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Analyzing the Agenda of Parliament in the Age of Reform∗

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Analyzing the Agenda of Parliament in the Age of Reform∗ Analyzing the Agenda of Parliament in the Age of Reform∗ VERY PRELIMINARY W. Walker Hanlon Northwestern University, NBER, CEPR July 27, 2021 Abstract This article provides a new measure of the agenda of the British Parliament{the sub- stantive topics on which debate was focused{from 1810-1914. This measure is obtained by applying a keyword approach to debate descriptions from the Hansard records. The results provide a new tool for analyzing the evolution of the British political system across this important period of history. To illustrate the utility of this measure, I an- alyze two issues. First, I use the data to identify key turning points, years that saw the most dramatic changes in the issues being debated. This analysis identifies three points, the First Reform Act (1832), the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), and the rise of the Labour Party (1910), as critical periods of change. In contrast, little seems to have changed in the years around the Second Reform Act (1867) or Third Reform Act (1884). The data are also used to study the impact of changes in party control on the agenda of Parliament. I find little evidence that shifts in the identity of the party in government substantially influenced the issues that came before Parliament. This finding suggests that parties played a reactive rather than a proactive role in determining what issues Parliament needed to address at any given point in time. ∗I thank Alexandra E. Cirone and seminar participants at the Northwestern Economic History Brownbag for helpful comments. Author email: [email protected]. 1 Introduction The experience of British government during the nineteenth century has exerted substantial influence over our current understanding of political systems. The three major Reform Acts extending the franchise that were passed during this period, in 1832, 1867 and 1884, have provided a central motivation for political economy theory (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2000; Lizzeri & Persico, 2004; Llavador & Oxoby, 2005). The emergence of modern party-centered Cabinet government, Britain's “efficient secret" in the words of Walter Baghot (1936), has influenced our understanding of the workings of Westminster systems through the work of political scientists such as Gary Cox (1987) and more recent work such as Dewan et al. (2020). The variation created by the reforms undertaken during this period has been used in an extensive literature aimed at better understanding Westminster systems. In addition, Britain's adoption of laissez-faire as a dominant governing philosophy in the middle of the nineteenth century, followed by its abandonment in favor of the early elements of the welfare state at the end of the century, has influenced thinking about the role of government through the work of generations of historians and legal scholars dating back to Dicey (1917) and including thinkers as diverse as F.A. Hayek and Karl Polanyi.1 This paper offers a new methodological approach, applied to information on Parliamen- tary debates contained in the Hansard, that allows us to to track, quantitatively, the agenda of Parliament from 1810-1914. By the agenda of Parliament, I mean the topics upon which Parliament's time and attention were focused. By allowing us to identify the topics that captured Parliament's attention, and track how their importance evolved across this critical period of history, these data offer a new window into the long-run evolution of the British political system. This exercise contributes to several existing lines of research. First, there has been extensive interest in the evolution of the British political system during the period I study. Eggers & Spirling (2014a) argue that this is due in part to the influence that the British system exerted on systems in other countries, and in part because the reforms that took place during this period offer a laboratory that can help us understand Westminster-style systems more generally. Within this literature, a number of papers use quantitative methods and Hansard data to study different aspects of the British political system (Eggers & Spirling, 2014b,a; Spirling, 2016; Eggers & Spirling, 2018). This existing research tends to focus on how the political system operated. Complementing this existing approach, the contribution of this study is to focus attention on the substantive issues that Parliament dealt with, and how (and why) these changed over time. Scholars have also shown substantial interest in the factors, such as media, that influence political agendas (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Cobb et al., 1976). Naturally, such studies rely 1This experience features prominently in Hayek's Road to Serfdom (Hayek, 1944) as well as in Polanyi's The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 2001). 