Financing UK democracy: A stocktake of 20 years of political donations

Mirko Draca, Colin Green () and Swarnodeep Homroy
Additional contact information
Mirko Draca: University of Warwick, Department of Economics & CAGE
Swarnodeep Homroy: University of Groningen, Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Political donations in the UK have been subject to comprehensive disclosure since 2001. We study the data produced as part of this disclosure policy to evaluate the role of private and public political finance over time. Total political donations have grown by nearly 250% since 2001, reaching over £100 million in real terms for the first time in 2019. This increase has been driven by donations from private individuals, who now account for approximately 60% of donations in election years compared to 40-50% up to the late 2010s. Furthermore, ‘superdonors’ (those contributing more than £100,000) have been a prominent driver of the rise, increasing their own share from approximately 31% in 2017 to 45% in 2019. We also show that private donations to Labour fell sharply in the final stages of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Overall, these trends have benefited the Conservative Party, leading to an historic resource gap between the two main parties emerging circa 2019. We calculate that the ‘resource gap’ between parties now stands at approximately £27 million compared to an historic average of £8-10 million (even when taking account of publicly-funded ‘Short’ money provided to the Opposition).

Keywords: Political Connections; Political Donations JEL Codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp642.2022.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Financing UK democracy: A stocktake of 20 years of political donations (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:642

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().