Electoral Security as a Determinant ofLegislator Activity, 1832–1918
New Data and Methods for Analyzing British Political Development∗
Andrew C. Eggers†

Arthur Spirling‡

December 2, 2013

Abstract

We consider the relationship between a Member of Parliament (MP)’s electoral
environment and his strategic choice of legislative activities for the period between
the First and Fourth Reform Acts in Britain. We argue that voters and party
institutions put cross-cutting pressures on members during this time, and thatlegislators calibrated their behavior in accordance with the marginality of theirseat. We gather a massive new dataset documenting MPs’ basic biographicalinformation, electoral records, roll call votes, and speeches. We then show inpanel data analysis that the extent of MPs’ speechmaking and voting (our key
measures of legislative activity) vary with electoral security in ways that areconsistent with our theoretical priors: safer members appear to cater to theinterests of their party leadership, while more marginal representatives behave inways likely to appeal to their constituents directly. We also document changes
in these relationships over time.

∗First version: May 2013. This version: December 2, 2013. STICERD (LSE) and IQSS (Harvard)
contributed financially to the costs of this project, and its assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
†
London School of Economics. email: a.c.eggers@lse.ac.uk‡
Department of Government, Harvard University. email: aspirling@gov.harvard.edu

11Introduction

Like all rational actors, legislators respond to the incentives they face; because the pressureson them vary over time and space, we observe different patterns of representation in practice(e.g. Lijphart, 1999; Powell, 2000). Thus, House members in the United States are primarily
concerned with delivering (federal spending) ‘pork’ to their constituents (e.g. Levitt andSnyder, 1997; Stein and Bickers, 1997), vote and speak in a way that is ideologically congruent with their district (Canes-Wrone, Brady and Cogan, 2002), and work to develop a
distinctive ‘Home Style’ for their voters (Fenno, 1978). By contrast, members of parliament(MPs) in the British House of Commons are elected on a party ticket, are thought to have anegligible ‘personal’ vote (though see Cain, Ferejohn and Fiorina, 1987; Pattie, Fieldhouseand Johnson, 1994), and have strong career reasons to obey their whips (Benedetto andHix, 2007; Kam, 2009) on roll calls. In this light, explaining the way in which a particularsystem of governance emerged is an exercise in determining how and why parliamentarians’
incentives changed, and the associated implications for their activity choices—particularly
their speeches and voting—in the legislature.

Scholars have been especially interested in applying this logic to the development of the
British parliament during the mass suffrage era (e.g. Cox, 1987; McLean, 2001) for at least
two reasons. First, because the organizational principles embodied in the (original) ‘Westminster’ system have been so influential for other polities (e.g. Rhodes, Wanna and Weller,2009). Second, because the history of this period—from the First (1832) to the Fourth (1918)
Reform Acts—represents a rapidly changing structural environment for MPs. In essence,
legislators went from operating almost independently of party machinery (e.g. Gash, 1952,1977) to living in the ‘modern’ period of whips, cohesion (Lowell, 1902; Berrington, 1968),
national (rather than local) election forces (Hanham, 1978), and a ‘triumph of partisan pol-2

itics’ (Jenkins, 1996). Precisely because the extent of change was of such magnitude, there
is an obvious interest in documenting, at a micro level, how MPs adjusted their activity interms of division voting, or speech-making, in response to new incentives. This is especiallytrue for episodes in which the party leadership, local organizations and constituency voters
did not place congruent pressures on their members (e.g. Ostrogorski, 1902; Hanham, 1978;
Jenkins, 1996), and where those members varied in their need and opportunity to respondto the demands of different actors. Put differently, to the extent that MPs in the Victorianera could calibrate their behavior in parliament in response to the security of their electoral
district, we wish to know how they did so when faced with simultaneous—though possibly
conflicting—demands from other actors. With some important exceptions (Cox, 1987; Rush,
2001; Schonhardt-Bailey, 2003) however, such fine-grained work on trade-offs in the strategic
choice of legislative action has been largely missing from accounts of British political development.

This absence is unfortunate since, as implied above, understanding how individual actors
negotiated the cross-pressures they found themselves under is at least as important to refining theory as descriptive work on changes to parliamentary life at an aggregate level. It
is unsurprising though, for reasons of data availability: obtaining data to systematicallycompare MPs’ action choices under different electoral circumstances, and at different times,
has been problematic. Here we seek to solve this problem; in particular, we introduce a newdata set that dwarfs all previous efforts in the field. We construct a relational database ofover 5000 Members of Parliament serving between the beginning of the 19th century and
the Great War. We include background covariate information, and results from every election (and by-election) occurring between 1803 and 1918. We match this data to one million
legislative speech records and twenty thousand roll calls, along with service dates and promotion information. We are thus in a position to provide much more definitive answers to3

questions regarding the relationship between legislative activity and electoral environment.
Because this data is itself a contribution, below we spend some time discussing its compilation and possible future uses. In this way we see our paper as contributing not simply to ourunderstanding of how MPs and their constituents interacted, but also to the development of
more comprehensive data resources in political science.

