"Entitled" Politicians - Lessons in justice from the 2009 UK parliament expense scandal

This paper analyzes politicians’ decisions to abuse or overuse their expense accounts and to retire, through the lens of organizational justice. While standard political science theory would usually attribute behavior to utility maximizing on the basis of politicians being a “bad” or “good” type, this paper paints a more nuanced picture of the reasons behind politicians’ choices. Using three wage votes in the UK parliament in 2008 to indicate MP perception of fairness, the paper analyzes data on expense accounts and retirement decisions from after the UK expense scandal in 2009. The paper advances theory of organizational justice by using a measure of overall justice, consisting of distributive and procedural justice elements. MPs with high and medium levels of perceived injustice had respectively £3240 and £2170 more in their expense accounts, and were 14.5% and 9.5% more likely to retire after the scandal, compared to MPs with low levels of perceived injustice. The paper discusses implications for how to prevent misconduct, by taking into account individual coping and fairness in process and outcome in institutional design on remuneration. It also provides direction for further research.