sign in sign up
<<
Home , Adam Holloway, Alice Mahon, Ann Cryer, Ann Winterton, Archie Hamilton, Barry Legg

Appendix: “Ideology, Grandstanding, and Strategic Party Disloyalty in the British ”

August 8, 2017

Appendix Table of Contents

• Appendix A: Wordscores Estimation of Ideology

• Appendix B: MP Membership in Ideological Groups

• Appendix C: Rebellion on Different Types of Divisions

• Appendix D: Models of Rebellion on Government Sponsored Bills Only

• Appendix E: Differences in Labour Party Rebellion Following Leadership Change

• Appendix F: List of Party Switchers

• Appendix G: Discussion of Empirical Model

Appendix A: Wordscores Estimation of Ideology

This Appendix describes our method for ideologically scaling British MPs using their speeches on the , which were originally produced for a separate study on welfare reform (O’Grady, 2017). We cover (i) data collection, (ii) estimation, (iii) raw results, and (iv) validity checks. The resulting scales turn out to be highly valid, and provide an excellent guide to MPs’ ideologies using data that is completely separate to the voting data that forms the bulk of the evidence in our paper.

A1: Collection of Speech Data

Speeches come from an original collection of every speech made about issues related to welfare in the House of Commons from 1987-2007, covering the period over which the Labour party moved

1 to the center under , adopted and enacted policies of welfare reform, and won office at the expense of the Conservatives. Restricting the speeches to a single issue area is useful for estimating ideologies because with multiple topics there is a danger of conflating genuine extremism (a tendency to speak in extreme ways) with a tendency or requirement to talk a lot about topics that are relatively extreme to begin with (Lauderdale and Herzog, 2016). The latter is a particular concern in a parliamentary system like the UK, where some MPs are also ministers with formal requirements to speak about their own issue area. Debates were scraped from the online transcripts. We included both regular debates and scheduled question times for relevant ministries, including Social Security and the Treasury. It is easy to identify which question-answers and debates are relevant, because they are labeled within the online transcript (Hansard) with prosaic titles such as “welfare reform ”. Therefore, after scraping the entire Hansard transcript, the second stage of data collection involved using a simple dictionary of terms related to welfare to identify and retain only the relevant speeches. The dictionary was determined through careful reading, as well as knowledge of the British policy agenda. Using custom Python scripts, the debates were amalgamated and stored by party and individual MP. The speeches were then divided into two periods. The first runs from the 1987 election up to the death of John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader, in June 1994, when Labour largely remained a traditional social democratic party. The second runs from June 1994 up to June 2007, the era of under Tony Blair, when it embraced welfare reform. Each MP is represented in one or both of the two periods by a single document, consisting of all speeches they made about welfare in that time. MPs appearing in both periods feature as two separate documents, although many only feature in one period, depending on when they were in office or when they spoke on welfare issues. It is necessary to split MPs in this way due to ideological change over time amongst Labour MPs, who shifted substantially to the center under Blair. In our paper, the 1987-94 speeches are used to estimate ideological extremity for MPs in the 1992-2001 period, and the 1994-2007 speeches are used to estimate extremity for the later 2005-15 period. Finally, MPs whose total speeches about welfare comprised only a handful of sentences were discarded, as these documents do not contain sufficient information to estimate the MP’s position. Because of this, and because not all MPs made a single speech about welfare, we estimate positions for a sample of all MPs who held office over the period. Nonetheless many famous names are included, both ministers and , and there is very substantial ideological diversity among the MPs. Table A1 shows the number of MPs featured in each period and in both periods, by party:

A2: Estimation

MPs for the two parties were scaled separately, meaning that MPs’ positions are comparable within each party, but not between parties. MPs from both periods were scaled together: within parties,

