Regulatory Asymmetry and Campaign Finance Circumvention under Concurrent Voting: Lessons from Poland’s 2023 Election and Referendum

This article examines how concurrent voting can create opportunities for campaign finance circumvention when overlapping political contests are governed by asymmetrical regulatory regimes. It develops a framework of regulatory asymmetry that identifies the conditions—divergent disclosure requirements, unequal spending limits, overlapping electorates, and weak oversight—under which political actors may redirect resources toward less regulated contests while continuing to influence more tightly regulated competition. The argument is illustrated through Poland’s 2023 parliamentary elections, held alongside a government-initiated nationwide referendum. Drawing on legal analysis and financial data, the article demonstrates how the statutory separation between electoral and referendum finance regimes created a weakly regulated arena for political spending: state-owned enterprises and affiliated foundations financed large-scale “informational” campaigns that indirectly benefited the incumbent camp while remaining outside electoral spending limits, while referendum campaigning generated financial and mobilizational spillovers into the electoral contest. Comparative evidence from five European cases situates Poland toward the permissive end of the regulatory spectrum. The article argues that fragmented campaign finance regimes weaken transparency and erode the anti-corruption function of campaign finance regulation, and it proposes regulatory harmonization and strengthened disclosure as safeguards for electoral integrity under concurrent voting.