Replication Data for: Politicians’ Private Sector Jobs and Parliamentary Behavior

About 80 percent of democracies allow legislators to be employed in the private sector while they hold office. However, we know little about the consequences of this practice. In this article, I use newly assembled panel data of all members of the UK House of Commons and a difference-in-differences design to investigate how legislators change their parliamentary behavior when they have outside earnings. When holding a private sector job, members of the governing Conservative Party, who earn the vast majority of outside income, change whether and how they vote on the floor of parliament as well as increase the number of written parliamentary questions they ask by 60 percent. For the latter, I demonstrate a targeted pattern which suggests that the increase relates to their employment. The article thus shows that one of the most common, and yet least studied, forms of money in politics affects politicians’ parliamentary behavior.约八成民主国家允许议员在履职期间于私营部门任职。然而，学界对这一做法所产生的影响知之甚少。本文依托新汇编的英国下议院全体议员面板数据，采用双重差分法（difference-in-differences）设计，探究议员在获得额外收入时其议会履职行为的变化。作为占据绝大多数额外收入来源的执政党保守党议员，在兼任私营部门职务时，其不仅会改变在议会会场的投票意向与投票方式，还会将提交书面议会质询的数量提升60%。针对质询数量增长这一结果，本文揭示了一种具有针对性的模式，表明该增长与其私营部门任职存在关联。综上，本文证实了政治领域中最普遍却最少被研究的一类收入形式之一，会对政客的议会履职行为产生影响。