2 Table A1: Number of MPs in dataset of speeches

1987-94 1994-2007 Both Periods* Labour 159 290 90 Conservative 197 198 86

*These MPs are also included in the totals for each individual period

the scores are comparable over time. Estimation was carried out with the Wordscores algorithm (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003) using Will Lowe’s Austin package in R (Lowe, 2015). Wordscores is a supervised algorithm that compares a set of texts whose positions are unknown (‘virgin texts’), to texts whose ideological positions are known in advance (reference texts). Virgin documents are scored according to their similarity to these reference texts in terms of relative word usage. The algorithm works better when the reference documents are as long, comprehensive and linguistically diverse as possible, minimizing the number of unique words in each (Lowe, 2008). As a result, we produced reference documents that amalgamate the documents of a substantial number of legislators into one long document. Importantly, this means that the algorithm is in practice ‘lightly supervised’, since even individual MPs that appear in the reference documents need not be scored as extreme, if their speech deviates from the typical pattern within these documents. The reference documents were chosen based on membership in known, extreme factions; they were not selected by pre-examining the speeches. For Labour, the left-wing reference document consists of all speeches made by members of the far-left ‘’ during the pre- Blair era, when the party as a whole was more left-wing. These MPs are uncontroversially extreme. As one expert on the House of Commons puts it “the Group’s membership was disproportionately leftwing” (Cowley, 2002), and it contains many famous figures from the Labour left, including , , and . In total, 23 Socialist Campaign Group MPs were included in the reference document. On the right, we used speeches made by Secretaries of State in the later period who were responsible for the welfare state, all of whom were close to Tony Blair, supported welfare reforms, and were clearly situated on the right of the party (, Andrew Smith, , and John Hutton). By definition, their rhetoric in parliament supported the more centrist Blair administration. For the Conservatives, the left-wing reference document consists of all MPs (in both peri- ods) who were members of the ‘ Reform Group.’ This is a moderate faction that has ad- vocated for moving the Conservatives to the center, and is associated with socially progressive, pro-European views. Its membership includes a number of famous moderates, including , and , as well as MPs who defected to either Labour or the Liberal Democrats, including Alan Howarth and Emma Nicholson. The right-wing reference

3 document contains members of the Thatcherite ‘No Turning Back’ group. As the name suggests, this group argues for a continuation of ’s conservative economic policies, and includes famous names from the right, including Iain Duncan-Smith, and . In all, the left Tory document contains 25 MPs, and the right document contains 21 MPs, and we excluded speeches that were made when individuals were either secretaries of state for social secu- rity, or party leaders, since it is by no means clear in the Conservative case that party leaders were situated at one end of the spectrum, unlike Labour, where Tony Blair and much of his ministerial team were uncontroversially on the right of the party. We reduced each individual MP’s document to a ‘bag of words’, and also carried out standard pre-processing of the texts, removing stopwords and numbers, and rare words that appear in less than 3% of all documents to prevent the estimation being heavily influenced by unusual, non- partisan words. Technical words relating to legislation, such as “bill”, “minister” and “amendment”, were also removed to prevent differences occurring between ministers and back-benchers that are merely due to their different formal responsibilities for introducing legislation. We then placed all documents on a common scale using WordScores, for which full mathematical details are available in Laver, Benoit and Garry (2003).

A3: Results

As an illustration of the raw results, Figures A1 and A2 show the estimated positions, and associated 95% confidence intervals, of selected Conservative and Labour MPs in the periods when they were (mostly) in government, which in our model, is the time when rebellions from backbenchers are most likely to occur. The left of the Figures corresponds to the most moderate MPs, and the right to the most conservative. The results appear very sensible. On the left end of the Conservatives are a number of well-known moderates, including Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, and the leader John , together with three MPs who subsequently defected to Labour (, Alan Howarth and Emma Nicholson). The right end contains a number of famous extremists, such as , well-known as the President of the socially conservative , and author of its inaugural pamphlet Faith, Flag and Family, which provides a good summary of his political prioirities, John Carlisle, a supporter of the South African regime, and John Redwood, who challenged from the right for the party leadership in 1995. The Labour left contains a Who’s Who of the party’s far-left, including the current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is widely regarded as Labour’s most left-wing leader in a generation, and other rebellious figures such as , John McDonnell and Tony Benn. The right, on the other hand, is a Who’s Who of New Labour, containing many famous figures who were instrumental in moving the party to the center under Tony Blair, and advocated for centrist, moderate policies. Intuitively, is located somewhat to the left of some of the more conservative New

