Private benefits, public vices: Railways and logrolling in the 19th century British Parliament

a column by Rui Esteves and Gabriel Geisler Mesevage for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The social costs of corruption in government have made policies to reduce it a priority. This column uses the example of the expansion of the British rail network in the 1840s to show that conflict-of-interest rules and transparency requirements are insufficient to prevent corruption. Faced with a major administrative reform to insulate the provision of public infrastructure from private interests, MPs traded votes to ensure their interests prevailed.

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