Again, I'll overgeneralize here about Europeans. Even where there is awareness of powerful interests in gov't, the fact that you have more transparency because money is not passed to politicos directly, creates a tendency to respond to the policies of gov't without a full contextual awareness of corporate interests.

This is just my sense in discussing politics with Europeans. The American response is typically to suss out a politician's hidden motives, whereas Europeans are much more ready to consider politics at the conceptual level. Politics in the USA is so debased because a conceptual discussion of policies is already subverted by the election process which preceded it.

In Europe, the tendency is reversed, so that Americans find difficulty in explaining political policy to Europeans since we tend to harp on the power arrangements rather than discuss policy. Or, for voters who have no interest in power arrangements, they'd rather discuss say lipstick or religion or abortion or being a war hero. For many of these voters, they engage in power relations at the level of worker's rights (i.e. they do consider union membership, minimum wages, etc.)

For others who also ignore policy statements and governing concepts, they may dig deeper and put a keen eye on, say, GE owning NBC, or Disney owning ABC, or  Sumner Redstone--a lifelong Democrat--supporting Bush now because he's great for Viacom. We'll notice that SONY and Bertelsmann have had an enormous impact on American culture by pushing laws that streamline book publishing and, unfortunately, destroy literature.

The direct money tie places a different emphasis on politics.