4 Labour Figures, which is consistent with his image as a slightly more moderate voice in the Blair era. Although the raw results appear very sensible and consistent with our knowledge of British politics, it remains important to further validate the results, because there are no formal statistical tests of how well a particular implementation of text analysis has performed (Grimmer and Stewart, 2013). With that in mind, we now go on to validate the results by (i) making comparisons between estimated wordscores positions for different groups of MPs who should, in theory, take opposing positions, and (ii) examining the language associated with each end of the estimated scale, to ensure that we are capturing a genuine ideogical spectrum.

5 Figure A1: Estimated Wordscores Positions for Selected Conservative MPs, 1987-1994, with 95% Confidence Intervals

John Carlisle ● Tim Janman ● ● John Redwood ● Edward Leigh ● ● ● ● Neil Hamilton ● Peter Brooke ● Edwina Currie ● Michael Forsyth ● ● ● ● ● Steve Norris ● Iain Duncan−Smith ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● David Nicholson ● ● Phil Gallie ● ● Quentin Davies ● ● ● ● ● ● ● Michael Heseltine ● Kenneth Clarke ● William Waldegrave ● John Major ● George Young ● Douglas Hurd ● Emma Nicholson ● ● ● ● Alan Howarth ● ● ● −0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 Estimated Wordscores Position

6 Figure A2: Estimated Wordscores Positions for Selected Labour MPs, 1994-2007, with 95% Confidence Intervals

John Hutton ● ● ● David Blunkett ● ● ● ● ● ● Angela Eagle ● ● ● ● ● Gordon Brown ● ● Jim Cunningham ● ● ● ● John Reid ● ● Oona King ● Frank Field ● ● Diane Abbott ● Adam Ingram ● ● ● ● ● Gerry Bermingham ● ● John McDonnell ● ● Bob Marshall−Andrews ● ● Jeremy Corbyn ● ● ● Dennis Skinner ● ● ● Denis MacShane ● Tony Benn ● Joan Lestor ● Michael Martin ● Tommy Graham ● Eric Clarke ● Alfred Morris ● −1.0 −0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 Estimated Wordscores Position

7 A4: Validation - Comparisons to Known Groups

Figure A3 compares estimated wordscores positions for selected groups of Labour MPs who should take opposing positions on welfare reform, while Figure A4 does the same for Conservatives. In each case, box-and-whisker plots illustrate the distribution of estimated scores for each subgroup. For Labour, Panel (a) of Figure A3 compares estimates for MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group in the first period to other MPs in the first period who later went on to become ministers in the Blair government; Blair was associated with the right of the party, and we would expect future ministers in his government to also be ideologically on the right of the party. It shows that Campaign group members were much more left-wing, and that future ministers were much more right-wing than campaign group members (and slightly more right-wing than everyone else), as expected. Panel (b) compares Campaign Group members in that period to all MPs in that period who were at some point ministers or secretaries of state with responsibility for welfare issues, who were charged with implementing Blair’s controversial welfare reforms. This shows exactly the pattern we would expect.

Figure A3: Comparisons of Estimated Wordscores Positions for Groups of Labour MPs

(a) First Period, Campaign Group MPs (b) Second Period, Campaign Group MPs vs. (c) Second Period, MPs in leftmost 30 and vs. Future Ministers Ministers with Responsibility for Welfare rightmost 30 from Kellerman (2012)

1.0 ●

0.6 −0.2

0.4 0.5 −0.4

● 0.2

−0.6 ● 0.0 0.0

−0.8 Estimated Score Estimated Score Estimated Score −0.2 ●

−1.0 −0.5 −0.4

−0.6 ● −1.2 ● ●

Campaign Future Campaign Most Left Most Right Group Others Ministers Group Others Ministers 30 30

Panel (c) makes use of the only previous ideal points produced for British MPs by (Kellermann, 2012) for the 1998-99 parliamentary session, using signatures on “early day motions”, a form of

