Slap the Crooked Politician on the Front Page
An important function of democratic institutions is to make politicians accountable before citizens. Accountability makes sure that a politician will have to answer the electorate for his/her mandate. But is it really so? In Italy corruption is rife, and shows no signs of decrease. Actually, it's on the rise. But the also the oldest democracy in the world, Great Britain, long held as a model, is not immune from political scandals. In 2009, The Daily Telegraph published the details of the expenses accounts of MPs in the House of Commons. Such revelations, in a country less used to public corruption like the UK, caused an uproar. Together with Indraneel Sircar, at Queen Mary University of London, we have estimated the impact of the expenses scandal on May 2010 elections. After gathering data on media coverage of parliamentary abuses, we have statistically assessed to what degree individual MPs involved in the scandal were punished following visibility given to their wrongdoings, or for the actual import of the financial abuses committed, which were later calculated by the Legg Commission.
Our first conclusion is that the British press was balanced: media coverage was well correlated with actual abuses, was especially focused on government members, thus fulfilling the press's watchdog function. Also, left- and right-leaning papers covered the scandal in a similar fashion, without any regard for ideologically proximate MPs.
The second conclusion is that the amount of media coverage had a significant impact on the composition of the House of Commons that emerged out of the 2010 elections. First of all, MPs whose charging of illegal expenses was reported were less likely to run for re-election. Those who decided to go ahead anyway saw their votes decrease as a function of media coverage of their abuses. The electoral punishment meted out was however almost never sufficient to remove a given MP from his or her seat. So the weeding out of crooked politicians mostly occurred in the pre-electoral phase. This is similar to what is found for the United States, where removal of crooks occurs especially during the primaries. Locked electoral rolls thus facilitate the permanence of corrupt politicians in democratic institutions.
Women candidates were the most affected
Why did electoral punishment have modest effects? First of all, the ideological distance between candidates can induce many voters to stick to a corrupt politician rather then vote for somebody else on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Our analysis shows that there is also another mechanism at work: voters perceive ideologically closer candidates as more honest, a textbook case of cognitive dissonance.
Our analysis show that female parliamentarians were more damaged by the scandal than their male counterparts. Keeping the level of financial abuse equal, women MPs received more media coverage and had a higher likelihood not to run again for their seat. The women who did, received a harsher punishment by voters. In short, women seem more vulnerable on various fronts, which not only makes being elected more difficult for them, but also makes their permanence in parliament harder.
To conclude, accurate media coverage is crucial to make democracy work and keep corruption at bay. The news coverage of the expenses scandal had important effects on the composition of Parliament elected in 2010. To the contrary, the level of monetary abuses reconstructed by the Legg committee didn't have any independent effect either on the likelihood of involved MPs to retire from politics or on the votes obtained by those who decided to stand for re-election. Those who remained outside the media spotlight held onto their seats, whether they had abused of the system to charge personal expenses or not. Only when abuses received the attention of the media, did democratic accountability unfold its beneficial effects.