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 dataset 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 (a) MPs’ final-term intra-/extra-parliamentary work balance, and (b) 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.