8 non-binding statement that back-bench MPs can circulate and sign. He scales these to place back- bench MPs in a left-right ideological space. The panel shows estimated scores for MPs in our analysis who are amongst the 30 most leftwing and 30 most rightwing Labour MPs in his analysis. The pattern here is in the expected direction, but nonetheless weaker than elsewhere. On closer inspection, the reason appears to be that Kellerman’s results are somewhat odd at the right end of the spectrum. While he does a good job of identifying left-wing MPs, the most right-wing group contains mostly moderate MPs, and some famous left-wingers such as Glenda Jackson. Part of the reason may be that EDMs are rarely signed by ministers, who are mostly missing from his data, but were among the most extreme MPs over the period. Overall, Figure A3 clearly suggests that the results are picking up genuine intra-party ideological differences.

Figure A4: Comparisons of Estimated Wordscores Positions for Groups of Conservative MPs

(a) First Period, Cornerstone and (b) Second Period, Cornerstone and (c) Second Period, MPs in leftmost 30 and Monday Club MPs vs. Others Monday Club MPs vs. Others rightmost 30 from Kellerman (2012)

● ● 0.8

● 0.6 0.6 ● 0.5 0.4 0.4 ● 0.2

● 0.0 ● 0.0 0.2 Estimated Score Estimated Score Estimated Score

−0.2

0.0 −0.4 −0.5 ● ● ● ● ● ● −0.6 ●

Cornerstone Group Cornerstone Group Most Left Most Right Others and Monday Club Others and Monday Club 30 30

For the Conservatives there are other known factions, with clear ideological positions, against which we can compare our results. Specifically, both the Monday Club and the Cornerstone groups of MPs are well-known for taking very conservative positions, particularly on social and national security issues, as well as the . Panels (a) and (b) of Figure A4 compare the estimated positions of MPs who were members of these factions to MPs who were not, in the first and second periods respectively. The results are very strongly in the direction we would expect.

9 Our results seem to do a good job of picking up ideologically extreme legislators. The results are not driven by overlap with the training data (members of the No Turning Back group), since fewer than one-third of the No Turning Back MPs were also members of either of the other factions. The fact that the Monday Club and Cornerstone groups are primarily known for their socially (rather than economically) conservative stances is especially promising, suggesting that our speeches on welfare issues are successfully identifying MPs who are ideologically extreme in other policy areas, too. Panel (c) again compares to Kellerman’s results. Here, there is no relationship between his measures and ours. Again, the reason appears to be that his measures do not pick out extremists on the right of the party. Very few of the known and obvious extremists on the right of the party make it into the top 30 of his scale. it may be that the signing of EDMs is not an especially ideological act for many MPs.

A5: Validation - Characterizing the Words

Tables A2 and A3 display the most representative words used by MPs at each end of the esti- mated scales, for Labour and the Conservatives respectively. The ‘left’ and ‘right’ columns include words used by the bottom and top 10% of documents on each scale. These words were selected by down-weighting infrequently-used terms that convey little political meaning, using a model-based approach developed by Monroe, Colaresi and Quinn (2008). Essentially, the method selects impor- tant words that are used most differently between the two groups: a word that features in the ‘left’ column is used much more frequently by the most left-wing MPs than the the most right-wing. In the case of Labour, words associated with the left end of the scale pick up common concerns of the classic Labour left, as well as language that suggests support for standard welfare policies and the groups that receive them. They talk about coal, manufacturing, industry and . They are concerned about housing, hospitals, unemployment and the loss of jobs, as well as potentially vulnerable groups helped by traditional welfare policies, like the unemployed, the old, workers, the poor, the young and the ill, and also use emotive language like worse or suffering. On the right end of the Labour spectrum, on the other hand, we find words associated with welfare reform that emphasize work, with new policies like credits and the new deal that aimed to change welfare programs, but also suggested there were issues with traditional welfare provision, showing less instinctive empathy with its recipients, who needed opportunities, measures, and proposals to change their behaviour, and may have been committing fraud. Instead of the unemployed, there is a focus on those who are working, and there is a lot of New Labour- managerial language like approach, and service, rather than emotive language. These are words, therefore, that raise common concerns of the Blairite Labour right, and overall, the words at each end seem to capture a clear Old Labour/New Labour spectrum, which was the main ideological division in the party at the time. The ’ words suggest a left-right division that is focused around help and support for

