Voters’ understanding of electoral spending: evaluating UK transparency mechanisms

Transparency is core to the principle of electoral oversight and can provide information that informs voters’ experience of elections. Information disclosure is designed to allow voters, the media, academics, and civil society to hold political actors to account. However, in the context of evolving campaign practice, the effectiveness of transparency mechanisms needs to be consistently scrutinised (Electoral Commission, 2018). In this paper, we examine a lauded system of electoral transparency–the UK’s electoral finance regime (Power, 2020)–and evaluate its effectiveness. Analyzing a unique dataset of 22,720 separate items of expenditure and 5770 invoices recording campaign spending at the 2019 UK general election, we review the sufficiency of the process and content of existing transparency disclosures. Our findings show significant deficits in the system of electoral transparency. We find that UK parties are not reporting data consistently, meaning that invoices are regularly uninformative, and that existing reporting categories are unable to capture the full spectrum of electoral activity. These findings are significant for understanding the requirements of an effective disclosure regime, and suggest that existing disclosures could be enhanced to inform voters and enrich voter experience.