply not present. We're in a local area, people have much more certainty that a particular party or group will win. And so criminals remain as kind of king makers who play Godfather-like roles behind the scenes. And in India, I think they've decided the only way to save themselves actually is by jumping into the electoral fray. A second factor, which I think I touch upon in the book, but you could use a lot more exposition, is there has always been, particularly in rural areas in India, the character of the landlord, the Zamindar, right? Who was both the revenue collector, was the public security, was the arbiter of disputes. And that person, whether you hated him or liked him, had a sense of legitimacy in the social order. And so to turn over from the former Zamindar and the landlord to a kind of strongman Robin Hood character is not such a stretch because in Indian political economy, that figure has been there going back hundreds of years. But just to add to Millen's point, there's a further paradox that even as we see an increase in candidates with criminal backgrounds or criminal charges, elections have become more competitive. More competitive. Yeah, so these two have gone hand in hand. It's not that the rise of this has somehow made elections less competitive. So in that sense, that core element of democracy, which is competitive elections, has actually been increasing in India, even as all these nefarious aspects to those elections has also been increasing. So within that competition, as his chart indicated, the role of wealth is playing a very heavy role. So competitive, but it helps to have money. Right, I mean competitive and obviously the money distorts the levelness of the playing field, right? I mean, you're getting to a situation today I'll just end here by saying, there are a restricted number of groups who can sort of make it in Indian politics today. You have the people who are suspected criminals who have links to all kinds of wealth and other resources. You have dynasts who are essentially family-backed politicians. You have celebrities and you have industrialists. So once you account for these four demographics, there's almost no room left for the average, quote unquote, amadui, average person to contest. And I think that funnel or that filter of money is going to narrow that down even further in 2019 and beyond. Okay, I guess we have time for a few more questions. Okay, yeah, sir, which one? Well, Rick Messick, I work on campaign finance in several countries. So if you make campaign contributions more, more transparent in India, how will that affect who runs as a candidate? And more importantly, if it does affect a candidate's slate, what difference do you think it'll make in public policy outcomes? I mean, can I just like interject? I mean, I don't think there's any impetus for change. I mean, I think that's the issue. I mean, we can say what if India did this, but there doesn't seem to be any urgency at all for any kind of tweaking of the system or reforming it and what I can see. There's no evidence that you can change. I mean, I think, well, campaign with transparency or on contributions would do is allow some kind of connecting of the dots to be possible. So that one could actually identify as used to more easily be able to do in the US system, perhaps where India and the US are converging in this weird way towards darker, cloudier, murkier contributions. So the Modi government has introduced a new instrument called electoral bonds. Electoral bonds are essentially a bearer bond that any entity, corporation or individual can buy anonymously in any amount and then deposit those bonds into the bank account of a political party. Now, what's important about these bonds is that neither the giver nor the recipient have to disclose that this transaction's taken place. So I as the corporate tycoon don't have to disclose I've given to such party and the party doesn't have to disclose I've received. So at least when there's some monocular transparency, if I am a coal magnate, who's essentially giving $100 million to a political party, and that political party when it comes to power decides to drop all coal regulations, I can connect the dots in journalism, civil society, the media individuals can point that out and then whether they act on it or not is another story. But now we move to a system where none of that is going to be possible. That transaction could take place between an oligarch and a political party and we wouldn't be none the wiser, right? It would be impossible to be able to trace that, those linkages and I think that's where why transparency is so important. Sorry, no, go ahead. Just to add, look the impetus for change in India on this is not going to come from a broad public backlash that will in turn put pressure on political parties. At least unless there's a major economic crisis and a sustained one. The change is much more likely to come from independent public institutions. India's election commission is really a rare, exceptionally powerful institution, which has been trying. And at some point you will get, as has happened in India in the past 20 years, a Indian Supreme Court is now very different from the US Supreme Court. It is in many ways much more progressive and because you have the Supreme Court sits in benches, you can always get that random thing of four judges who decide to take up what the election commission is saying and just pass it as law. And frankly