TY - JOUR
T1 - Politicians’ Private Sector Jobs and Parliamentary Behavior
AU - Weschle, Simon
N1 - Funding Information:
For comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Despina Alexiadou, Stefanie Bailer, Benjamin Barber, Christian Breunig, Michael Donnelly, Andrew Eggers, Chris Hanretty, and Ibrahim Oker, as well as conference and seminar participants at APSA, the “Parliamentary Careers in Comparison” conference at the University of Leiden, the “Frontiers in Money and Politics Research” conference at Stanford GSB, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Konstanz. For valuable research assistance, I thank Julia Munsters, Hamza Mighri, and Daniel Jackson. I acknowledge financial support from the Appleby‐Mosher Fund and the Maxwell Tenth Decade Project at Syracuse University.
Publisher Copyright:
©2022, Midwest Political Science Association.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - About 80% of democracies allow legislators to be employed in the private sector while they hold office. However, we know little about the consequences of this practice. In this article, I use newly assembled panel data of all members of the United Kingdom House of Commons and a difference-in-differences design to investigate how legislators change their parliamentary behavior when they have outside earnings. When holding a private sector job, members of the governing Conservative Party, who earn the vast majority of outside income, change whether and how they vote on the floor of parliament as well as increase the number of written parliamentary questions they ask by 60%. For the latter, I demonstrate a targeted pattern suggesting that the increase relates to their employment. The article thus shows that one of the most common, and yet least studied, forms of money in politics affects politicians’ parliamentary behavior.
AB - About 80% of democracies allow legislators to be employed in the private sector while they hold office. However, we know little about the consequences of this practice. In this article, I use newly assembled panel data of all members of the United Kingdom House of Commons and a difference-in-differences design to investigate how legislators change their parliamentary behavior when they have outside earnings. When holding a private sector job, members of the governing Conservative Party, who earn the vast majority of outside income, change whether and how they vote on the floor of parliament as well as increase the number of written parliamentary questions they ask by 60%. For the latter, I demonstrate a targeted pattern suggesting that the increase relates to their employment. The article thus shows that one of the most common, and yet least studied, forms of money in politics affects politicians’ parliamentary behavior.
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U2 - 10.1111/ajps.12721
DO - 10.1111/ajps.12721
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85137325480
SN - 0092-5853
JO - American Journal of Political Science
JF - American Journal of Political Science
ER -