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

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

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.

Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal.

Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.

But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..

> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)

Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.

Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017

If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.