Thesis Title:
Politics behind the scenes: Legislative Member Organisations in the UK
Thesis Abstract:
Legislative Member Organisations (LMOs) are voluntary organisations within a legislature that are formed of members who share an interest in a particular policy area or theme. LMOs carry out a range of activities and functions and serve a variety of purposes. Ultimately, LMOs are a significant pathway for outside influence and money into politics, represent a significant use of MPs time, and have been subject to scandals that have questioned parliamentary integrity. However, despite this there has only been a small handful of academic studies on LMOs, and notably the only study to include LMOs in the UK is an unpublished PhD thesis.
My research is therefore aimed at addressing this research gap by providing a study of LMOs across the UK’s four legislatures. Consequently, my research will increase scrutiny and transparency around lobbying and the activities of politicians and address broader questions about the quality of the democratic process in the UK.
To achieve this, I will combine publicly available legislative records with a programme of elite interviews. Using web scraping software, I will aggregate publicly available resources from each legislature’s website into more accessible and easily comparable datasets. Once datasets for each legislature are complete, analysis can be made of LMOs within and between legislatures. Elite interviews will then be used to interrogate initial findings, cross-examine existing literature, and identify further avenues of research.
Primary Supervisor:
Dr Daniel Gover