The ‘Joyce Affair’ changed party funding in Britain forever, and possibly also our understanding of how reform occurs

On the evening of February 22nd 2012, there was a fracas in the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons involving Falkirk MP Eric Joyce, who was suspended by the Labour party and announced that he would be standing down at the 2015 General Election. The subsequent Labour selection process was dogged with accusations of corruption and vote rigging by Unite. The Collins Review, set up in Falkirk’s wake, introduced an agreement that union members would opt-in to paying the political levy. But to what extent can we understand this as a pivotal moment in the financing of politics

The funding of politics in Great Britain – an issue transformed

Political party financing may not regularly hit the headlines in the UK, especially in the wake of Brexit and the more pressing concerns politicians appear to face, but, Sam Power argues here, it is an issue that will not go away any time soon. Drawing on recent research, he explores recent changes in how party financing has evolved

Why a World Series win for Cleveland tonight could help tip a swing state to Hillary Clinton

Tonight, the Chicago Cubs face the Cleveland Indians at the latter’s home ground in Ohio. Taking into account studies which suggest that sports victories can help incumbent candidates to win re-election, Sam Power writes that the outcome of the game could help tilt which way the Buckeye State votes – and therefore the entire presidential election

The London Anti-Corruption Summit: one good day is not enough

Issues of financial secrecy took centre-stage at the anti-corruption summit in London on 12 May. Sam Power reviews the progress made, arguing that the summit was a small step in the right direction, but by no means the dawn of a new era. With the limelight on the anti-corruption talks already fading away, the summit’s success will ultimately depend on the process for translating reforms into action

The transparency paradox: why transparency alone will not improve campaign regulations

The role of new sources of data has become of increasing interest to those involved in political campaigning and a legislative focus of policy makers and regulators. Utilising Karl‐Heinz Nassmacher’s ‘magic quadrangle’ of ‘accounting, practicality, sanctions and transparency’ and a case study of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 this article unpicks how successful the ‘guiding philosophy’ of transparency was in delivering increased citizen confidence in the democratic process. I ultimately argue that at the heart of all discussions about what regulation in this area should look like, an uncomfortable paradox has to be accepted: that transparency may well help to quell actual instances of malfeasance and the misuse of data, but may at the same time increase citizen distrust in democratic processes. Any regulation should consider the ways in which transparency might be implemented such that it better supports the stated legislative aims

Party funding regimes and corruption in Western Europe: a comparative study of Great Britain and Denmark

There is an almost Europewide trend that party funding regime change - or proposed regime change - manifests itself in a move from private to public subsidisation. There are a number of drivers that have been identified as a reason for this such as institutional proximity to other states enacting reform, explicit financial/electoral strategy and wider party organisational change. In recent years, however, it has generally been accepted that corruption is an increasingly important variable in explaining this change. In this sense the change from a system of private funding to state subsidisation is seen as a remedy against corrupt practice. As an almost necessarily less corrupt form of party financing. Research shows that the empirical evidence on this is both patchy and unclear. This thesis considers whether different types of corruption are prevalent in differenttypes of party funding regime (i.e. those that are predominantly privately financed and those that are predominantly state financed). The analysis utilises the elite interview, extensive documentary research and operationalises the logic of appropriateness to answer the central research question: does the amount of state subsidisation in a country have an effect on the type of corruption? Drawing on evidence from a comparison of Great Britain and Denmark, this thesis argues that the level of state subsidy is, in fact, unrelated to the type of corruption that we find, perceived or otherwise. Thus, if subsidies are to be introduced or sustained they must be done so for other reasons - they are not a cure for corruption, or importantly, perceived corruption. They can, however, be justified on public utility grounds. Anti-corruption measures should focus on other regulations, but even then we should not expect such measures to impact on perceptions of corruption

The financial health of British political parties: what the latest data tells us

New data by the Electoral Commission on party funding shows, among other things, that Labour raised a record-breaking £16m in a year through membership fees alone, while the Conservatives received more money from bequests than from living members. Sam Power explains what these figures tell us about the state of play in UK party politics, and how they compare with previous years

Comparison of Markov chains via weak Poincaré inequalities with application to pseudo-marginal MCMC

We investigate the use of a certain class of functional inequalities known as weak Poincaré inequalities to bound convergence of Markov chains to equilibrium. We show that this enables the straightforward and transparent derivation of subgeometric convergence bounds for methods such as the Independent Metropolis--Hastings sampler and pseudo-marginal methods for intractable likelihoods, the latter being subgeometric in many practical settings. These results rely on novel quantitative comparison theorems between Markov chains. Associated proofs are simpler than those relying on drift/minorization conditions and the tools developed allow us to recover and further extend known results as particular cases. We are then able to provide new insights into the practical use of pseudo-marginal algorithms, analyse the effect of averaging in Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and the use of products of independent averages, and also to study the case of lognormal weights relevant to particle marginal Metropolis--Hastings (PMMH)

Explicit convergence bounds for Metropolis Markov chains: isoperimetry, spectral gaps and profiles

We derive the first explicit bounds for the spectral gap of a random walk Metropolis algorithm on $R^d$ for any value of the proposal variance, which when scaled appropriately recovers the correct $d^{-1}$ dependence on dimension for suitably regular invariant distributions. We also obtain explicit bounds on the ${\rm L}^2$-mixing time for a broad class of models. In obtaining these results, we refine the use of isoperimetric profile inequalities to obtain conductance profile bounds, which also enable the derivation of explicit bounds in a much broader class of models. We also obtain similar results for the preconditioned Crank--Nicolson Markov chain, obtaining dimension-independent bounds under suitable assumptions