Nebentätige Bundestagsabgeordnete: Was offenbaren die Veröffentlichungspflichten?

Abstract

This article statistically analyzes the moonlighting activities of members of the German Bundestag. In contrast to popular prejudices about "the political class," the data reveal that there are considerable differences among the 613 MPs regarding (i) the number and type of ancillary activities and (ii) the amount of outside income. Moreover a multiple regression analysis shows that the factors party affiliation, duration of parliamentary membership, age, and number of children contribute to the explanation of the observable differences. However, the empirical findings for MPs' outside income have to be viewed with skepticism as the official disclosure rules do not create full income transparency. Copyright 2009 die Autoren Journal compilation 2009, Verein für Socialpolitik und Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Moonlighting Politicians: A Survey and Research Agenda

“…Nevertheless, this limited number of analyses already provides a number of interesting common trends as well as disagreements. Firstly, existing studies indicate clear partisan effects in Germany (Mause 2009;Niessen and Ruenzi 2010;Geys and Mause 2011) and the UK (Geys 2011), but not in Italy (Gagliarducci et al 2010). In Germany and the UK, politicians associated with conservative and/or liberal (in the economic sense) parties are significantly more likely to have outside jobs than politicians from left-wing parties.…”

“…Women are not only significantly less likely to have many outside jobs (Mause 2009;Geys 2011) and/or high outside income (Becker et al 2009;Gagliarducci et al 2010), socio-demographic characteristics such as age, family status and parliamentary experience are much stronger determinants of moonlighting for women than men in Germany (Geys and Mause 2011). Still, although the latter findings are interesting in their own right, it remains unclear whether this is due to self-selection effects or potential discrimination (we return to this below).…”

Are Female Legislators Different? Exploring Sex Differences in German MPs' Outside Interests

“…city/county councillor). 6 Although this official data source has also been utilised in Becker et al (2009), Mause (2009, and Niessen and Ruenzi (2010), none of these studies examines the role of politicians' sex in detail, nor differentiates between different types of sideline activities. Before proceeding with the analysis, however, it should be noted that the number of outside interests is clearly an imperfect measure of MPs extra-parliamentary activities.…”

“…Although a matter of public and political debate in many countries, outside interests have been largely neglected thus far in the sex-differences literature discussed above. 1 Indeed, while several studies have observed that in the national parliaments of Germany and Italy as well as in U.S. state legislatures female MPs on average have fewer outside jobs (Maddox, 2004;Mause, 2009) and/or lower outside income (Becker et al, 2009;Gagliarducci et al, 2010) than their male colleagues, no studies exist, to the best of our knowledge, that investigate this finding further. 2 Yet, such findings clearly raise more questions than they answer:…”

German MPs' Outside Jobs and Their Repercussions on Parliamentary Effort

“…This triggered an empirical literature which was mostly descriptive in nature. Mause (2009) finds that members of the right wing parties in the Bundestag (CDU/CSU and FDP) follow significantly more side activities than their colleagues from other (left-wing) parties. It does not seem to play a role, however, if a delegate was directly elected or got into the assembly via his party list.…”