Many Unexploited Opportunities to Penalise Rule-Breaking MPs - Legislative Conduct Accountability at Westminster from 1995 to 2019

This thesis explores to what extent MPs in Britain were punished for breaching parliamentary rules between 1995 and 2019. It first develops an original conceptual framework for analysing three distinct ‘faces’ of legislative conduct accountability: the institutional, the party and the electoral faces and suggests that there are various opportunities to punish rule-breaking MPs within each face. Using Britain as a case study, the thesis then examines what types and how many ethics violations have occurred in the House of Commons since it established a formal Code of Conduct, what characteristics have affected MPs’ propensity to breach parliamentary rules, and the extent to which existing opportunities to penalise rule-breaking MPs have been exploited in each of the three faces. Documentary analysis illustrates that the most common types of ethics violations were failures to register relevant interests, improper private gain from official resources, and failures to declare relevant interests. While less than one-tenth of all MPs who served in the Commons between 1995 and 2019 committed ethics violations, regression analysis shows that male MPs displayed a higher propensity to do so than female MPs. MPs who first entered Parliament at an older age were also less likely to violate the Commons’ Code. Most importantly, descriptive and regression analyses based on aggregate constituency-level data suggest that despite tremendous efforts at the institutional level to monitor, investigate and penalise rule-breaking MPs, the opportunities to impose penalties particularly at the party and electoral level are far from being fully utilised. Thus, in the coming years it may be especially important to focus on intra-party reforms, such as ethics bodies or binding ethical guidelines, and electoral reforms, such as increasing the competitiveness in constituencies, instead of adhering to the idea that additional institutional regulations are required to combat legislative misconduct.