1 on an ability to measure agendas over time. This paper contributes to this literature by providing a new tool that can be used to examine the factors that influenced the political agenda in Britain over a long and particularly interesting period of history. The series of franchise reform acts passed during my study period, in 1832, 1867, and 1884, have had a substantial influence on political economy theory (citations above). Mo- tivated by this, numerous empirical studies looked at the extent to which these franchise reforms influenced fiscal policy (Husted & Kenny, 1997; Aidt & Jensen, 2009; Aidt et al., 2010; Chapman, 2018; Corvalan et al., 2020; Chapman, 2020) or political representation (Laski, 1928; Berlinski & Dewan, 2011; Berlinski et al., 2014). This study allows us to approach the same set of questions from a different perspective, by assessing on whether franchise reforms led to substantive changes in the agenda of Parliament that may have favored newly enfranchised voters. In this context, a particularly useful feature of my data set is it can pick up reforms, such regulations of working conditions (e.g., the \Ten Hours Bill") that were clearly redistributive in nature, but with minimal fiscal impact. Finally, this study contributes to an extensive historical literature on the development of the British government (Roberts, 1960; MacDonagh, 1961; Taylor, 1972; Fraser, 1973; MacDonagh, 1977; Henriques, 1979; Harris, 2004; Boyer, 2019). In particular, this study provides new tools that can help us better understand the changing nature of British gov- ernment activities. The starting point for this study is the record of British Parliamentary debates from the Hansard. While data from the Hansard have been used by previous researchers (Eggers & Spirling, 2014b,a; Spirling, 2016; Eggers & Spirling, 2018), this study relies on an aspect of the Hansard that has not been extensively studied in previous research. This aspect is the short descriptions and word counts associated with each debate in Parliament (from 1810- 1914). The value of the debate descriptions that I use is that they reveal the main topic or issue under debate, as well as providing an indicator of how much time or attention that topic received (as reflected in the number of words spoken). This is a rich source of information about the issues considered by Parliament; for my study period, these descriptions cover a total of 372,000 interactions in Parliament, with 597.9 million words spoken in total, ranging from extensive discussions involving tens of thousands of words to simple questions with only a few.2 The key challenge in using these data is being able to translate the debate descriptions into a set of topics that can be traced over time. This requires applying some historical understanding to the debate descriptions in order to classify debates into topic groups that can then be analyzed. As a first step, the debate descriptions are parsed into individual words. Out of this set, I identify a set of key words (e.g., \vaccine", \school" or \admiralty") 2These were words spoken in actual debates. Many other words were spoken in Parliament during this period, such as during the pro-forma reading of bills. These are not included in my Hansard word counts, so my word counts reflect words spoken in active debates or other interactions such as question time. 2 which are then associated with specific topics (e.g., HEALTH, EDUCATION, the NAVY). The result is a data set that quantifies the attention paid by Parliament to various concrete topics of policy concern across the 1810-1914 period. The first half of this paper is focused on describing this classification procedure and then validating that this approach generates reasonable results. A simple way to provide some confidence in the results is by examining how the share of attention dedicated to various topics evolves over time and comparing these patterns to historical evidence. Figure 1 provides one example, focusing on debates related to the \Elections" topic, which includes terms related to voting and the franchise. In the figure, we can see three major spikes in interest in this topic. These correspond to each of the three major electoral reform acts that took place during this period, indicated by the vertical lines in 1832, 1867, and 1884. Clearly, the Hansard data are reflecting the fact that the debates over these three landmark reform bills attracted a substantial attention from Parliament in those years. Perhaps just as important, the data in Figure 1 also pick up failed attempts at reform. The most notable of these is the \Tory dodge" of 1859, when Disraeli's government intro- duced a mild reform bill aimed at preempting Liberal reforms, but in a way that provided political advantages to the Tories (Smith, 1966). A clever if somewhat cynical political gambit by Lord John Russell defeated the bill and led to the resignation of Disraeli's gov- ernment. Russell then introduced his own bill in 1860, but it generated little enthusiasm and was soon dropped. Though unsuccessful, the experience of 1859-60 provided the foundation for the Second Reform Act of 1867. The fact that my data can pick up these important, if unsuccessful, efforts to pass legislation, is a useful feature.
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