Using our data, we demonstrate that there is indeed an association between the electoral
climate an MP faces in his home district and his legislative activity, and that it changes
over time. Though observational data such as ours means that causal statements are moredifficult to make with certainty, we can nonetheless do a thorough job of laying out therelationships between the key variables we consider. In a ‘pooled’ analysis, where we do notcontrol for ‘fixed effects’ pertaining to individual MPs, we demonstrate that unopposed MPs
vote and speak significantly less than their colleagues in more competitive seats. Meanwhile,for those who faced opposition, more secure MPs tended to vote and speak slightly more.
Once we focus on ‘within’ variation (i.e. include member fixed effects), a somewhat different
picture emerges: now, more secure MPs (including those who are unopposed) speak less, butvote more than the most marginal category of member. Below, we relate these patterns to
the possible cross-pressures between the expectations of the electorate and the demands ofparty chiefs, and the notion that MPs chose actions strategically to increase their chances ofstaying in office even if it meant acting at loggerheads with their leaders. Our fixed effects
estimates suggest that, by the end of the century, safer MPs faced increasingly congruent incentives to ‘behave’ in the Commons—by speaking less, and voting more—with presumably
little cost to their re-election prospects.

We proceed as follows: in Section 2 we give the substantive background for our study, andreport on previous efforts in the literature. In Section 3, we describe our database: its ori4

gins, contents and possible uses. In Section 4 we explain our measurement of constituency‘marginality’ and the various measures of legislative activity we use. We then report our
results, and conclude in Section 6.

2

Marginality and Activity in Westminster Systems

Party voting by the electorate, either based on national Cabinet—i.e. executive—policy positions and performance (see Budge, 1999; Crewe, 1983; Norris, 2001) or on cruder partisan
loyalties (see Butler and Stokes, 1974) is thought to be the norm for contemporary Westminster systems like Britain. Congruent with this principle, almost all legislative businessis directly controlled by the executive, and party pressure or ‘whipping’ is commonly usedby the government to herd its ‘backbench’ MPs into supporting the Cabinet’s programmatic
agenda when required (e.g. Cowley, 2002, 3–7).1 By conventional wisdom then, since voters
do not care about parliamentary behavior (and have no reason to), there is little an individual backbencher has to offer his or her constituents aside from a party label at election time.

To the extent that scholars of contemporary Westminster systems have sought to unpack
the relationship between legislator activity and popularity, unlike our study here, they havetended to focus on the former as a causal factor for the latter. Within this rubric, scholars
have considered the effects of various actions on election performance: constituency service(see Cain, Ferejohn and Fiorina, 1987; Norton and Wood, 1993; Searing, 1994; Gaines, 1998),
local campaigning activity (e.g. Denver and Hands, 1997; Pattie, Johnston and Fieldhouse,1995), roll call behavior (e.g. Pattie, Fieldhouse and Johnson, 1994), private members’ bills(Bowler, 2010) and other related legislative work (Loewen et al., Forthcoming).

1

Whipping typically includes offers or threats related to ministerial promotion: see Kam (2009) for a
discussion of the Canadian case.

5For the nineteenth century, Cox (1987, 51–67), building on earlier data gathering efforts
by Lowell (1902) and Adyelotte (1954), investigates the relationship between participationin roll calls, speech making and district size (i.e. the number of electors in the constituency).
He finds that, broadly speaking, for the early and middle years of the Victorian era, MPs from
more populous seats tended to be more active in the legislature. Schonhardt-Bailey (2003),
along with earlier work by McLean (2001), considers the role of constituency ‘interests’ (asopposed to ideology) in parliamentary voting during the Corn Laws period. Stephens andBrady (1976) consider the relationship between constituency types and party cohesion for
the 1880s, and find little evidence that district characteristics affected roll call behavior atthat time.

2.1

Competing pressures, ambiguous predictions

Because we are focussing on such a long period during which so much changes, it is unsurprising that multiple elements addressed by previous scholarship—for historical and contemporary periods—enter our account of MP behavior. In particular, we see MPs as strategic actors
under pressure from three main sources: the voters themselves in a given constituency; local
party organizations, who recruit candidates and assist in electioneering attempts, and a central party apparatus that, with certain periods excepted (see, e.g., Hanham, 1978, on the riseof the ‘Fourth Party’ in organizational terms), is synonymous with the party’s parliamentary
leadership. In the current period, in which ‘nationalized’ party appeals and campaigns are
considered the norm, these three pressures broadly push candidates and members towards
the same action choices: MPs follow the party whip and fall in line behind their leader atand between elections, since there is relatively little return or opportunity (and much cost)to refusing to follow party directives in terms of roll call voting or speech making. Whatmakes the 19th century interesting is precisely the notion that these pressures did not pull in6the same direction at the same time. As a result, different types of MPs—distinguished at aminimum by the safety of their electoral situation—may have faced different incentives. Our
central task below is to see if MPs facing different electoral situations behaved differently in
the House of Commons and how this relationship between electoral context and legislative
behavior may have changed over time.

Although we assume that all MPs, whatever their electoral background, could affect their
future success via their actions, we focus our theoretical account on those that faced competition. That is, we assume that those who were unopposed (literally, faced no alternative
candidates) at election time are qualitatively different to those who were in competitive
races—in particular, as regards pressures from voters, local or central organizations to behave in certain ways. At the opposite end of the spectrum, it is interesting to consider theplight of an MP in a very marginal—that is, competitive—seat. On heading to the Houseof Commons, such an MP has strong reasons to wish to connect to his voters, perhaps bymentioning them in speeches in the way that Cox (1987) describes for the period immediately following the Great Reform Act.2 Alternatively, in the period when voters are notparticularly party orientated, MPs would need to spend time in their districts wooing themwith local goods and local appeals. Clearly, there is an opportunity cost for those seeking toplease party elites: marginal MPs will find it hard to be continually at Westminster to votefor bills that leaders wish to pass. Moreover, these members might seek to curry local favor
by enacting private bills, actively clogging up the Commons agenda at the expense of debate
time for the (more public and partisan) interests of those further up in the party hierarchy.
As the century progressed, the executive comes to dominate proceedings, and such opportunities for private action and legislation become rarer (Cox, 1987; Rush, 2001) leaving MPs
2
Exactly what MPs in more marginal seats thought about the relationship between legislative activities
and their electoral security is not obvious, but members certainly seem to have desired newspaper coverageof their efforts for the earlier part of the period under study (Cox, 1987, 54–55).

