Regulating the Regulators: Parliamentary Discourse on Expenses Scandals and Other Crises in the United Kingdom

This article examines how legislatures debate the regulation of their own members, focusing on parliamentary self-regulation as a form of self-regarding legislation and using the UK expenses scandal of 2009 as a central case. Using automated content analysis, the study investigates thematic patterns in the parliamentary debate of 29 June 2009 and compares them with five additional debates on MPs’ conduct spanning from 1975 to 2021. The analysis identifies six recurrent themes: procedural, institutional, advocacy, legal, ethical, and financial and tests three hypotheses: that procedural and substantive (institutional) themes dominate; that partisanship is limited; and that these thematic structures are robust over time. The findings confirm that procedural and institutional frames consistently shape parliamentary discourse on internal regulation, with little partisan differentiation and surprising thematic stability across decades. The 2009 debate, while emerging from a moment of acute political crisis, reflects a durable pattern of rhetorical self-regulation characterised by cross-party consensus, procedural formalism, and normative appeals to institutional accountability.