MPs Expenses and safe seats - is it happening again?

When I did my blogposts back in 2009 that found an apparent link between the safety of an MPs seat and the likelihood of them having been involved in the expenses scandal of that year it caused a bit of a stir. It got a fair bit of coverage and there were some who thought (hoped?) it might make a difference to the campaign for electoral reform.

There were however numerous people who dismissed what I had found claiming it was not statistically significant and/or there were problems with the methodology I used.

I never claimed to be a statistician (although my work was reviewed by someone who is better qualified on that score than me and he certainly thought there was something in it) but I did think it was striking when split into quartiles how the safer an MP's seat, the higher their apparent chances of being involved in the scandal.

Obviously the fuss from the original research has long since died down and I hope I have proved in the intervening years that I am not some sort of safe seat correlation obsessed one trick pony but when the latest expenses scandal broke I couldn't help but wonder if I was to apply my original analysis to it whether we would see anything different. I actually expected that we would not see the same sort of thing, after all this is a quite significantly changed parliament and as various people were queueing up to tell me before, my original findings apparently were just coincidental.

So surely this time around we would find no link? Certainly not a similar shaped graph to last time anyway?

Well I only have 14 names out of the 27 supposed transgressors so far but....

Er....

Update to MP expenses scandal and safe seats correlation

Further to my previous posts from a week and a half ago here and here which looked at the MPs who had been implicated in the expenses scandal by the Telegraph and seemed to find a correlation between the safety of the seat the MP held and the likelihood of being involved, I have gone through the data again using the latest available list from the Telegraph. The link to this is here although it changes daily and may well be out of date by the time you read this (although I have saved it locally myself). The source data about the MPs is from the 2005 election and from Keele University here.

The last time I did the work a week and a half ago only 94 MPs had been implicated. As of today there are 243 so there is more data to work with.

I have posted the results below but first I just want to again caveat all of this. I am not a statistician and I know that we don't have all the data yet. If you read through the comments on the previous threads you will see some people say that there are problems with the approach or method and that things like confounding variables are not taken account of. There are also some comments from people who think the approach is OK. I accept that my approach is fairly blunt and is by no means to final word, however I have had a number of queries from people asking if I have done an updated version of this as the previous one is now well out of date, hence the new post.

Right, here are the results:

The median number is now 287.7. It has drifted back towards the median from 262.4 previously.

The graph now looks like this:

There is still an increase in each quartile but it is less pronounced than previously. There is still quite a stark difference though between the bottom and the top quartile with the top having almost twice as many as the bottom and now with more source data to work from.

One of the objections previously was that the Telegraph were bound to focus on the most newsworthy MPs first, but almost 3 weeks on that effect must surely have dissipated as they ran out of newsworthy ones. I certainly found myself doing this update wondering who a lot of the newly added MPs are. I hadn't heard of lots of them!

Right, I think this is the last time I will post on this now. I think I have found an interesting effect albeit with potential problems. I have had a few e-mails from people asking for the source data and I will respond to these soon but with this latest data (I held off responding because it was quite out of date by the time the requests started). Anyone else who wants it, please e-mail me at the e-mail address at the top. I would like to see others take this forward and also for someone to come up with a decent way of analysing this effect once all the data had been released. I will be interested to see what other people can find about this.

Independent on Sunday - safe seats and expenses scandal correlation - 2 mentions

The only papers we get delivered here are the Independent on Saturday and Sunday (I read the rest online).

Having gone through the IOS this morning I was very pleasantly surprised to see two references to the correlation I seemed to have uncovered between the safety of an MP's seat and the likelihood of having been involved in the expenses scandal which I detailed here.

The first is in a piece entitled "Politics: The only way is up" where thay have asked various of the great and the good to give their views on what needs to change. One of the questions asked is "Would electoral reform improve perceptions of MPs' probity?" and Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert and Professor of Government at Oxford replied:

Yes. Many of the worst abuses have been committed by MPs in safe seats. Primary elections would ensure that MPs were chosen by a wider group than the small unrepresentative cliques who often now act as an electoral college. In the long run, the single transferable vote method of PR would give every elector the chance to combine a vote in a general election with a vote in a primary election.

He is clearly referring to my apparent findings at the start of his answer and using it as part of an argument for moving to Single Transferable Vote exactly as I did.

The second reference is in regular commentator John Rentoul's comment piece entitled "If Esther's the answer, the question is wrong". In it he argues that having lots of independent MP's in parliament after the next election would not solve the problems and investigates other potential ways to improve things. A paragraph towards the end says:

Some of these ideas are good. Some of them even appear to be connected to the expenses issue. It would seem, for example, that MPs in safe seats have been more likely to make questionable claims than those in marginals. But is electoral reform the answer? It is claimed that voters in multi-member constituencies can choose between candidates of their preferred party. So they can, but has that made Irish politics spotless? And if we had fewer MPs, that would just mean The Daily Telegraph ran the story for 14 days instead of 16.

So he uses my apparent findings but then questions if electoral reform is the answer. I think the answer is yes but at least the debate is happening now! As I already blogged, Ben Bradshaw quoted my research in an answer on BBC Question Time on Thursday.

This proper debate is exactly what I had hoped for and it is nice to see my work contributing to it in some small way. I will certainly keep blogging about reform and I hope others will too, both for and against. It is the first time I can remember proper reform being debated so widely. My findings are still preliminary but I think they speak to a wider feeling that there is something very wrong with our current system and things need to change radically if politics is to once again properly engage people in this country.

Mark Thompson - "More or Less" safe seats expenses analysis

Well I have just listened to my interview on "More of Less". I thought I came across OK.

They cut loads of what I said out including me mentioning the name of the blog so I thought I would post this entry so anyone searching for Mark Thompson in Google Blog Search or coupled with More or Less will have a chance of finding me (and not as Tim actually mentioned get only results about the director general of the BBC)!

The relevant post pertaining to what I talked about on the programme is here.

If you were listening, please let me know what you think and if you missed it is broadcast again on Sunday at 8:30pm.

I will do a fuller post about my experience going on national radio for the first time soon.

I'm going to be on Radio 4's "More or Less" this Friday!

I have just been called by Radio 4's "More or Less" presented by Tim Harford and they have asked me to be a guest on this week's programme! They want to talk to me about the story I broke recently about the apparent correlation between how safe an MP's seat is and the likelihood of them being implicated in the expenses scandal that I posted about here and here.

As the programme is about numbers, they want to focus mainly on the numbers and maths behind what I discovered. It is being recorded tomorrow and will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 1:30pm in the afternoon this Friday 22nd May.

So if you want to hear what I sound like then please tune in to hear me or listen again/podcast it.

Right, I'm off to phone my mum!

UPDATE: I've just discovered that it is repeated on Sunday at 8:00pm too.