IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ulb/ulbeco/2013-273645.html

Outside Earnings, Electoral Systems and Legislative Effort in the European Parliament

Author

Listed:
  • Christian Staat
  • Colin C.R. Kuehnhanss

Abstract

Parliamentarians are often allowed to pursue other work in addition to their mandate. Using data on the 7th European Parliament (2009–14), we analyze the relationship between the outside earnings of its Members (MEPs) and their parliamentary activities. The supranational nature of the European Parliament thereby allows a novel analysis of ‘moonlighting’ free of country-specific bias. We find outside earnings to be negatively correlated with the particularly work-intensive production of draft reports and opinions. Utilizing the considerable freedom of Member States in organizing elections, we find this relationship to be dependent on the electoral system under which MEPs are elected. While the effect of the trade-off between outside and parliamentary work is predominantly negative in all other systems, outside earnings of MEPs from centralized but candidate-focused systems correlate positively with their productivity, indicating a possible benefit from selection effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian Staat & Colin C.R. Kuehnhanss, 2017. "Outside Earnings, Electoral Systems and Legislative Effort in the European Parliament," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/273645, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    • Handle: RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/273645
    Note: SCOPUS: ar.j
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Auerbach, Jan, 2022. "Productive Office and Political Elitism," MPRA Paper 114582, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Nastassia Leszczynska, 2017. "Double Hat Politicians: Political Moonlighting in Wallonia," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2017-43, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    3. Martijn Huysmans & Niels Gheyle, 2023. "Regional representation in the European Parliament: Parliamentary Questions on Geographical Indication," Working Papers 2309, Utrecht School of Economics.
    4. Gründler, Klaus & Potrafke, Niklas & Wochner, Timo, 2025. "Outside employment and parliamentary priorities," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 237(C).
    5. Wochner, Timo, 2022. "Part-time parliamentarians? Evidence from outside earnings and parliamentary activities," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    6. Gavoille, Nicolas, 2018. "Who are the ‘ghost’ MPs? Evidence from the French parliament," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 134-148.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/273645. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benoit Pauwels (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecsulbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.