Private electoral finance and democratic theory.

Changing models of party organization and party democracy: the emergence of the cartel party. The Politics of Party Funding: State Funding to Political Parties and Party Competition in Western Europe. Moreover, party reliance on private donations could also be argued to attenuate the ties between parties and their grassroots, and the introduction of public funding could be seen as a way of freeing up party activists from fundraising so they could do more political work on the ground (Briffault, [11]; Christiano, [15], p. 258; Ewing, [27], p. 133). Canada's union-allied New Democratic Party (NDP) agreed to reforms that severely restricted the funds that trade unions could donate to it on the grounds that, as stated by one of the party's spokespeople, "the only people who should be allowed to contribute to political parties are those who are actually eligible to vote at election time" (cit. [Extracted from the article]