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

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

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