Campaign finance refers to all funds that are raised and spent in order to promote candidates, parties or policies in some sort of electoral contest. In modern democracies such funds are not necessarily devoted to election

Election

An election is a formal decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the...

 campaigns. Issue campaigns in referendums, party activities and party organizations are additional items to be funded by political money. When James K. Pollock and Louise Overacker began to analyze the role of money in politics, they started in the United States, looking at the money that was spent in order to influence the outcome of a (federal) election.