Counting the cost of corruption

"The formal electoral process has become a game, behind which the realities of politics are played out in a manner which bears little resemblance to democratic accountability..."

Corruption scandals cost politicians votes, so goes the conventional wisdom. Try telling that to Silvio Berlusconi, a man almost synonymous with scandal, but who emerged as the big winner from last week’s regional elections in Italy. What does that tell us about the electoral impact of corruption? One reading might be that it shows voters don’t really care about accusations of corruption amongst their political leaders. The reputation of the political class is now so low across most European democracies that citizens more or less expect them to be involved in corrupt activities. And over time corruption scandals, like most scandals, lose their capacity to shock: what once generated outrage now elicits indifference. So, although voters may have been disgusted by the recent parliamentary expenses scandals in the UK, they are less likely to have been wholly surprised: for many, it will have represented confirmation of what they already suspected about the behaviour of their representatives.

However, even if citizens do become gradually inured to corruption within the political class, there is another reason why we should remain very concerned about its impact. In the post-communist era, electoral politics in the developed democracies has shifted from ‘selling ideologies’ to ‘selling leaders’. For although voters may increasingly expect their politicians to be corrupt, the political game itself demands a rhetoric of denial. The focus of election campaigns is increasingly on the honesty and trustworthiness of leaders, presented in contrast to the alleged dishonesty of their opponents, rather than on what they actually stand for.

This is doubly damaging for democracy. It reduces electoral competition to little more than a political beauty competition, where voters are being sold a confected ‘package’. Witness the recent focus on the wives of the main party leaders as extensions of their appeal. We are invited to get to ‘know’ our political leaders, as if they were characters in a national level soap opera, leading some commentators to talk of the ‘trivialisation’ of politics. An even more insidious problem is that this undermines comprehension of the real complexities of the political process and the capacity of politicians to effect change. There is an inevitable ratcheting up of increasingly implausible claims about what can be achieved, with political leaders trading promises that are almost bound to fail. That can only add to a sense of cynicism towards the political process as voters are increasingly turned off. In some countries, notably in the former communist world, such trends have opened the way to the emergence of ‘state capture’, whereby firms and other private bodies shape the laws, policies and regulations to their own advantage. The formal electoral process has become a game, behind which the realities of politics are played out in a manner which bears little resemblance to democratic accountability.

For all the recent hoo-ha around the claims by former ministers like Stephen Byers and others, it is highly unlikely that they are really in a position to ‘sell’ policy change to the highest bidder. But, even if their attempts to trumpet their self-importance were little more than bluster, the line between lobbying and improper influence can easily become blurred. So far, in addition to well-established and mainly effective parliamentary procedures, a strong and largely independent media has helped ensure that the UK retains sufficient scrutiny of the political process for it to be difficult to ‘buy’ policy. But there is no room for complacency.

Professor Paul M Heywood

Politics academics all ignorant lefties

"I’m sceptical about much election forecasting...but I confidently acquit my colleagues of the charge of being groupthinking lefties."

Politicalbetting.com had some fun this week with the results of a poll of politics academics, carried out back in 2006, which showed the vast majority both wanted and expected a Labour victory after the general election. A full 54% of politics academics wanted a Labour victory, compared to just 15% who wanted a Conservative win. Ditto their predictions for what the Commons would look like after the election: 53% expected a Labour victory, just 18% thought a Conservative victory was likely. And an overwhelming 80% thought Gordon Brown was the best chancellor of the post-war era. Given both this overwhelming Labour bias, and what currently look like very inaccurate predictions, why should we believe the academic election forecasts reported here a few days ago?

The problem is that we’re not comparing like with like. Politics, as a discipline, is extremely broad, a point we make repeatedly to students wanting to study it at university. At Nottingham, for example, our third year students can take modules from a list of about 30, covering everything from intervention in Africa to war and massacre, from the politics of science fiction to Middle Eastern politics, and from political utopianism to Russian security policy, as well as modules looking at parliamentary politics or the politics of public opinion.