7

with a reduced strategy set. Later on, when the electorate becomes more party-orientated,such an MP is presumably required to be more responsive to his local association (as warned
by Ostrogorski 1902, though see Judge 1993, 79 for discussion), in order to garner help at
election time (Hanham, 1978). To the extent that he does this, he may find himself ‘out ofstep’ with his party leadership in a different way, since they require his obedience on rollcalls (Jenkins, 1996, 59–63) for their survival as a (potential) government. Moreover, for
an MP seeking promotion to cabinet (Cox, 1987, 75–79) or access to honors and sinecures(Jenkins, 1996, 64), following orders in the House of Commons is a wise course of action.
Exactly what an MP from a very insecure district ought to do—whom he ought to please,and how to do it—is not obvious for much of the 19th century. It is more obvious for thosein safer districts: voters already like them, re-election is relatively more certain, and thus
such MPs are freer to respond to career incentives.3

2.2

Empirical Task

It is the implications of this ambiguity that we seek to resolve below. Before doing so, we
note that the efforts of previous scholars notwithstanding, making causal statements fromobservational data about actor decisions and outcomes is very difficult. While we can readily
establish associations between certain behaviors, it is helpful and intellectually honest to be
ecumenical in our interpretation of these results—at least in terms of plausible mechanisms
by which they have arisen. At the most basic level, for example, we cannot be entirely sure
why an MP finds himself in a more or less competitive district in the first place, and we presumably think the factors that determine this data generating process are not independent
3

We do not mean to suggest that ‘party pressures’ and ‘constituency pressures’ are always at odds: we
discuss other possibilities in our interpretation of the findings in Section ??.

8

of other (latent) factors pertaining to the MP in question or his subsequent actions. Yet
while the possibilities are many, they are not boundless: below, we will assess our evidence inlight of other scholars’ findings, and general plausibility. We see our efforts as ‘benchmarks’for a new dataset that concerns an important period in Westminster development: a firststep in establishing descriptive patterns upon which further work can be based.

To summarize then, while the complex relationship between individual election outcomes
and legislative activities has generated interest among scholars—especially historically—
there has been no attempt to comprehensively map the (possibly) changing relationshipbetween these two variables over the entire course of Britain’s political development. Below,
we attempt to do just that, paying special attention to the period between the first (‘Great’)reform act (Representation of the People Act, 1832) and the fourth reform act (Representation of the People Act, 1918). This will require that we obtain information on electoral
success on the one hand, and ministerial service, speech making and legislative voting on theother. The next section explains how we went about this task.

3

A Massive Database

We assembled a database representing electoral records and legislative activity by bringing
together data from a variety of sources. In this section we describe these sources as well as
the process we used to connect disparate sources in a single relational database.4
4

We fully acknowledge that other sources, such as the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (partof the Chadwyck-Healy collection), provide much of the information we do below. However, they do so ina way that is less immediately helpful to those studying MP activity. In particular, notice that we link our
unique MP identities to their parliamentary behavior in the senses included in the Parliamentary Papers, aswell as their constituency election results and roll calls, in a way that has not been done before.

9

3.1

Members of parliament

The core of the database is a list of MPs along with their basic biographical information suchas dates of birth and death. We obtained this information through a website connected to the
Hansard Digitisation Project,5 combined with data collected by an independent researcher,
Leigh Rayment. We used this data to construct an initial database of MPs. With theaddition of a few MPs who were missing from these sources (sometimes due to short stints
in parliament), we located 5,599 MPs who served between 1832 and 1918.

3.2

Electoral records and parties

The next step was to link MPs to their electoral records. Aside from the direct uses of electoral data for research purposes (such as studying the relationship between electoral context
and legislative activity, as we do in this paper), bringing in electoral records had indirect
benefits for building our database, in that it helped link MPs to parties and allowed us toestablish definitively when particular MPs served in parliament.

We began by transcribing the information (candidate names, parties and vote results) for
every electoral return from Craig (1989a), Craig (1989b) and Craig (1983) into our database;these collectively cover British constituencies for the period 1832–1949. We supplemented
these records with Walker (1978) for the Irish constituencies, and we used Thorne (1986)
and Fisher (2009) to cover the period 1803 to the 1831 general election. In total, we recorded
25,726 election returns between 1832 and 1918, of which 16,005 were successful. (Note thatsuccessful returns were those in which the MP won the seat; in cases where the election
result was overturned following a petition, successful returns were not always those that won
the most votes.)5

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com.

10We collect each set of returns into a “race”, which we stored along with information such as
the date, number of electors, and whether it was a general election or by-election. In total,
12,734 races took place between 1832 and 1918, of which 2,737 were by-elections.

Each race was also linked to a constituency; we obtained a list of constituencies from the
UK Parliamentary Service website. We follow the conventional approach to identifying constituencies, by which a constituency disappears when it is divided or undergoes extensive
boundary changes (as happened to several constituencies in 1867 and 1884). In all we have
867 constituencies in the period from 1832 to 1918.

After extensive checks of these electoral records, we then linked the winning candidates
in each contest to MPs in our database. This allowed us to construct, for every MP, anexhaustive list of spells in which the MP served in the House of Commons; we could later
use these spells to identify MPs from debate records and division lists. We record 7,027
distinct spells of service in parliament.

