[Confidence: Fairly low, and given the amount of literature, also sceptical of anyone who is particularly confident on this question] If you follow British politics, you already know about the details of MPs earning vast sums of money from second jobs that has been dominating the headlines in the past week (few weeks?). I won’t bore you by repeating the details: Owen Paterson, Geoffrey Cox, you know the score. The second jobs scandal has prompted a second debate (one that seems to happen maybe once a year or once every two years on Twitter): should MPs be paid more? There are two distinct arguments here: the first argument is that MPs who are paid more are less likely to take second jobs that distract from their work as an MP, or that lead them to behave badly as an MP (promoting the interests of the company they work for a la Owen Paterson). The second argument is that MPs who are paid more will generally be higher quality MPs - both through selection effects (you get better candidates if you pay more money) and because better paid MPs might work harder. To cover both of these arguments is probably too much for one post, so I’m just going to focus on the argument about higher quality MPs for now, rather than MPs who take second jobs (even though it is less relevant to the news cycle at the moment).
What I'd really like to see is a study of is the effect of the salaries of the *staff* of legislators...
Very interesting article. One error snuck in tho:
with the dotted line showing MPs who did not receive the pay increase and the solid line showing MPs who did not,
The solid line (I assume) should not be negated.