The much-ridiculed survey was of members of the Political Studies Association, a group which represents that broad church. The result is that when the PSA does surveys of its members on things like this it often gets silly results, which is why I wish they wouldn’t, and have argued before – in an article that didn’t win me any friends – that they make us all look pretty stupid.

But the recent political forecasts didn’t come from all politics academics; they came from a very specialised group of election experts. Plenty of these aren’t in the PSA anyway (many of those presenting papers at the Manchester conference are not even UK academics). So, in short, those who did the forecasting are not all PSA members, and not all PSA members are election experts. I wouldn’t necessarily trust this lot’s views on political philosophy (nor they mine), but I do trust their knowledge when it comes to elections.

As for political bias, well, there’s no doubt that academics are on the whole left-of-centre. I was once told that academics used to be much more representative of the rest of the population, until the public sector/private sector voting cleavage became so prominent in the 1980s, although I’ve seen no evidence of that. For what it’s worth, I suspect – although again with no evidence – that the elections experts are not as left-of-centre as academia in general. But more importantly, where’s the evidence that any bias, if it exists, has impacted on the various voting forecasts? Anyone who studies the papers presented at the recent conference – or any similar work – will see that these are pretty hard headed models, into which the data go, and out of which the results flow. It’s really not clear where the bias is supposed to be.

As the original post pointed out, I’m sceptical about much election forecasting (as is my colleague Cees van der Eijk, who wrote an excellent short article for the British Journal of Politics and International Relations setting out his doubts), but I confidently acquit my colleagues of the charge of being groupthinking lefties.

They might well still be wrong, but if they are, we will be able to judge their models against the result, and say why. And it won’t be because of any bias.

Professor Philip Cowley

Selling England by the Pound?

The government is understandably furious about the maladroit claims made to undercover reporters by former transport minister, Stephen Byers, that he was ‘a bit like a sort of cab for hire’, able to influence serving ministers for a small matter of £3,000 to £5,000 per day. Alongside similar claims made by his former ministerial colleagues, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, such suggestions of being able to help shape or sway policy decisions in return for private payments strike at the very heart of the accountability upon which the democratic process depends.
Many commentators have pointed out the UK still lacks effective regulation of political lobbying, despite a series of scandals reaching back over many years – from the ‘cash for questions’ scandal of 1994 (when it was claimed that the lobbyist Ian Greer told Mohamed Al-Fayed that ‘you rent an MP like you rent a taxi’) to the ‘Ecclestone’ affair of 1997 (when, supposedly in return for a £1m donation to the Labour Party, later ignominiously returned, Formula One was exempted from a ban on tobacco advertising) and the ‘cash for honours’ investigations of 2006-07 (which explored the alleged link between political donations and life peerages).

The standard interpretation of such scandals is that they undermine public confidence in politicians and the political process. And they do. Evidence from a recent Eurobarometer survey (2009) shows that that a strikingly high proportion of EU citizens (78 per cent average across the EU27) see corruption as a ‘major problem’ in their country. In just three countries (Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark) did fewer than half the respondents agree. The UK figure stood at 74 per cent, with just 22 per cent disagreeing, compared to 65 per cent and 28 per cent respectively just two years earlier – the fourth highest increase in the EU over that period. Those seen as most likely to be corrupt were politicians at national level, followed by officials awarding public tenders and those issuing building permits, then politicians at regional level. The parliamentary expenses scandals appears to have had a clear impact, with the number believing that there is corruption at national level in the UK jumping from 44 per cent in 2007 to 62 per cent in 2009.

In practice, according to the 2009 survey, just 9 per cent of respondents across the EU27 had themselves been directly exposed to any form of corrupt activity over the previous twelve months, and in the UK that figure was just 3 per cent (the second lowest of any country). But impressions about corruption are garnered from news stories of precisely the kind we have seen over the last few days, and from the righteous outrage they give rise to amongst reporters and political commentators.