Linking MPs to electoral records also allowed us to assign party labels to MPs using thelabels that appear in the electoral sources listed above. Note that we assign a party to an
MP at a particular time based on the party label that appears in his most recent election
return; when an MP switches parties mid-parliament, we do not register the switch.6
6

Such party switches were very uncommon. Focusing on Liberals and Conservatives, we find only 90
cases in which an MP standing in subsequent elections changed party from Liberal to Conservative or thereverse, out of 9913 total cases in which a Liberal or Conservative stood in subsequent elections.

11

3.3

Ministerial office

To obtain information on the MPs’ ministerial careers, we used Cook and Keith (1975) andButler and Butler (1994) which covers our period for Cabinet offices, and other ranks on thegovernment payroll (some of which are relatively minor officials that disappear over time).
For each spell of officeholding, we record (based on these sources) whether the office wasconsidered at the time to be part of the cabinet. We record a total of 243 distinct offices and
4,739 spells of officeholding in all. Currently absent from our work is a list of MPs serving
in the Shadow Cabinet, including the Leader of the Opposition: that is, the opposition front
bench officials who would become ministers should their party be in government. For theperiod under study, we do not have ‘official’ records on these matters since such terms were
not generally used until after the Victorian era (Jenkins, 1996, 118).7

3.4

Speeches

In 2005, the House of Commons Library and the House of Lords Library undertook a joint
digitization campaign in which the entire set of Hansard debate records from 1803 to 2004
were eventually converted to machine-readable text.8 These records are marked up in XML
format with tags identifying speeches, speaker names, debate titles, and so on. Due to theextensive markup, parsing the data into speeches and debates was quite straightforward.
Between 1832 and 1918 we record 1,191,723 speeches organized into 218,174 debates.

The main difficulty in integrating this information into our database was the linking of
speaker names to actual MPs.9 The same issues arise to various extents in matching elec7‘Leader of the Opposition’ is first defined, for salary reasons, in statute form via the 1937 Ministers of
the Crown Act (Brazier, 1997, 90).
8
http://www.hansard-archive.parliament.uk/
9
A group within the UK Parliamentary Service (see http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/) made apreliminary attempt to identify MPs in debates and link those MPs to offices and constituencies. Although
we made use of some of their data as noted above, we decided to match speeches to MPs ourselves given

12toral records (noted above) and in votes (addressed below) to MPs, but because linking
speakers to MPs proved to be such a major challenge in assembling the database we pause
to explain our approach here.

Whether it be speeches, roll calls, election returns or other sources of data, MPs are notreferred to in consistent ways in historical materials. There are various reasons why a given
individual may be referred to differently in different instances. Some of the variation is
simply due to misspellings or OCR errors; some of it is due to changes in an MP’s officialname over time as he acquired different honorific titles or even changed his surname due
to a marriage or inheritance; some of it is due to changes in who else was in the House ofCommons, as an MP may be referred to as “Mr. Jones” until another “Mr. Jones” enters,
after which time his identity is recorded as “Mr. J. Jones”. The way an MP is referred
to can even change within a given debate: an MP may be referred to as “Mr. J. Jones”
the first time he speaks in a debate and simply “Mr. Jones” the second time. Sometimes
MPs are referred to by both their name and their constituency (particularly when anotherMP with a similar name is serving at the same time); in this case the variation can comefrom varying conventions in how to abbreviate county and borough names. Finally, MPs
who hold offices of state, such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, will often be referred toas such—rather than by their given name. To a human reader, it is often quite clear that
two recorded speaker names refer to the same person; for example, a person would probably
quickly identify that two speakers recorded in 1840 as “Acland,Tho. Dyke (Somersets.)” and“Acland,Tho. Dyke (Somersetsh.)” were the same person, and by looking up MPs serving
in 1840 could identify this speaker as Thomas Dyke Acland, MP for Somerset West (distinct
from his father, also named Thomas Dyke Acland, who represented Devon Northern at thesame time). Given over a million speeches to process, however, having a human match eachclear omissions and errors in the existing data.

13

speech to a speaker is obviously impractical.

As suggested by this example, in linking speeches to MPs we want to be able to makeuse of the speaker’s name, office, and/or title (which may change over time) as recorded by
Hansard, we want to make use of constituency information (when available), which similarly
is not recorded in standardized ways, and we want to take account of who was in parliament at a given time. Given unique features of the problem, our approach was to write ourown custom software that used a variety of raw information about the speaker, voter, or
candidate and returned a ranked list of possible MP matches, along with a score reflecting
the closeness of the match. The scores we used to characterize a match are based partly onname similarity (addressing complexities such as the use of initials, aristocratic titles, andthe name of offices (e.g. “The Solicitor General”)) but also rely heavily on the informationin our database (gleaned from MP biographies and electoral records) about which MPs wereserving at what time. For cases in which one MP received a sufficiently high match score,and no other MP was close, we accepted the match; for other cases we output spreadsheets ofpotential matches and asked research assistants to determine (if possible) which MP was thecorrect one, focusing on cases where resolving an ambiguity would lead to several speeches
being matched. All told, it took hundreds of hours of manual checking to link speeches,
votes, and electoral records to MPs, even after the work necessary to design and run theautomatic matching procedures.

The number of speeches given per year increases throughout the period we examine, fromabout 5,000 in the 1830s to about 30,000 in the 1910s. Overall we matched about 95% of
the total of 1.2 million speeches to MPs, a proportion that was fairly steady throughout theperiod we examine.

