This being said, it should be cautioned that funding and media access could serve as a useful guide to assessing the threshold issue in practice only if, in addition to these formal requirements, one takes into account also the factual functioning of these formal rules in different states. That is, one would also need to take into account the intensity with which the formal rules are being implemented (by the courts and election commissions) in the different states. Thus, while it is true, for instance, that in Russia all registered parties are entitled to equal access to free campaign broadcasting, there is such a multiplicity of parties, and thus campaigning adds, that the practical mobilizing support is automatically diluted. Each party, regardless of size, gets no more than its “thirty-second moment of fame”. Moreover, some official observers have reported a heavy pro-government bias on all main channels during successive Russian elections in the past. All these, and other, contextual specificities must be taken into account when measuring and comparing this particular threshold across different states.