The politics of procedural choice: regulating legislative debate in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

All democratic organisations operate under a particular set of rules. Such procedures are implemented by the very individuals that create and maintain them, usually under a majority voting rule. This research project engages with the question of why and how members of parliament "abdicate" procedural power, focusing on the evolution of the rules of debate in the UK House of Commons. Working from newly collected data on the reform of Standing Orders of the House spanning 205 years (1811–2015), as well as records of over six million speeches, it provides a new perspective on procedural choice. Framing debate as a platform for speech-as-filibuster behaviour, I develop a formal model where the decision to support an anti-dilatory reform is primarily a function of polarisation. I show that legislators adopt restrictive rules when they are more likely to share policy preferences with colleagues within their party. The presence of shared views, then, motivates MPs to prioritise responsible use of the common resource of plenary time over individual policy influence. Both empirically and theoretically, my research offers new insights into the process of parliamentary reform in the absence of party discipline, and studies how the dynamics of procedural choice change as political parties enter the stage. Methodologically, it makes a contribution to the text-as-data field, exploring the use of novel machine-learning techniques in the measurement of political preferences.</p

The politics of procedural choice: regulating legislative debate in the UK House of Commons, 1811â2015

All democratic organisations operate under a particular set of rules. Such procedures are implemented by the very individuals that create and maintain them, usually under a majority voting rule. This research project engages with the question of why and how members of parliament "abdicate" procedural power, focusing on the evolution of the rules of debate in the UK House of Commons. Working from newly collected data on the reform of Standing Orders of the House spanning 205 years (1811â2015), as well as records of over six million speeches, it provides a new perspective on procedural choice. Framing debate as a platform for speech-as-filibuster behaviour, I develop a formal model where the decision to support an anti-dilatory reform is primarily a function of polarisation. I show that legislators adopt restrictive rules when they are more likely to share policy preferences with colleagues within their party. The presence of shared views, then, motivates MPs to prioritise responsible use of the common resource of plenary time over individual policy influence. Both empirically and theoretically, my research offers new insights into the process of parliamentary reform in the absence of party discipline, and studies how the dynamics of procedural choice change as political parties enter the stage. Methodologically, it makes a contribution to the text-as-data field, exploring the use of novel machine-learning techniques in the measurement of political preferences.</p

Replication Data for: The Politics of Procedural Choice: Regulating Legislative Debate in the UK House of Commons, 1811-2015

The historical development of rules of debate in the UK House of Commons raises an important puzzle: why do members of parliament impose limits on their own rights? Despite a growing interest in British Political Development (BPD) and the institutional changes of nineteenth-century UK politics, the academic literature has remained largely silent on this topic. Three competing explanations have emerged in studies of the US Congress, focusing on efficiency, partisan forces, and non-partisan (or: ideology-based) accounts. This paper falls broadly in the third category, offering a consensus-oriented explanation of the historical development of parliamentary rules. Working from a new dataset on the reform of standing orders in the House of Commons over a period spanning 205 years (1811-2015), as well as records of over six million speeches, I argue that MPs commit more quickly to passing restrictive rules in the face of obstruction when legislator preferences are proximate within both the opposition and government, and when polarisation between both sides of the aisle is low. The research represents, to my knowledge, the first systematic and directional test of a range of competing theories of parliamentary reform in the UK context, shedding light on the process of parliamentary reform over a prolonged period of Commons history, and advancing several new measures of polarisation in the UK House of Commons

Replication Data for: Measuring Polarisation with Text Analysis - Evidence from the UK House of Commons, 1811-2015

Political scientists can rely on a long tradition of applying unsupervised measurement models to estimate ideology and preferences from texts. However, in practice the hope that the dominant source of variation in their data is the quantity of interest is often not realised. In this paper, I argue that in the messy world of speeches we have to rely on supervised approaches that include information on party affiliation in order to produce meaningful estimates of polarisation. To substantiate this argument, I introduce a validation framework that may be used to comparatively assess supervised and unsupervised methods, and estimate polarisation on the basis of 6.2 million records of parliamentary speeches from the UK House of Commons over the period 1811-2015. Beyond introducing several important adjustments to existing estimation approaches, the paper’s methodological contribution therefore consists of outlining the challenges of applying unsupervised estimation techniques to speech data, and arguing in detail why we should instead rely on supervised methods to measure polarisation