14

3.5

Roll calls

As part of a recent collaboration with the History of Parliament Trust, we were able toobtain digitized roll call records (‘divisions’ in House of Commons terms) for the period 1836
to 1910. As far as we are aware, there is no similar collection in terms of size or detail. In
particular, we have some 20,258 divisions, with 4,790,548 voting decisions (that is, ‘ayes’ and‘noes’) in total. Using the methods described above, we were able to match 99% of thesevotes to an MP (with the proportion missing being similar throughout the entire period).
For every division we know the identity of the tellers, and whether or not they were a Chief
Whip for the Conservatives or Liberals. (This allows us to identify divisions in which thewhip was applied, using the approach of Cox (1992).) We also have the description of theroll call under consideration as it appeared in the original division lists, which in many cases
gives a rough idea of the substance; roll calls can also be linked to the surrounding debate.10

4

Measures and descriptive statistics

Since we are interested in the relationship between electoral margins and legislative behavior,
it is helpful to first summarize the measurement strategy and basic descriptive statistics ofeach of our key variables. We begin with the competitiveness of seat contests. Due to avariety of legal, economic, and social changes that took place during the period under study
here, the House of Commons became much more competitive as the Victorian era wore on.
Compared to the situation in the early 19th century, by the end of the First World War
MPs were far more likely to face an actual election campaign (rather than winning without
opposition), and those who faced campaigns were more likely to face close races (for an
aggregate overview, see, Cox, 1987). In order to document these changes over time we must10

Our roll call records do not contain lists of ‘pairs’—MPs committed to voting on opposite sides of theissue, who choose to stay away on the basis that their mutual absence makes no difference to the majority
outcome of the division.

15

decide on measures of electoral competition.

The central task here is to measure electoral margins in a period in which a large proportion of MPs were elected in multimember constituencies. In a single-member district, anatural way to summarize the safeness of an MP’s seat is to measure the margin between
that MP and his closest competitor in the previous election. We adopt a straightforward
generalization of this for multi-member seats: the difference in vote share between the MP
and the most successful losing candidate in the race. To be more specific, denote by vi
the vote share11 of the candidate who finished in ith place; for a constituency with districtmagnitude M , all candidates with i ≤ M win a seat. We define the margin for candidate iin parliament t as
mit = vit − vM +1,t .
For robustness we also use an alternative measure of marginality employed in other multimember contexts (e.g. Cox and Rosenbluth, 1995), which measures the difference between
the candidate’s vote result and the Droop quota for the race. The two measures produce
essentially identical results.

Figures 1 and 2 use these measures to highlight the changes in competition that MPs faced.
For expositional purposes we divide MPs into four categories, which we also use in the panel
11

By vote share, we mean the number of votes received by the candidate divided by the estimated numberof voters. We estimate the number of voters by dividing the total number of votes cast by the number ofseats up for election, under the assumption that e.g. voters in a two-member constituency cast both ballots.

16

analysis below. For MP i in parliament t, define the margin category Cit as follows:



A





 B
Cit =


C





 UN

if mit ≤ .1
if .1 < mit ≤ .2
if mit > .2
if unopposed.

Putting MPs into these categories allows us to describe the relationship between MPs’ electoral context and their legislative behavior in an easily interpretable way without making
assumptions about the functional form (e.g. linearity) of the relationship between marginand behavior. It also allows us to include unopposed MPs in analysis along with other MPs,
despite the fact that we do not have a directly comparable measure of electoral margin in
for the types of MPs.

The increase in competitiveness of elections to the House of Commons has been noted byothers. Figures 1 and 2 confirm the pattern using the complete set of election results. Strikingly, about half of MPs were elected without opposition in the early part of the nineteenth
century; by the early 20th century, almost half were elected by a margin under .1. The evolution of electoral marginality (and its relationship with legislative activity, analyzed below) issimilar if we use finer-grained categories or document changes in the continuous distributionof margins.

We now turn to our measures of legislative activity: voting and speaking. We focus on
the sheer amount of voting and speaking in which an MP engages. Our measure of voting
activity is quite simple and straightforward: for each MP in each parliament, we record the
proportion of divisions on which the MP cast a vote. Our measure of speaking activity isbased on the number of speeches the MP made in each parliament, divided by the length of
17

1.0

Figure 1: Electoral margins by general election, 1832-1910

Category C

0.4

Margin > .2

Proportion of MPs

0.6

0.8

Unopposed

Category B

0.2.1 < Margin < .2

Category A
0.0

Margin < .1

1832

1841

1852

1865

1874

1885

1895

1906

Year of general election

Note: Margin category A refers to MPs elected by a margin under .1, category B refers to MPs elected bya margin between .1 and .2, and margin category C refers to MPs elected by a margin of .2 or larger; MPs
not facing opposition are categories as “unopposed”. Proportions in each category are plotted by parliamentand parliaments are indicated by the year in which the parliament first sat.

18

Figure 2: Electoral margins by period

A

B

C

UN

Margin category

0.6
0.5
0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

Proportion

0.4

0.5
0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

Proportion

0.4

0.5
0.4
0.3
0.0

0.1

0.2

Proportion

Period 3
1885−1918

0.6

Period 2
1859−1885

0.6

Period 1
1832−1859

A

B

C

Margin category

UN

A

B

C

UN

Margin category

Note: Margin category A refers to MPs elected by a margin under .1, category B refers to MPs elected bya margin between .1 and .2, margin category C refers to MPs elected by a margin of .2 or larger, and margin
category “UN” refers to MPs who were elected without opposition.

the parliament (in years). Because of the substantial right skew of this variable (call it sit )and the large number of zeros, we carry out analysis on log(1 + sit ). It is certainly possible
to use more nuanced measures, such as the varying length of speeches, or their content. We
would encourage future work in the area to just that, but here we concentrate on establishing
relationships for more basic measures.