10 the poorest at one end, and concern for businesses and the cost of such services at the other. In other words, it seems to capture a clear economic division between those who are more willing to support welfare measures, and those who worry about the cost of such policies for businesses and taxpayers. Those on the left were more likely to use mostly neutral or even positive language about the provision of welfare, such as help, support, receiving, increase, resources and care. Those on the right are more likely to discuss pay, wages, jobs, business, industry, the economy, directors, trade, rural areas and , all of which reference more traditionally conservative causes. The frequent references to minimum wages are likely to be negative, rather than positive, since many Conservatives strongly opposed its introduction by the Blair government due to concerns about the impact on businesses. Arguably, the division here seems to suggest a split between more moderate ‘One-Nation’ Tories who tend to show concern for all groups in society, versus more traditional conservatives who strongly emphasize issues facing businesses and taxpayers. In other words, both sets of words suggest that we are picking up genuine left-right ideological differences that reflect known divisions within the parties.

11 12

Table A2: Most important words for Labour MPs at each end of the spectrum

Left Right

1. old 26. attendance 1. work 26. guarantee 2. social 27. 2. tax 27. fraud 3. 28. south 3. pension 28. parents 4. wages 29. coal 4. new 29. lone 5. poor 30. afford 5. system 30. welfare 6. city 31. unemployment 6. credit 31. proposals 7. hospital 32. trade 7. ensure 32. clear 8. manufacturing 33. many 8. help 33. previous 9. authority 34. worse 9. deal 34. revenue 10. money 35. deputy 10. support 35. review 11. elderly 36. tonight 11. pensioners 36. poorest 12. industry 37. industrial 12. benefits 37. basic 13. here 38. students 13. right 38. approach 14. motion 39. fund 14. child 39. progress 15. unemployed 40. community 15. important 40. staff 16. even 41. council 16. minimum 41. information 17. british 42. suffering 17. income 42. disability 18. night 43. rich 18. measures 43. term 19. young 44. union 19. working 44. service 20. workers 45. order 20. families 45. opportunities 21. housing 46. lost 21. national 46. need 22. live 47. grant 22. 47. first 23. loss 48. called 23. reform 48. across 24. jobs 49. thousands 24. more 49. jobcentre 25. local 50. ill 25. agency 50. issues Table A3: Most important words for Conservative MPs at each end of the spectrum

Left Right

1. benefit 26. families 1. minimum 26. rural 2. support 27. payments 2. wage 27. directors 3. child 28. available 3. tax 28. want 4. income 29. cases 4. wages 29. human 5. social 30. claimants 5. pay 30. save 6. disabled 31. period 6. jobs 31. problems 7. million 32. absent 7. company 32. bad 8. agency 33. authorities 8. industry 33. taxes 9. help 34. made 9. what 34. poverty 10. fund 35. family 10. manufacturing 35. create 11. allowance 36. scheme 11. many 36. election 12. maintenance 37. shall 12. businesses 37. president 13. security 38. lone 13. schools 38. taxation 14. benefits 39. number 14. trade 39. state 15. year 40. account 15. deputy 40. get 16. care 41. payment 16. treasury 41. one 17. parents 42. work 17. constituency 42. small 18. housing 43. increase 18. hour 43. little 19. regulations 44. uprating 19. low 44. bank 20. changes 45. resources 20. why 45. civil 21. expenditure 46. announced 21. workers 46. tested 22. local 47. receiving 22. economy 47. measure 23. parent 48. points 23. told 48. interesting 24. disability 49. extra 24. saying 49. surely 25. april 50. test 25. money 50. guarantee

