Suffrage Extension and Financial Volatility: Reconsidering the Great
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Suffrage Extension and Financial Volatility: Reconsidering the Great Reform Act GARY COX∗ SEBASTIAN SAIEGHy November 23, 2020 Abstract We argue that Consol price movements during England’s reform era reflected spec- ulative activity spurred by continental revolutions and government instability, rather than market perceptions of a significant risk to the British regime’s survival. We first show that, controlling for cross-market linkages, Consol variability during the era reform was no different than it was in normal times. Next, we show that diversification using ex- clusively securities whose value depended on the British regime’s survival—which should not have been a good strategy in the face of a substantial revolutionary threat—still had considerable value. Finally, we use daily data to examine the relationship between major events and Consol prices. We find that investors did not view the reform process as a fundamental threat to the stability of property rights. Instead, “ordinary” polit- ical risk (i.e. a potential change in the partisan control of the government) explains much of the variability in Consol prices. We conclude with an analysis of land prices and agricultural rents—pointing out that neither suggested that investors perceived a revolutionary threat. Keywords: Democratization, Financial History, 1832 Reform Act JEL Codes: N4, N2, N430 ∗William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Stanford Uni- versity; Encina Hall West, Room 303, Stanford, CA 94305; (650) 723 4278; [email protected] yCorresponding Author.Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, UC San Diego; Social Sciences Building 370, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093; (858) 534-7237; [email protected] 1 Introduction As Przeworski (2009, p. 292) notes, prominent theorists have argued that “... extensions of [suffrage] rights are a response of the incumbent holders of rights to revolutionary threats by the excluded ...” Acemoglu and Robinson (2000, 2006) and Boix (2003) have been particu- larly influential exponents of this view, in which the franchise is granted only in extremis. Britain’s Great Reform Act is often cited as a case illustrating the importance of revolu- tionary threats. This tendency is natural given the wave of continental revolutions 1830-34; the wave of Swing (and other) riots on the domestic front 1830-32; and Lord Grey’s famous declaration that “... the principle of my reform is to prevent the necessity of revolution ...” (quoted in Quinault 1994, p. 392). To assess revolutionary threat perceptions, scholars have increasingly examined how se- curities markets reacted during suffrage reform episodes. For example, Dasgupta and Ziblatt (2015) report a significant spike in Consol yields during the first reform crisis, while Seghezza and Morelli (2018) find the second reform bill had no similar impact. In this study, we recon- sider the behavior of Consols (and other assets) during the first reform crisis. We highlight two factors—financial spillovers and government turnovers—that might confound our abil- ity to interpret a Consol yield spike (or other single-asset price swing) as stemming from increased threat perceptions. Financial economists routinely seek to control for financial spillovers (Rigobon 2019); and many scholars argue that a switch in which party controls government can substantially affect securities’ prices. Yet it has not become standard prac- tice in historical studies to control for these potential confounders.1 1Our paper also contributes to the broad literature studying how political uncertainty affects financial market volatility (e.g., Bittlingmayer 1998; Boutchkova et al 2012; Pástor, and Veronesi 2013; Rigobon and Sack 2005; Zussman, Zussman, and Nielsen 2008; Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu 2011; Girardi and Bowles 2018) and to the more specific literature focusing on the reaction of British securities to military and political crises in the nineteenth century (e.g., Ferguson 2006; Mitchell, Brown, and Easton 2002; Brown, Burdekin, and Weidenmier 2006; Campbell et al. 2020). 2 We show that, once one controls for financial spillovers using the standard methods in the empirical contagion literature (cf. Dungey et al. 2005; Rigobon 2019), there is no evidence of unusual price movements or co-movements in the Consols market. In contrast, the same tests do show abnormal behavior in the French Rentes market—which was affected by an actual revolution. These results suggest that investors saw no significant revolutionary threat to the British regime (and also suggest that controlling for financial spillovers may be important in other studies of suffrage expansion). As another test, we explore the value of diversifying a portfolio using only regime-dependent securities. If the British regime faced a serious risk of overthrow during the reform crisis, all regime-dependent securities should have declines in value, meaning that intra-regime diversification should not have been profitable. Yet, we show that such diversification had more