Using data for select years in this period, Cox (1987) noted that the rate of voting andspeaking in parliament increased substantially over the 19th century (pp. 53-54). Figure 3
documents this pattern for the universe of divisions and debates. The left panel shows thatMPs voted on a steadily larger proportion of divisions as the century progressed: the average
MP voted on just one-quarter of divisions in the 1830s and almost half of divisions by the
1910s. Similarly, as shown by the right panel of Figure 3 the average number of speeches
per year made by the average MP increased steadily as well. Additional analysis confirms

19that the increase in speaking is not simply a few individuals appearing more, but rather anincrease in the number of speakers and an across-the-board increase in the number of times
each MP participated.

We organize our data as a panel with the unit of analysis being the MP-parliament.
Figure 3: Increasing participation by MPs over time

0.5

Speaking
●

●

●

0.3
0.2

●

●

●

●
●

●
● ●
●

●
●

10

●
●
●

5

●

●

●
●
●●

●

●●

●

●
●

●

●

●

●

●

●

0

1

0.4

●

Avg speeches/yr (log scale)●

0.1

Average roll call participation rate

Voting1832 1847

1865 1880 1895 1910

1832 1847

Year of general election

1865 1880 1895 1910

Year of general election

Note: The left panel shows the average proportion of divisions voted on by MPs in each parliament. The
right panel shows the average number of speeches per year by MPs in each parliament (transformed as
described in the text).

We omit cases where an MP was not serving throughout (the life of) a parliament, on thebasis that these MPs are often elected in by-elections (whose electoral marginality may not
be indicative of likely future contests) and in any case do not have the opportunity to voteor speak on the same matters as those who serve throughout the parliament.

20

5Results

How were the electoral pressures facing MPs reflected in their legislative activity? Does theincrease in competitiveness over the 19th century help explain why MPs became more activein voting and speaking? We begin to address these question by regressing our outcomes (rollcall participation rate and (log) speeches per year) on indicators for MPs’ electoral security
and a set of covariates that one might think would be related to legislative activity (andpossibly electoral competitiveness).

The main regression results appear in Table 1. Recall that the omitted competitivenesscategory (category A) indicates MPs elected in the most competitive races; the coefficientsshown thus test for differences between observations in which an MP was elected in lesscompetitive races or was unopposed and observations in which the MP was elected rather
narrowly. All regressions include a dummy for each parliament, which should control for
most of the over-time variation in legislator activity; the regressions also include indicators
for whether the MP held cabinet office, another office, or no office during the parliamentin question, as well as other covariates describing an MP – an indicator for party (Liberalor Conservative), indicators for where the MP’s constituency is located (Ireland, Scotland,
Wales, Home Counties, or rest of England), and a measure of the MP’s experience at thestart of the parliament. For each outcome we show the results of a regression without member fixed effects (columns 1 and 3) and with member fixed effects (columns 2 and 4).

Looking at columns (1) and (3), which do not include MP fixed effects, the clearest findingis that MPs who were unopposed both voted less and spoke less than MPs who faced competition. It does not seem to be the case that, among MPs who face an opponent, those
who win more easily participate less; in fact, we find evidence in column 3 that MPs who

21

Table 1: Legislative activity as a function of electoral marginality: regression analysis
Dependent variable:
Model:
Margin category: B

Roll call participation
(1)
(2)
0.002
0.015∗∗(0.005)(0.005)

Margin category: C

0.004(0.005)0.022∗∗∗(0.005)0.094∗(0.038)−0.049(0.032)

Unopposed−0.023∗∗∗(0.005)0.009†(0.005)−0.144∗∗∗(0.036)−0.09∗∗(0.031)

X
X
X

X
X
X
X
8435
0.117

X
X
X

X
X
X
X
9852
0.093

Parliament dummies
Officeholding dummies
Region, party, experience
MP fixed effects
Obs.
R2

8435
0.296

(Log) speeches
(3)
(4)
0.061
−0.029(0.038)(0.031)

9852
0.265

Note: See text for information about covariates. Guide to significance codes: ∗∗∗ indicates p < .001; ∗∗ indicates .001 < p < .01;
∗ indicates .01 < p < .05; and † indicates .05 < p < .1.

faced competition but were easily elected (those in categories B and C) spoke more thanMPs elected narrowly. How much less active were unopposed MPs? The coefficient on “Unopposed” in column (1) indicates that average roll call participation rate for MPs who were
elected to parliament without opposition was about 0.025 lower than that for MPs who were
elected by narrow margins; given that the average turnout rate for MPs in margin category
A was about .36, this works out to a difference in turnout rates of about 7%. In the caseof speeches,the coefficient for unopposed MPs (-0.14) indicates that MPs who were unopposed spoke about 15% less than MPs who faced close contests.12 Both differences between
closely-contested and unopposed MPs are strongly statistically significant.

Figure 4 puts these results in context by depicting point estimates and 95% confidence
12

The average of our speech outcome (which is log(1 + sij )) for MPs in margin category A is about 1.63,
implying an average of 4.1 speeches per year; the coefficient for unopposed MPs implies an average of 3.44
speeches a year.