Passiver und weniger parteitreu: Wie sich die Amtszeitbeschränkung auf Parlamentsmitglieder auswirkt

Mitglieder von Schweizer Parlamenten mit Amtszeitbeschränkung folgen gegen Ende ihrer Amtszeit weniger der Parteilinie – und lassen in ihren Aktivitäten erst noch nach. Das zeigt eine Untersuchung des Verhaltens von Abgeordneten auf Bundes- und Kantonsebene

The politics of legislative debate in Switzerland

What determines the speech-making behaviour of legislators in the lower house (Nationalrat) and the upper house (Ständerat) of the Swiss federal parliament? In this chapter, we employ newly collected data on debates covering the 46th - 50th legislative periods (1999-2019) to investigate the determinants of participation in debates, and the verbosity of members' speeches. The Swiss electoral system creates incentives for personal vote seeking in both chambers, but the institutional settings are markedly different in the lower and upper house. The smaller upper house has relatively free debates, while debates in the Nationalrat are tightly regulated. We find that faction leaders are more likely to participate in the lower house, while committee chair(wo)manship and seniority are the most important predictors of speech-making behaviour, increasing both the participation and verbosity of speeches. Gender, in turn, fails to play a role in speeches once we consider the effect of other covariates

Replication Data for: Procedural Change in the UK House of Commons, 1811-2015

Recent research has shown an increasing interest in the historical evolution of legislative institutions. The development of the United Kingdom Parliament has received particularly extensive attention. In this paper, we contribute to this literature in three important ways. First, we introduce a complete, machine- readable dataset of all the Standing Orders of the UK House of Commons between 1811 and 2015. Second, we demonstrate how this dataset can be used to construct innovative measures of procedural change. Third, we illustrate a potential empirical application of the dataset, offering an exploratory test of several expectations drawn from recent theories of formal rule change in parliamentary democracies. We conclude that the new dataset has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and beyond

Parliaments Day-by-Day: A New Open Source Database to Answer the Question of Who Was in What Parliament, Party and Party-group and When

Reliably answering questions about representation and parliamentary behaviour requires data about which parliamentarian was where, and at what time. However, parliament membership is not stable over time. For example, it is common for politicians to change office (we find up to 40% turnover between elections). Consequently, parliament member- ship, as well as party and party group composition change on a daily basis. To address the challenges that these fluctuations present, we introduce a new open-source database: ‘Parliaments Day-By-Day’ (PDBD). PDBD currently contains demographic and day-by-day membership data for the national parliaments of Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, covering the period between 1947 and 2017, and comprising a total of 21 million parliament-legislator-day observations. We demonstrate the usefulness of this high-resolution data in a concise study of the day-by-day development of parliaments in terms of gender and seniority. This reveals hitherto unknown patterns of early turnover, gendered replacement and seniority

Between Apathy and Anger: Challenges to the Union from the 2014 Elections to the European Parliament. EPIN [Working] Paper No. 39, 20 May 2014

This EPIN study brings together contributions from a ​broad selection of member states ​and ​provid​es ​insightful analysis ​into the 2014 elections to the European Parliament on the ground. The report reveals the different factors that impede the development of genuine European elections and the consequences of the ballot in the member states covered by the study​, namely Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and the UK​,​ and at EU level. The report finds that: • The EP Resolution to encourage European parties to nominate candidates for the next Commission President has not really increased public interest in the EU and voter turnout will probably remain low. • Visibility of the European top candidates in most member states has been quite limited. • National manifestos do not coincide – and sometimes event conflict with – the European parties’ manifestos. • Election debates focus on national issues; EU issues are only brought to public debate when they are relevant for domestic politics. • Again, we will see a protest vote against governments and large parties. The EP elections are still perceived as a test ahead of local and national elections, or as a vote of confidence in national governments. • This year the protest vote also concerns the EU. The report predicts a more eurosceptic ballot that might complicate decision-making in the EU, exacerbate the conflict between the national and European levels and increase tensions among member states

Parliaments day‐by‐day: A new Open Source database to answer the question of who was in what parliament, party, and party‐group, and when

Data files and r-scripts to go with manuscript titled 'Parliaments Day-by-Day: A New Open Source Database to Answer the Question Who Was in What Parliament, Party and Party-group When' (2021-08-09