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Vol.:(0123456789)
British Politics (2020) 15:135–159
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-019-00109-4
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
‘Lordy Me!’ Can donations buy you aBritish peerage?
Astudy inthelink betweenparty political funding
andpeerage nominations, 2005–2014
SimonRadford1· AndrewMell2· SethAlexanderThevoz3
Published online: 14 March 2019
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
Abstract
Trust in political institutions has declined across developed democracies. One of the
main reasons cited for this lack of trust has been the role of money in politics, while
standing up to ‘big money’ has been a common rallying cry of populists of both
left- and right-wing variants. Political scientists have tried to examine the role of
big money in two main steps: firstly, by showing that money can buy access to leg-
islators; and, secondly, that legislators are thereby more responsive to the wishes of
donors when writing and voting on laws. Researchers have used experiments and
other techniques to show that Congressional staffs are more responsive to requests
from donors compared to others and have also shown aggregate trends in respon-
siveness to the preferences of the wealthier. In this paper we try and go one step
further: to show that donors can become legislators. We do this by looking at the
example of the House of Lords. Compiling an original dataset of large donations
and nominations for peerages, the authors show that, when the ‘usual suspects’ for
a position, like former MPs and party workers, are accounted for, donations seem to
play an outsize role in accounting for the remaining peers.
Keywords Party funding· Donations· House of lords· Populism· Money in
politics· British politics· Influence
* Simon Radford
sradford@usc.edu
1 University ofSouthern California, LosAngeles, USA
2 Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, Oxford, UnitedKingdom
3 Nuffield College, Oxford University, Oxford, UnitedKingdom
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