13 Appendix B: MP Membership in Ideological Groups for Estimation of Models 5–8 in Table 2

Table A4: Groups Membership Lists Used in Table 2

Labour Socialist Campaign Group Alan Simpson Audrey Wise Bill Michie David Anderson David Hamilton David Taylor Dennis Skinner Diane Abbott Donald Dixon Ernie Ross Harold Best Harry Barnes Jeremy Corbyn Jimmy Wray -Walker John McDonnell John McAllion Ken Livingstone Maria Fyfe Martin Caton Mike Wood Phil Sawford Ray Powell Robert Litherland Robert Parry Robert Wareing Ronnie Campbell Terry Lewis Tess Kingham Tony Banks Tony Benn Nicholas Winterton Patrick Cormack Conservative Cornerstone Group Andrew Turner Bill Cash Brian Binley Charles Walker David Davies David Jones Edward Leigh Gerald Howarth Ian Liddell-Granger John Hayes John Redwood Lee Scott Phillip Davies Phillip Hollobone Stewart Jackson Conservative No Turning Back Group Andrew Turner Angela Watkinson Christopher Chope Edward Leigh Gerald Howarth Greg Hands Greg Knight John Redwood John Whittingdale David Davis Demond Swayne Iain Duncan-Smith Jonathan Djangoly Liam Fox Michael Portillo Paul Goodman Peter Lilley

14 Appendix C: Rebellion on Different Types of Divisions

Table A5 presents the number of divisions by type in the 2005–2010 and 2010–2015 as determined by the division headings on www..com. It also presents the average number of rebels per division. We calculate the average as the total number of rebels on a given type of division over the total number of rebellions classified as that type. The most clear pattern that emerges is the very low number of rebels on Opposition Day divisions. This fits our theory, which suggests that rebellion is not a good mechanism for sending messages to voters when in opposition and on opposition sponsored items.

Table A5: Types of Divisions and Level of Rebellion 2005–2015

2005–2010 Opposition Days Second Reading Third Reading Clauses Other Ave. Rebels per Division 1.21 13.27 16.76 4.13 10.43 No. of Divisions 128 15 17 389 739 2010–2015 Opposition Days Second Reading Third Reading Clauses Other Ave. Rebels per Division 0.65 8.75 7.833 5.29 9.56 No. of Divisions 155 75 42 456 511

15 Appendix D: Models of Rebellion on Government Sponsored Bills Only

Using data from Br¨auninger,M¨ullerand Stecker (2016), we rerun the analysis found in Tables 2 and 3 in the main paper for the later period, 2005–2015, on the subset of divisions sponsored by the governing party, excluding private member bills. These are presumably bills that the government wishes to pass. We find that our results are robust in this subset of data. The results are presented here in Table A6. The coefficients on the measures of ideological extremism (Most Rebellious, Group, and Extremism Score), along with their interactions with the Government dummy are positive, statistically significant, and of similar magnitude to those presented in the paper using the full set of divisions. The control variables behave similarly, as well.

16 Table A6: Effect of Government Status on Rebellion: Fractional Logit Models with Random Effects

Labour Conservative Labour Conservative

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Government 0.128 0.001 0.671∗∗∗ 0.146 1.376∗∗∗ 0.003 (0.139) (0.144) (0.106) (0.107) (0.125) (0.142) Most Rebellious 1.616∗∗∗ 1.769∗∗∗ (0.152) (0.150) Group 1.569∗∗∗ 0.945∗∗∗ (0.285) (0.258) Extremism Score 1.226∗∗∗ 1.537∗∗∗ (0.469) (0.555) Majority −0.341∗∗∗ 0.009 −0.476∗∗∗ −0.236 −1.132∗∗∗ −0.204

17 (0.117) (0.139) (0.144) (0.164) (0.195) (0.234) Tenure 4.887∗∗∗ 2.327∗ 10.400∗∗∗ 2.926 14.508∗∗∗ 7.006∗∗ (1.576) (1.303) (2.234) (2.047) (3.883) (3.333) Leader −0.597∗∗ −0.971∗∗∗ −1.132∗∗∗ −1.458∗∗∗ −0.770∗∗ −1.502∗∗∗ (0.264) (0.233) (0.305) (0.263) (0.365) (0.296) Gov*Most Rebel 1.128∗∗∗ 0.752∗∗∗ (0.155) (0.169) Gov*Group 0.767∗∗∗ 0.498∗∗∗ (0.141) (0.144) Gov*Ext Score 0.554∗ 0.742∗∗ (0.314) (0.343) Constant −6.772∗∗∗ −6.428∗∗∗ −6.968∗∗∗ −6.046∗∗∗ −7.025∗∗∗ −6.306∗∗∗ (0.134) (0.161) (0.160) (0.175) (0.316) (0.380)

