The demand and supply of political campaign financing in Tanzania and Uganda during the 2010s

Campaign financing is defined as money and other resources used by parties and candidates during primary, parliamentary, or presidential elections to secure nomination and election to political office. In this paper, we develop a demand-supply framework for analysing and understanding such financing in newly democratising poor countries, exemplified by Tanzania and Uganda. Like other African countries, both countries operate a first-past-the-post electoral system, and both experienced a double transition towards political and economic liberalisation beginning in the 1980s. This has increased the cost to parties and candidates of being elected to public office.

We make estimates of the orders of magnitude and sources of campaign financing in the two elections in both countries during the early and mid-2010s. Some 80+ members of parliament in each country were interviewed in 2017 to provide such information. For the two presidential elections during that period, we collected data through interviews with knowledgeable individuals and the use of secondary sources.

The main findings are that: (a) legislation and enforcement of campaign financing regulations are weak, especially in Uganda; (b) campaign expenditures for parliamentary and presidential elections have grown significantly during the period – more so in Uganda than in Tanzania, while the incumbent party candidates outspend the opposition significantly in both the parliamentary and presidential elections in both countries; (c) female members of parliament generally spent as much or more on election campaigns as male candidates; (d) the supply of plutocratic financing by larger, mainly domestic, private companies – especially to fund the presidential candidates of the ruling parties in Tanzania and Uganda – has grown in tandem with economic liberalisation since the 1990s; and (e) providing campaign financing probably improves the bargaining positions of major donors – especially vis-à-vis the incumbent presidents and parties – and more so than does paying taxes to the state by these larger campaign finance donors.

Comparing our campaign cost figures with those from neighbouring countries, the conclusion is also that Tanzania and Uganda – despite the significant differences between them – do fall within a comparable range of campaign costs found in other African countries.