22intervals for the coefficients in the regressions in columns (1) and (3) of Table 1 not just forthe marginality categories but for all coefficients (aside from the intercept and the parliament
dummies). Coefficients are plotted as “predicted differences from baseline”; for expositional
clarity we plot a 0 for margin category A, the omitted margin category in the regression.
Again we see that unopposed MPs were less active, but we also see that electoral context
is a relatively weak predictor: the difference between officeholders and non-officeholders, forexample, is much larger than that between MPs elected in competitive contexts and thoseelected unopposed.13

To this point we have focused on the results from Table 1 that do not include member fixed
effects (i.e. those in columns 1 and 3). The difference between unopposed MPs and those incompetitive races that these regressions highlight is of course likely to be the result of bothincentives and selection. That is, the coefficients on the margin categories and “Unopposed”
in columns 1 and 3 of Table 1 do not reflect just the effect of competition on MPs’ legislative
activity (incentive effects); rather, they also reflect the underlying differences between MPs
elected from different kinds of contexts, as well as differences between the kinds of contexts
in which different types of elections occur (selection effects). Both kinds of effects may be
important for understanding how changes in electoral marginality may explain legislative
behavior over time. The regressions that include MP fixed effects in Table 1 (columns 2
and 4) control for some of the selection effects by focusing on how electoral marginality andlegislative behavior are correlated within MPs’ careers. Controlling for each MP’s averagelevel of voting or speaking (as well as the particularly parliaments in which he served, as wellas other covariates), how does an MP’s inclination to vote and speak depend on the nature
13

Additional analysis indicates that the margin categories contribute little to explaining the long-term
increase in legislator activity. For example, if we multiply the long-term change in the proportion of MPs
who were unopposed by the estimated difference in activity between unopposed MPs and those in margin
category A, we find that the reduction in unopposed MPs accounts (in a descriptive sense) for less than 5%of the overall increase in voting and speaking in parliament.

23

Figure 4: Electoral margin and other correlates of legislative activity, 1832-1918
Roll call participation

Speeches delivered (logs)

Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: C●

Margin cat: C●

Unopposed

Unopposed●

Cabinet office●Cabinet office

Other office●

Other office

Liberal●LiberalHome counties●

Home counties

Ireland
Scotland

Decades of service

●

●

●

Wales

●

Decades of service

●

0.00

●

Scotland

●

−0.05

●

Ireland

●

Wales

●

0.05

0.10

0.15

●

●

●

0.0

Predicted diff. from baseline

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

Predicted diff. from baseline

Note: Regression coefficients and .95 confidence intervals shown for pooled regressions in which the dependent variable is an MP’s legislative activity (voting rates or speaking rates) in a parliament. These
regressions do not include member fixed effects; the results can thus be interpreted as a characterization of
how variation in legislative activity both within and across MPs relates to MPs’ electoral context and otherfactors. Coefficients for parliament dummies not shown.

24

of his most recent constituency race?

For clarity of exposition, Figure 5 graphically depicts the coefficients from the fixed effectanalysis from columns (2) and (4) of Table 1 (those with member fixed effects) along withthe comparable coefficients from columns (1) and (3) (those without member fixed effects).
With member fixed effects, we see quite a distinct pattern for the two legislative outcomes:
as an MP’s electoral context gets safer he appears to vote more but speak less. The differences from the analysis without member fixed effects are striking. Comparing across MPs(i.e. in the analysis without fixed effects) electoral margin does not appear to matter muchand unopposed MPs vote less; comparing within MPs’ careers (i.e. in the analysis with fixed
effects), MPs vote less when they are elected by a narrow margin than when they are electedby a larger margin or are unopposed.

The pattern we find in the fixed effects analysis (roughly, comfortable MPs vote more andspeak less) is consistent with a situation in which MPs who do not face electoral pressures
are loyal backbenchers, regularly turning up to vote and not ruffling feathers as speakers. Inline with our theoretical comments above, MPs who are elected by narrower margins may
feel less secure in their seats and thus less inclined to invest in pleasing party leaders; instead,they speak in parliament in order to represent their constituencies; they skip votes in orderto remain active in the constituency or maintain and develop ties outside of parliament thatwill advance their non-political careers (which may be especially important if they expect
to lose). Additional analysis is necessary to determine whether this is consistent with thecontent of MPs’ votes and speaking contributions. We note that party leaders may wellhave given (implicit) ‘permission’ for such activity. That is, elites may have preferred MPs
from their own party to return to the Commons, despite their obstreperousness, rather thanMPs from opposing parties who would be more consistently unhelpful. Even if such a logic
25

Figure 5: Electoral margin and legislative activity with and without member fixed effects
Roll call participation

Speeches delivered (logs)

Pooled analysis

Pooled analysis

Margin cat: A

Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: B

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: C●

Margin cat: C●

Unopposed●●

Unopposed●●

Fixed effects analysis
Margin cat: A

Fixed effects analysis
Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: B

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: C

−0.01

0.01

●

Unopposed

●

−0.03

●

Margin cat: C●

Unopposed

●

0.03

●

−0.2

Predicted diff. from baseline

−0.1

0.0

0.1

Predicted diff. from baseline

Note: The left panel plots the coefficients on marginality categories from column 1 (top) and column 2(bottom) of Table 1. The right panel plots the coefficients from column 3 (top) and column 4 (bottom) of
Table 1.

26

holds however, notice that our maintained assumption is that promotion-minded MPs would
prefer to not have to spend time away from their colleagues dealing with fickle voters athome and that thus a conflict continues to exist.

Finally, we divide the data up into three periods and examine how the relationship between
electoral context and legislative activity may have changed over time. We use the same periods for which we depicted the distribution of electoral security in Figure 2 above, i.e. threeroughly equally-sized periods in which competition was low (pre-1859), rising (1859-1885),
and high (1885-1918). We focus on fixed effect analysis and report the results graphically in
Figure 6.