N 551 460 552 460 301 207 Log Likelihood -903.290 -774.490 -1079.065 -978.637 -631.724 -422.767

∗∗∗p < .01; ∗∗p < .05; ∗p < .1 Appendix E: Differences in Labour Party Rebellion Following Lead- ership Change

As an additional robustness check, we seek to ensure that rebellion patterns among Labour MPs did not shift when the Labour Party leadership changed from John Smith to Tony Blair and again when Blair stepped down as PM in favor of Gordon Brown. Blair’s leadership represented a marked shift towards the center compared with Smith, and as such, could have resulted in increased rebelliousness among MPs. Difference of proportions t-tests, reveal no difference in the rates or rebellion before and after the leadership changes. During the 1992–1997 parliament, the average Labour MP rebelled on 0.45% of divisions under Smith and on 0.47% of divisions under Blair (p = 0.58). During the 2005–2010 parliament, the average Labour MP rebelled on 1% of divisions under Blair and 0.08% of divisions under Brown (p = 0.20). In the most recent parliament, we find that Corbyn’s leadership has affected the Labour Party in two ways. First, the overall number of rebellions has increased, again, usual for an opposition party. When comparing Corbyn’s leadership with Harriet Harman’s interim tenure at the beginning of the 2015 parliament, we find that Corbyn has suffered significantly more rebellions than Harman, a result that holds for Corbyn’s leadership both before and after the EU referendum. Second, the exodus of the usual party leadership to the backbenches has severely hindered Corbyn’s ability to recruit an effective . In one case , an 81 year-old MP responsible for writing a book titled “Commons Knowledge: How to be a ” held two cabinet level portfolios concurrently between July and October 2016. With no credible control over opposition appointments, Labour has lost a powerful tool for influencing the discipline of its members.

Appendix F: List of Party Switchers

We drop from our analysis MPs who switched parties. We include in this definition any MP who lost the party whip and became independent for more than one month. In doing so, we create a conservative test of our argument a MPs were expelled from the party are both likely to hold extreme positions and rebel at higher rates. We also drop Speakers of the House — , Michael Martin, Bernard Weatherill, and — and MPs who served only partial terms. The complete list of party-switchers is found in Table A7.

18 19

Table A7: Party Switchers

Name Party Switch Name Party Switch Rupert Allason Con–Ind Mike Hancok Lab–LD Richard Body Con–Ind Con–Ind Nicholas Budgen Con–LD John Horam Lab–Con–SDP Dennis Canavan LD–Lab Alan Howarth Lab–Con Michael Carttiss Ind–Con Andrew Hunter Con–Ind–DUP Douglas Carswell Con–UKIP Robert Jackson Lab–Con Lab–Ind Ken Livingstone Lab–Ind LD–Con Robert Maclennan Lab–SDP–LD Bryan Davies SNP–Lab Tony Marlow Lab–Ind Quentin Davies Lab–Con Lab–LD Lab–Ind Lab–Ind Hugh Dykes Con–LD Emma Nicholson Lab–LD Con–Ind Andrew Pelling Lab–Ind George Galloway Lab–Ind Mark Reckless Con–UKIP George Gardiner Con–Ref Party Lab–Ind Christoper Gill Con–Ind Bob Spink Con–UKIP Teresa Gorman Con–Ind Peter Temple-Morris Con–Lab Tommy Graham Lab–Ind Lab–Ind–LD Jane Griffiths Lab–Ind Robert Wareing Lab–Ind Lab–Con Appendix G: Discussion of Empirical Model

We gather data on the a) the frequency with which each MP votes on divisions, and b) the frequency with which the MP votes in opposition to his or her party majority on those divisions. Thus, our data are structured as in Table A8.