So there is a very widespread belief that corruption is rife, and it is to be found in particular amongst politicians. Does this really matter? At one level, it could be argued that concern about corruption and its consequences is generally overplayed. The received wisdom is that reports of corrupt behaviour erodes confidence in political institutions and in the political class, leading to citizen disengagement from politics. And yet there is some counter evidence. In many established democracies, the long term decline in voter turnout at elections witnessed since the early 1960s appears to have either slowed or even reversed since around 2000. And in Italy, where corruption has long been seen as virtually the stock-in-trade of the political process, Silvio Berlusconi still enjoys an approval rating of over 40 per cent in spite of being almost permanently mired in scandal and facing street protests involving tens of thousands of citizens. One explanation may be that most Italian voters have already discounted corruption: they are so used to it that it no longer registers as a significant factor in their assessment of the political class. It seems that the greater the number of scandals over time, the less impact they have. We may simply be getting used to the idea of our politicians being involved in shady business; whether it affects how we vote is another question.


Paul M Heywood

Public meetings can be fun

The decline of the public meeting is one of the staples of any discussion about changing electoral tactics. David Butler’s study of the 1951 election found a full 30% of the public claiming to have gone to at least one public meeting; by the 1966 election, an NOP poll found the figure had declined to just 4%. Public meetings organised by the parties have now died out almost completely. Yet cross-party meetings – with the various candidates on display, showing their wares – still occasionally continue, and when they happen they can be both fun and informative.

Last night saw the five known candidates for Nottingham South singing for their supper at the University’s conference centre, in a debate organised by the Students Union and the Politics Society. It attracted about 250 students, who enjoyed a good 90 minutes of lively debate between the candidates.

There has been a Nottingham South constituency, in some form, almost continuously since 1885 – and in that time it’s been represented by Liberals, Conservatives, and Labour MPs. Of the three Nottingham seats, it’s by far the most marginal, and boundary changes since the last election have make it slightly more marginal still, as has the decision of the incumbent MP, Alan Simpson, to stand down.

It’s the constituency in which (most of) the University of Nottingham sits, and in which (most of) its students live. It’s appropriate that one of the candidates, standing for the Greens, is a Nottingham student, since one of the things that marks Nottingham South out is its high student population – just under 1 in 4 of the population of the seat are in full-time education, and part of the point of the debate was to raise student awareness of their voting power, as part of the campaign against higher fees.

Students’ rarely exercise as much voting power as they could. Most are 18-21, the group with the lowest turnout in the electorate. And although there are constituencies containing large numbers of students, their votes are often spread between those seats and the constituencies from which they have originally come, and where many remain registered, which diminishes their collective impact. Yet the student vote can still matter, if organised properly, and given the right issues – as Labour MPs at the last election found to their cost in Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff and Sheffield. The Labour candidate in Nottingham South has clearly been paying attention – witness her public pledge, repeated last night, to vote against any rise in student top-up fees, should the government go down that route after the election. Under questioning, similar pledges to support the students’ campaign were made by the Lib Dem and Green candidates, whilst the Conservative said that she’d examine the details of the campaign.

Professor Philip Cowley

A step backwards with new MPs, says Ken Clarke

Whenever he comes to speak at the University – and as one of our local MPs he’s a frequent visitor – Ken Clarke always packs the room out. Students always turn up in droves to hear him speak, despite the fact that it’s now over a decade since he was in government, when most of them were still at junior school.



In this podcast, recorded just after a recent visit to the University, he talks about the state of Parliament and his hopes for reform. The current parliament, he says, has ‘disgraced itself’; in fact he claims it hasn’t really returned properly since the Christmas break, shell-shocked MPs just staying away and waiting for the election to end their collective suffering.
He’s hopeful about the prospects for reform under an incoming Conservative government, as you’d expect. But he notes two things that might make reform less likely.

