THE COST OF ONE-PARTY COUNCILS: LACK OF ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND PUBLIC PROCUREMENT

The persistence of uncontested seats and one-party dominated councils at the local level is a cause for concern across England in terms of quality of public services, value for money, and government responsiveness to citizen needs. One particular high-risk area is the integrity of government contracting when controls of corruption are weak. Hence, this report investigates the impact of weak electoral accountability on corruption in public pro-curement, explored at the local level in England. It uses administrative data on electoral outcomes as well as on public procurement tendering procedures from 2009-2013. It employs an innovative measure of corruption risks in public procurement capturing a set of ‘red flags ’ signalling the likely steering of government contracts to a favoured bidder. Based on the comparison of matching contracts, the findings suggest that weak elector-al accountability may lead to substantially higher corruption risks and lower price savings in English local councils. Councils of weak electoral accountability are roughly 50% higher corruption risk than their competitive counterparts which also coincides with foregone savings of 1-4 % of contract value. The foregone savings by councils with weak electoral accountability roughly amount to 2.6 billion GBP annually. Due to incomplete data and methodological challenges, further work is needed to establish the full causal effect of weak electoral accountability on procurement corruption risks