the politicians will not be too unhappy. They pass on the buck a lot to the courts and I think it's just a matter of time but it's a purely stochastic process. One cannot predict when it'll happen but there have been so many institutional changes that have really come from the courts rather than from parliament. I like to think of disclosure really as having three purposes here. One of which is just so that voters and constituents know who is speaking to them when they see these ads or when they get these mailers who is speaking to them. One, two, as Milan was saying, to connect the dots to follow the money to know who is in the pocket of so-called money d'interest in the quote to quote the Supreme Court. And then third to detect fraud and to actually enforce the campaign finance laws that we do have on the books. You need disclosure and at least here in the States we've seen this rise in secret dark money. I think the blame is at the feet of several institutions. I mean, the Supreme Court did say eight to one in Citizens United that disclosure is important to hold power accountable and it assumed that the laws would be updated but our laws have not kept pace with the changing jurisprudence or with how campaigns are run. The Congress after Citizens United in 2010 passed what was called the Disclose Act, excuse me, the House passed the Disclose Act which would require outside groups to disclose their top donors. Currently the bill would require donors of $10,000 or more to outside groups to disclose their donors or as the money is transferred. That passed the House, it went to the Senate, it got 59 out of 100 votes but because of the Senate's filibuster rule it was a strict party line vote and the 41 senators that voted no trumped the 59 senators that voted yes. And so even though it had majority support and I think super majority support it did not go to President Obama's desk. And ever since then the partisan breakdown here has made it such that we have not been able to move disclosure reform at the national level. Now there's a lot of room for experimentation at the state level. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, California, they have passed interesting disclosure laws requiring top donors to be disclosed on mailers and on television ads. So there's a lot of experimentation and we can maybe if we have time get into that later with public financing systems in Connecticut and in Maine. My organization it's a nonpartisan organization has been at the forefront of helping to lead the movements at the state levels to lower the barriers to entry. But there's a lot of experimentation on disclosure happening at that level too. And then finally I would say the Federal Election Commission which is not a constitutional body as the election commission is in India has been broken for some would say for decades but especially the past 10 or so years I was previously counseled to one of the commissioners Commissioner Ravel who really made dark money in the need to fix dark money, educated the public and built a lot of pressure around this issue. Unfortunately the gridlock at that commission it's generally it's no more than three commissioners of any one political party. So traditionally three Democrats and three Republicans have not been able to agree on new regulations to deal with disclosure after Citizens United have not been able to agree on how to enforce the law have not been able to agree on the very meaning of many of the laws that have been on the books for a long time or on the purpose or mission of that agency. So that breakdown both in terms of policy and rulemaking but also enforcement has given rise to this level of undisclosed money in our elections. Any other questions? Do one more question? Yeah, we'll do one more question. Why don't we have a, thank you. I'm Celia Pasalina with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. And I wanted to actually ask a question about enforcement in particular. And you say that there's weak enforcement in India and that's probably true but some would argue that politically motivated enforcement is an even bigger problem. Like for example, accusations in Brazil and of course neighboring Bangladesh. Do you have any recommendations? And this is to the whole panel as to how to strengthen enforcement without falling into that trap. Yeah? So the Supreme Court has just ruled that an important judgment, there was a public interest suit brought before it several years ago saying that candidates who face criminal cases. So the mesh is right, they're not convictions but they're not charges either. These are equivalent to what we call indictments, right? Where a court has framed charges and there's some kind of trial of judicial proceeding underway. That candidates who face cases should be disqualified because they taint the democratic system and the court much of the disappointment of a lot of civil society activists ruled that that would be unconstitutional. That the parliament has laid out in legislation what the grounds are for disqualification and if they want to disqualify candidates in that way it's not for the courts to resolve it but actually parliament. That there's a statute there where you have to build an exception. And of course that would be challenged as well because there is in most democratic societies where the rule of law prevails, a presumption of innocence before being proven guilty. So I think the court probably ruled in my judgment