The first is all those new MPs. As also previously argued on this blog, Clarke argues that the large influx of new MPs could be ‘somewhat compliant’, more easily controlled by the whips, and those who are keen on reform can ‘get the wrong end of the stick’. He worries they could ‘take us a step backwards’.

He also fears that David Cameron will face ‘all the usual pressures’ to retain executive power. Clarke says that he will stress that a Cameron government will make fewer mistakes if it is properly accountable, and he is hopeful that Cameron will heed his warning.

At this point, those of us who study Parliament experience a bout of déjà vu. For when Labour came to power in 1997, Ann Taylor had made similar pledges about what an incoming government would do to reform the Commons. ‘Awkward though it may appear to a few on our side’, she argued, ‘a more accountable government is a better government’. Yet whilst Labour certainly carried out significant reform of the Commons, it was much harder to identify reforms that had actually strengthened the power of the institution. Too many of the ‘modernisation’ reforms were cosmetic, or for the convenience of government or Members, and significant forces in the government resisted attempts to beef up the Commons. It was only when Robin Cook became leader of the House in 2001 that attention shifted to trying to strengthen the Commons, and even a politician as skilful as Cook often failed to get his way.


Professor Philip Cowley

Why the environment is an electoral non-issue

Ask people if they think the environment is an important issue, and they will tell you that it certainly is. A ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of concern about global warming is reported by 67% of the British public respondents in the UK, and 84% of car drivers are ‘very’, or ‘fairly’, concerned about the effect of transport on climate change (indeed drivers show a higher level of concern for the effect of transport on climate change than non-drivers).

But ask people if they are willing to pay for environmental improvements and that support tends to disappear. Whilst 84% of those car drivers were concerned, only 18% were willing to pay higher taxes on their car for the sake of the environment. In another recent survey, of those airline passengers who were ‘concerned’ about the environmental impact of flying, only 14% held passengers mainly responsible for its effects. As Iain McLean of Oxford University has put it, the ‘feeling that something must be done is disconnected from feeling in favour of doing anything.’

This disconnection is a problem for politicians in democracies. If the electorate report high levels of concern, then this is an issue about which ‘something must be done’. But if there is no desire on the part of the electorate to actually do anything about it themselves (which there isn’t), and if this is understood by politicians (which it is), then we can expect this high-flown rhetoric to be accompanied by policies that make long-term promises but which leave the status quo intact in the short-term.

This disconnection has also led some to suggest that the environment is now an arena for political ‘simulation’, where electorates ‘demand’ environmental action, but where such demands are not intended to be taken seriously, being a mere performance or simulation of ‘real’ politics. Woe betide any politician who takes such demands seriously and seeks to act upon them. In policy terms, this means that it’s acceptable to promise carbon cuts in fifty years time, but not to apply the fuel duty escalator today. One way to explain this simulation is that environmental politics is particularly prone to what Bryan Caplan, an American economist, has called ‘rational irrationality’. Individuals can make no difference to the outcomes of environmental problems, and so have no reason to get good information about them (they are rationally ignorant). Furthermore they can believe what they prefer to believe without any cost. One can be a global warming alarmist or a climate change denier, on the basis of no good reason whatsoever; it costs you nothing as an individual and so you can just believe whatever you prefer (that’s rational irrationality). When, however, you are faced with the prospect of altering your travel habits or paying more tax, the potential costs of your preferred beliefs are revealed to you and you may sing a different tune.

So despite general agreement on how important it is, don’t expect the environment to figure as a key issue in this general election. This is not just because the party leaderships agree on the importance of environmental matters – they also agree on the benefits of economic growth, but they will fight like ferrets in a sack over who can deliver it best. It is also because of the intractability of both (a) satisfying the demand that ‘something must be done’ and (b) satisfying that demand in a way that appears to cost nothing to anyone right now. It is much better to make a few vague long-term commitments and go back to education, education, education.

For more on this, see here

Dr Mathew Humphrey