value, not less, during the reform era. Next, we use daily data to examine the relationship between major events and Consol prices. We find that investors did not view the reform process as a fundamental threat to the stability of property rights. Instead, “ordinary” political risk (i.e. a potential change in the partisan control of the government) explains much of the variability in Consol prices. Our results here are similar to those showing that the partisanship of electoral victors affects stock market returns (e.g., Leblang and Mukherjee 2004; Bialkowski, Gottschalk, and Wisniewski 2008; Sattler 2013). Finally, land is usually cited as particularly at risk in revolutionary take-overs. Yet we show that land prices were stable and agricultural rents were insensitive to local riot intensity (the variable most often used in the previous literature to proxy for revolutionary threats). The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 1, we discuss how cross- market linkages affected the Consol market in the early 1830s. Next, we evaluate the value of diversifying a portfolio using only regime-dependent securities. In Section 3, we examine how Consol prices responded to various types of non-commercial (i.e. political) risks. Section 4 discusses the land market; and a final section concludes. 3 1 Financial Volatility in the Reform Era What explains the variation of Consol prices during Britain’s reform era (1830-32)? Scholarly opinions differ. On the one hand, financial economists such as Mitchell, Brown, and Easton (2002) conclude that the Reform Bill was not perceived as a particularly important event by market participants. Instead, they argue that the fall of Wellington’s government and uncertainty in Europe had much more significant impacts on Consol prices. Campbell et al. (2018) reach a similar conclusion with regard to stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870—finding that the vast majority of large movements can be attributed to European wars. On the other hand, recent work in political economy suggests a larger role for the Reform Bill. Dasgupta and Ziblatt (2015) report that, at the peak of the reform crisis, “investors discounted the value of Consols by 16.6 percent from the pre-crisis baseline” (p. 3). One might interpret this as showing that frightened elites reduced their demand for Consols— likely to become worthless if the regime were overthrown—thereby reducing Consol prices. In this section, we offer an alternative account—closer to Mitchell, Brown and Easton’s (2002)—according to which financial spillovers from the continent drove Consol fluctuations. We begin by providing some historical background. 1.1 Background In his seminal book, The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm highlighted the unique corre- lation between British and Continental politics during Reform Bill era. As he noted, the period was “. probably the only one in modern history when political events in Britain ran parallel with those on the continent . ” (1962: p. 110). The revolutionary wave of 1830-34—ignited by the overthrow of the Bourbons in France (1830)—affected many parts of Europe. Belgium (1830) won independence from Holland, Poland (1830-1) was suppressed 4 only after military operations, and parts of Italy and Germany also rebelled. In Britain, var- ious domestic events might have increased elites’ fears of revolution, including the initial onset of Swing rioting (August 1830); the peak of Swing rioting (November 1830); and the famous Days of May, a period of unrest precipitated when the House of Lords rejected the third Reform Bill (in 1832). Britain’s political and sanitary synchronicity with Continetal Europe during the early 1830s suggests that volatility in Consols may have been driven by market reactions to foreign, rather than domestic, risks. Bolstering this idea, strong cross-market linkages already existed between Britain and Continental Europe. Dutch and French investment capital flowed in and out of Britain throughout the reform era (Neal 1990); and investors could purchase a wide range of foreign securities in the London exchange (Rose 1979; Rutterford 2006).2 This account, published on July 30th, 1830 (two days after the French revolution of July 26-28) in the Money Market and City Intelligence section of the The Times , illustrates how quickly the London market reacted to continental events: The English funds are maintained with tolerable firmness, though the alarm at the events in France is spreading over a pretty considerable class of stockholders. The 3 closing price of Consols is 4 per cent. below that of yesterday...; while the fall of the French funds on the second day after the publication of the ordinances has been 3 per cent., and in the whole 7 or 8 per cent. Generally speaking, there is a disposition among the English capitalists to get rid of this latter stock as an investment, but there are also a few who have [bet on] the ultimate maintenance of public credit in France. 1.2 Inter-market connections Consider some mechanisms by which the French revolution might have put downward pres- sure on Consol prices, even if investors saw no threat of regime overthrow in Britain.