The electoral system and the expenses scandal correlation - Legg update

This post is co-written by me and Will Straw, editor of Left Foot Forward.

Last May, Mark did a series of blogposts which analysed the data from the expenses scandal and suggested that there could be a link between the first-past-the-post electoral system and the likelihood of an MP being involved in the scandal. New evidence from the Legg report suggests this is the case.

As the graph below shows, the average majority of the worst offenders is higher than that of those expenses-sinners who wrongly claimed smaller amounts.

Mark’s first post was published on May 17 at which point The Telegraph had named 74 MPs. The second post (an update to the first one) was published the next day and the number of MPs implicated was 94. The methodology used was that if an MP had been mentioned negatively at all in The Telegraph’s coverage with relation to expenses then a 1 was put next to their name otherwise there was a 0. The groups of MPs were then split up into quartiles ordered by how safe their seat was. The initial analysis suggested that MPs in the safest seats were 3 times as likely to have been implicated in the scandal as those in the least safe. A further update a week or so later by which point the number of MPs implicated had almost quadrupled to 243 suggested that the figure had come down to a bit less than 2 times as likely.

With the release of the Legg report yesterday – possibly the most definitive word we will get on the scandal – we decided to have another look at this situation and whether there still seems to be a link. The main problem is that more than half of all MPs are implicated in the scandal. There is also a disparity between the lowest erroneous claims, from Mike Gapes in Ilford who was asked to pay back 40p, and some MPs who are paying back £30,000 to £40,000. For this reason, and given all the data we now have, the original methodology seemed a bit blunt. Using Mark’s original analysis, there is still an observable effect but it is now very small (there are 87 MPs in both the safest and second safest quartiles, 74 in the third and 80 in the safest) as the Chart below shows.

In the original Telegraph data it was not possible to be robust about the amount of money MPs were going to have to pay back. This is because the amounts were not always listed or were disputed. Now, however, we have all the amounts down to the very last penny.

We thought about introducing a cut-off point to isolate the worst expenses excesses. If you take only those MPs who claimed £5,000 or more then the ratio of 2-1 between the highest and lowest quartile is still there (the figures are 21 MPs from the safest quartile, 13 in the second, 11 in the third and 11 in the safest). The selection of the cut-off point though is arbitrary and hence probably not greatly robust.

So in order to try and find a better way to see if the safety of an MP’s seat could be correlated with the amount of expenses money claimed we listed the 328 MPs who (after appeals and adjustments) have been asked to pay money back and ordered them by size of payment. This way we are now taking into account this wide range of difference in amounts paid back and including all the implicated MPs.

We then split this data into quartiles and looked at the average size of the majority for the MPs in each quartile. What we found is that for MPs in the top quartile (including Barbara Follett, Andrew Mackay, and many of the most controversial claims) the average majority is 8,678. In the second quartile the average majority is 7,534. In the third it is 7,705. And in the lowest quartile (including people like Mike Gapes and his 40p) the average majority is 7,276. So there is a fair bit of difference here but there is another point to note. The average size of majority for all 328 MPs implicated is 7,798 (7,613 for all MPs). This means that the top quartile is quite a way above this average (by nearly 1,000 depending on from which point you measure it) and the bottom quartile is a fair way below it (by close to 500). The two middle quartiles are clustered near the average(s).

As with Mark’s original posts, there will likely be debate over what these figures tell us the degree of statistical significance, but we feel that, at the margin, they show that there is a link between the expenses scandal and the size of an MP’s majority. Of those MPs implicated, on average the safer their seat, the more they wrongly claimed.

Credit: Jessica Asato and Bhumi Purohit of Progress for compiling the data.

Also cross-posted here on Left Foot Forward.

UPDATE: For those interested in doing their own statistical analysis, the data is available here.

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.

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.