quite wisely there because there is always this question or threat of politically motivated cases. I think the enforcement challenge in India is slightly different. That the election commission which is very powerful during the course of elections is powerful because it's able to deputize 10 to 11 million officials in India to work on its behalf during elections. And Vikram Nehru is here. He was a former IS officer many years ago. They're pressed into service to be electoral officers. But then once the election is over those 10 to 11 million people disappear and it's left to this few hundred members of the election commission to deal with allegations of impropriety. So if a candidate say forgets or fails to submit his or her campaign election expenditure documentation it's very, very hard for the commission to actually pursue a case because they simply don't have the enforcement power. So that's a real gap in the system is that you plus up for the time of election and then the day the results are announced that whole machinery collapses back. And so there needs to be some way to augment that so that there is an enforcement machinery that can follow up once the election is done. Okay. My own thing is I'm much more pessimistic about this because the thing is it's a ubiquitous problem now across the democracies. I think in the end a bigger part of this answer might lie that we need to reduce the stakes of politics. As long as stakes are very high ideological, financial people will find ways to get round the system to subvert it, bend it, whichever. Now how and why we reduce the stakes of politics is of course a completely different question. I would just say at least again my experience with the American system the federal election commission, there've been a number of proposals put forward to reform that commission because I agree. I mean there were important public policy reasons to have an even number of commissioners from each political party so that you wouldn't have this risk of political retribution or that the appearance of political retribution. But increasingly and I worked on a study two years ago that looked at the number of deadlocked three to three votes have just have just gone up significantly over the past 10 years where there used to be some agreement in general about pursuing enforcement actions. It takes four out of six votes to move forward on an investigation and on an enforcement matter and that breakdown has just risen exponentially in terms of the split. So one of the proposals is of course to have an uneven number of commissioners so that you can break a tie to have a chairman or chairwoman of the commission that would sit maybe for 10 years that would be a little more insulated from partisan politics. I think people are looking through that through a slightly different lens now as 10 years maybe too long. Another proposal would be at least at the FEC every step of the way in an investigation even opening an investigation requires the affirmative votes of four commissioners. And so evidence might come forward there might be a complaint filed and a response filed and the commission could just say well we don't have enough information to even authorize our staff to investigate. You might shift that presumption for that initial preliminary investigation to career nonpartisan staff and then give the commission a set period of time to overrule the staff at least for the initial step of an investigation to look into a matter if you're going to find wrongdoing that would require four votes. You could also shift to a private right of action so that other entities could eventually pursue enforcement actions if the commission is gridlocked. I mean even now the commission lacks the power to actually find anyone. It needs to go to court to do that. Usually what happens is they conciliate and they come to some sort of an agreement before going to court but even under the current system it would take taking an actor to court. So those are just some of the proposals I think changing who can actually do the investigations and flipping some of those burdens at the initial stages. And one other it's just coming to mind I mean an excellent model that was shut down recently was Wisconsin's government accountability board which was really the gold standard when it came to campaign finance enforcement. That was an entity made up of in large part retired judges and that was a system that unfortunately they shut down several years ago but had a number of interesting mechanisms that bolstered enforcement and accountability at least there in Wisconsin and was something that a number of states were looking at for strengthening enforcement. So I want to thank Annie for moderating and guiding our discussion. Fresh from New Delhi so it has a perspective about someone who sees this through an American political lens in an Indian one. When Devesh and I set out to write this book we consciously focused on India because there had not been a study which had looked at the world's largest democracy but of course these things shouldn't be viewed in the silos so we're grateful to Tom and to Stephen for providing that comparative perspective. For those of you who are interested there are copies of the book available for sale just outside in the corridor. They are reasonably priced from Oxford University Press and I just want to thank all of our panelists and giving them a round of applause. Thank you so much. Thank you.