Do individual disclosure rules for parliamentarian

Authors: Anne van Aaken Stefan Voigt

Publish Date: 2011/08/02

Volume: 12, Issue: 4, Pages: 301-

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Abstract

The pros and cons of stricter disclosure rules for parliamentarians are hotly debated Some argue that disclosure rules for parliamentarians increase transparency of the legislative branch leading to lower levels of rentseeking and corruption increased citizen trust in parliament and better quality of lawmaking Others argue that disclosure rules endanger the privacy of parliamentarians that their introduction would stop businesspeople and lawyers from running for seats which would decrease the quality of lawmaking This is the first attempt to empirically test these conjectures on the composition of parliament empirically We find that the introduction of disclosure rules is usually not accompanied by a significant shift in the proportion of lawyers and businesspeople in parliamentThe authors thank Oliver Budzinski Matthias Dauner Leonie Guder Tobias Karzel Malwina Novakowska Fabienne Ochsner Rekha Oleschak SangMin Park Janina Satzer Michael Seebauer and Jil Schwieger for help and Simeon Djankov for making the Worldbank data available to us as well as two anonymous referees for very helpful comments An early version of the paper was presented at the annual meeting of the European Association of Law and Economics in Copenhagen 2007

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