Figure 6 indicates that the relationship between marginality and legislative activity that
we documented above (roughly, “safe MPs vote more and speak less”) emerges over time: itis completely absent in the early period, strongly evident in the late period, and intermediate
in between. This is consistent with the idea that, as party organization developed and theelectorate became more party-oriented (Cox, 1987), MPs sought favor with party leadersrather than by attempting to please the electorate. The timing of this shift is somewhat
later than one might expect, however, given that this process is thought to have begun in
the 1840s. Put otherwise, to the extent that ‘speaking more’ helped one be reelected, it waspresumably a strategy that had non-constant returns over time: there were periods when it
helped, and periods when it may have hurt. Going further, the period in which ‘modern’incentives seem to have come to the fore is after the passing of the Third Reform Act (1884)
and the Redistribution Act (1885). This is intriguing, and suggests that the equalizationof constituency sizes and their representation (i.e. one seat per district), had some effecton the way that MPs behaved. One possibility here is that because MPs increasingly faced
similar incentives (insofar as their districts were increasingly homogenous in terms of size
27and representation), their strategies also converged and we see this via the (suddenly) clear
pattern in the last row of Figure 6.

6

Discussion

At least since the time of Burke and his Speech to the Electors of Bristol (1774/1975), scholars of politics have debated the ‘proper’ role of legislators in representative democracy. While
much of the debate has been normative in nature, Britain’s historical experience with mass
suffrage made the transition from ‘delegate’ to ‘trustee’ a descriptive reality.14 This sweeping
transformation is ultimately composed of thousands of actors making rational decisions tocomport with new incentives arising through institutional innovations—be they an expanded
franchise or a Cabinet as agenda setter. Here, we set out to document the way that one
important set of such actors—MPs between the First and Fourth Reform Acts—dealt with
their changing environment in terms of their legislative activities of speech making and voting. We argued that MPs with different electoral backgrounds would face different pressures,and have different priorities, as they balanced party and voter demands during an inchoate
period from which the modern Westminster system ultimately emerged. We showed thatcompetition affected choices in ways predicted by theory: for example, in our fixed effects
analysis, we demonstrated that MPs in safer seats tended to attend divisions more often,
and speak less frequently as time wore on. This is commensurate with the notion that they,
relative to their least secure colleagues, prioritized supporting their party’s agenda: keeping
their ‘head down’ in debate, and doing as they were told by their whips. Notwithstanding
our comments about the possibility of implicit ‘permission’ to misbehave in Section ??, thisstrategy made more sense for MPs with secure seats, whose political futures depended on
14

By ‘trustee’ we do not mean ‘independent’ in a non-partisan sense, but rather members as representativesof national parties with national (as opposed to hyper-local) policy platforms executed via parliamentaryactions.

28

Figure 6: Electoral margin and legislative activity over time: fixed effect analysis
Roll call participation

Speeches delivered (logs)

Period 1 (1832−1859)

Period 1 (1832−1859)

Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: A●●

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: B

Margin cat: C●

Margin cat: C●

Unopposed●

Unopposed●

Period 2 (1859−1885)
Margin cat: A

Period 2 (1859−1885)
Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: B

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: C●

Margin cat: C●

Unopposed●●

Unopposed●●

Period 3 (1885−1918)
Margin cat: A

Period 3 (1885−1918)
Margin cat: A●

Margin cat: B

Margin cat: B●

Margin cat: C
Unopposed

0.04

0.06

●

Unopposed

●

0.02

●

Margin cat: C●−0.02 0.00

●

0.08

●

−0.3

Predicted diff. from baseline

−0.2

−0.1

0.0

0.1

Predicted diff. from baseline

Note: Coefficients on marginality categories shown for panel analysis including member fixed effects carriedout separately for each of three time periods.

29pleasing party leaders and not the electorate.

Quite apart from the historical question we set out above, there may be interesting policy
implications of our work. At the time of writing, MPs seem to believe that their activities
within parliament might matter for reelection (Cowley and Stuart, 2005), and that they facetrade-offs between pleasing party bosses and constituents, at least in terms of their service
commitments (Johnston et al., 2002). Whether this is true or not, it implies that legislators
perceive cross-cutting pressures and are acting in ways that challenge core components of
the Westminster system as traditionally considered. In this way, increasingly conflicting
incentives may endanger both the normative justification for, and mechanical functioningof, the future working of this traditional method of governance (e.g. Powell, 2000)—an issue
already of concern to psephologists (see Blau, 2004). Though it seems unlikely that Westminster systems will find themselves adopting American parliamentary practices, moves inthat direction have obvious consequences for ‘national’ party mandates.

To be clear, we are aware that our findings are commensurate with interpretations other thanthe ones we asserted here: we make no claims to have (uniquely) causally identified a particular story here. Instead, we view our work as a first cut at using a new database to ‘fill in’ gaps
in our knowledge on British Political Development—a topic of long-standing and general interest to political scientists (e.g. Cox, 1987; Judge, 1993; McLean, 2001; Schonhardt-Bailey,2003), historians (e.g. Bagehot, 1873/2011; Lowell, 1902; Redlich, 1908; O’Leary, 1962; Cannadine, 1990), economists (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson, 2000; Lizzeri and Persico, 2004)
and others (e.g. Crossman, 1964). As we hope is clear, with this new data, scholars havenumerous possibilities for future research, whether it be the contents of speeches (in the senseof e.g. Quinn et al., 2010), the nature of (any) incumbency advantage in electoral races, theideological cohesion of parties (MacRae, 1970, e.g.) and the role of promotion opportunities
30

therein (Benedetto and Hix, 2007), the effect of the changing sociological makeup of membersof parliament (e.g. Rush, 2001) and so on. We leave such efforts for future work.

31

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