MPs for Sale? Returns to Office in Postwar British Politics

By Andrew C. Eggers, Jens Hainmueller. American Political Science Review, 2009

285 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many recent studies show that firms profit from connections to influential politicians, but less is known about how much politicians financially benefit from wielding political influence. We estimate the returns to serving in Parliament, using original data on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. Applying both matching and a regression discontinuity design to compare Members of Parliament (MPs) with parliamentary candidates who narrowly lost, we find that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs, but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs. Conservative MPs profited from office largely through lucrative outside employment they acquired as a result of their political positions; we show that gaining a seat in Parliament more than tripled the probability that a Conservative politician would later serve as a director of a publicly traded firm—enough to account for a sizable portion of the wealth differential. We suggest that Labour MPs did not profit from office largely because trade unions collectively exerted sufficient control over the party and its MPs to prevent members from selling their services to other clients.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/282a6c60cbdcb28bdb9c6b5b2d2e92a45950a828

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Citations in the corpus

Geographic Boundaries as Regression Discontinuities (2015, background): “…(2010) count 78 applications of RD designs in economics, and the design is spreading quickly in political science (see, e.g., Broockman 2009; Eggers and Hainmueller 2009; Caughey and Sekhon 2011; Gerber, Kessler, and Meredith 2011; Gerber and Hopkins 2011; Trounstine 2011; Eggers et al.…”
Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil (2012, methodology): “Other applications of the close-race RD design include Brollo and Troiano (2012), Eggers and Hainmueller (2009), Ferreira and Gyourko (2009), Gagliarducci, Nannicini, and Naticchioni (2011), Hainmueller and Kern (2008), Pettersson-Lidbom (2008).”
Wealth Inequality and Democracy (2017, background): “Promising strategies appear in studies by Eggers & Hainmueller (2009), Truex (2014), and Faccio (2006) that evaluate the incidence and financial value of political connections across different settings.”