Taking the Leap: Voting, Rhetoric, and the Determinants of Electoral Reform
Research Question
Why did electoral reform fail in 1866 but pass in 1867 in the same Parliament with no intervening election?
Main Finding
Partisanship strongly structured roll-call voting, but passage depended on debate becoming more focused and less multidimensional under Conservative management. Narrowing the agenda helped assemble a winning coalition for reform.
Research Design
Quantitative historical analysis of parliamentary divisions and speeches on reform in 1866-1867, combining vote analysis with text-based analysis of legislative rhetoric.
Data Employed
An original dataset of 60 reform-related parliamentary votes and more than 3,200 reform-related speeches from Commons debates.
Substantive Importance
The paper clarifies how major institutional reform can hinge on agenda structure and debate dimensionality, not only party seat counts, in weakly institutionalized party systems.
Research Areas
Legislative Politics, Electoral Reform, Historical Political Economy, Text Analysis, Quantitative Methods
Citation
@article{leap,
author = {Moser, Scott and Reeves, Andrew},
title = {Taking the Leap: Voting, Rhetoric, and the Determinants of Electoral Reform},
journal = {Legislative Studies Quarterly},
volume = {49},
number = {4},
pages = {467--502},
year = {2014},
}