If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.

Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.

What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?

Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.

Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.

Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.

Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.

Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.

It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol

But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.

> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money

How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.

In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.

e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?

By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.

I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.

That’s what is going on here

- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations

- parties can take capped membership fees

- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously

- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.

Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.

My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.

Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.

Start with the fact that it's impossible and will only benefit the candidate that best bends the rule or is able to blatantly break it without repercussions.

Here’s a narrow critique, you don’t understand that limiting campaigning privileges name recognition which is something only existing officials or celebrities will have.

In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.

Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.

I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.

And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides.

e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.

You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.

Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.

So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.

And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.