The Limits of Electoral Control: Evidence from Last‐Term Politicians

Abstract

In modern democracies, politicians' accountability is often linked to the disciplining mechanism of electoral control. For politicians in their final term, this mechanism is impaired. Using a novel data set covering 910 members of the UK House of Commons active within the period 1997–2010, we investigate how reduced electoral control affects last‐term MPs' trade‐off between work effort inside parliament, leisure, and outside interests. Our main contributions lie in providing the first explicit consideration of (1) MPs' final‐term intra‐/extraparliamentary work balance and (2) MPs' reasons for leaving parliament (i.e., retirement, career change, electoral defeat). These extensions provide important fresh insights concerning the boundaries of elections' disciplining power.

Strategic public policy around population thresholds

“…Importantly, the exogenous nature of the imposed thresholds and our pre/post comparison of policy developments within the same municipality imply that our inferences are very likely to be causal in nature. As such, we contribute to a vast political economics literature on political agency and (self-)selection (Besley, 2005;Gagliarducci and Nannicini, 2013;Geys and Mause, 2016). In addition, given that the substantial room for interpretation when granting housing permits reflects in low local accountability in housing policies, our results are consistent with extensive scholarship observing a negative correlation between the level of political accountability and government corruption (Adsera et al, 2003;Lederman and Loayza, 2005;Yan and Oum, 2014).…”

Gerontocracy in a comparative perspective: Explaining why political leaders are (almost always) older than their constituents

“…Aging parliamentarians have also been found to be less active in France (Gavoille, 2018), Germany (Bailer & Ohmura, 2018), and Japan (Ono, 2015). In the same spirit, Geys and Mause (2016) find that in the United Kingdom, retiring MPs (i.e., those over 65 who do not intend to run for reelection) are more prone to shirking in the strict sense—that is, substituting leisure for work (see also Willumsen & Goetz, 2017; Lott, 1990, and Clark & Lucas Williams, 2014 on the United States; Bailer & Ohmura, 2018 on Germany). Shorter time horizons may also be the reason behind the poor economic performance of aging leaders: in democracies, older politicians become less likely to invest in policies that would benefit growth in the long run (Atella & Carbonari, 2017; McClean, 2019); in autocracies, they become more likely to prey on the economy in order to maximize their own wealth (Jong‐A‐Pin & Mierau, 2011, p. 289).…”

Explaining voter turnout: A meta-analysis of national and subnational elections

“…Elections are central to democratic polities (Ashworth, 2012;Geys and Mause, 2016), and scholars have long sought to identify and explain variation in electoral participation across time and space. Indeed, few topics in political science have generated a comparable volume of literature, and turnout scholarship witnessed a veritable explosion over the past 15 years.…”