Taking the Leap: Voting, Rhetoric, and the Determinants of Electoral Reform
41 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2012 Last revised: 6 Feb 2014
Date Written: February 4, 2014
Abstract
The Second Reform Act ushered in the age of democratic politics in the UK by expanding the franchise and providing new representation to industrialized cities. Using unsupervised topic model analysis of parliamentary debates and quantitative analysis of roll call votes, we investigate why electoral reform passed the House of Commons in 1867. Specifically we consider why reform passed under a Conservative government but failed under a Liberal government despite no election or change in membership of the House of Commons. We find that party, not constituency, is responsible for explaining votes on reform and that it was the reduction in the number of aspects in the debate over reform that ultimately allowed Conservatives to pass electoral reform.
Supplemental Information for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2203723
Keywords: electoral reform, Second Reform Act, legislative behavior, topic models, agenda dimensionality
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