Table A8: Example Data

MP Name Total Votes Total Rebellions MP 1 1000 100 MP 2 900 0 MP 3 875 15 MP 4 1100 75

With such a setup, we have a number of modeling choices. We could simply predict the per- centage of rebellions using OLS. Unfortunately, the vast majority of MPs rebel very rarely. Such “floor effects” will induce OLS to make nonsensical predictions, with party loyalty rates well over 100% and disloyalty rates below 0%. Alternatively, we might model the proportion of rebellion using beta regressions. Unfortunately, beta regression cannot be estimated on dependent variables that actually take on a value of 0 or 1. Several MPs never rebel from their party, meaning that many of these proportions of rebellion are in fact 0. Agresti (2007) points out that the proper way of thinking about data structures like these is as a series of binomial trials. So for MP 1, we do not have a proportion or percentage, but a vector of 900 0’s and 100 1’s. In such a setup, the natural modeling choice is a logit model (given its utility for binary data). The fractional logit model transforms “grouped” data like this into a series of vectors of binomial trials, and then uses a normal logit model to predict the probability of observing a 1 (in our case, the probability of observing a rebellion). Of course, expanding these proportions into vectors of binomial trials means that MP 1 will appear many times in the same year of the data set, in addition to potentially appearing in multiple years (or in our case, parliamentary terms). Such repeated observation of a unit in a cross-section can be handled well within the multilevel modeling tradition by incorporating a random inter- cept for the repeating unit of interest. That is, the data appearing in the table below actually represents a series of votes, nested within individuals, nested within parliamentary terms. Our primary inferential interest is in the interaction of some individual and term effects, but to avoid shrinking standard errors excessively as a result of individuals appearing multiple times in the data set, we incorporate a varying intercept for each MP. Such an approach models out any unobserved heterogeneity across individuals in our data set in rebellion. With this framework in mind, our logit model predicts the probability that an individual will

20 rebel as a function of his or her 1) ideology, 2) government status, and 3) an interaction of these two covariates (and other controls). Such a model could be estimated cross-sectionally (across MPs), and would suggestthat the effects of ideology on disloyalty are conditional on governing party status. No observations need to be dropped from the analysis for this to happen in a cross- sectional framework. However, when we move to an time series panel data framework, we have two “types” of variance to consider: the between unit (cross-sectional) variance, and the within unit (temporal) variance. By incorporating varying intercepts for units, we remove the between unit variance in rebellion and concentrate on the within unit variance in rebellion. Within unit variance is by definition, the only variance left for our model to consider as responding to the covariates in our model.

21 References

Agresti, Alan. 2007. An Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis. Vol. 423 Wiley-Interscience.

Br¨auninger,Thomas, Jochen M¨ullerand Christian Stecker. 2016. “Modeling Preferences Using Roll Call Votes in Parliamentary Systems.” Political Analysis 24(2):189–210.

Cowley, Philip. 2002. Revolts and Rebellions: Parliamentary Voting under Blair. London, UK: Politico’s Publishing.

Grimmer, J. and B. M. Stewart. 2013. “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21(3):267–297.

Kellermann, Michael. 2012. “Estimating ideal points in the British House of Commons.” American Journal of Political Science 56(3):757–77.

Lauderdale, Benjamin E. and Alexander Herzog. 2016. “Measuring political positions from legisla- tive speech.” Political Analysis 24(3):374–394.

Laver, Michael, Kenneth Benoit and John Garry. 2003. “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data.” American Political Science Review 97(2):311–331.

Lowe, Will. 2008. “Understanding Wordscores.” Political Analysis 16:356–371.

Lowe, Will. 2015. “Austin: Do things with words.” Version 0.2.2. http://github.org/conjugateprior/austin.

Monroe, Burt, Michael Colaresi and Kevin Quinn. 2008. “Fightin’ Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict.” Political Analysis 16:372–403.

O’Grady, Tom. 2017. Recruitment, Rhetoric and Reform: New Labour’s Politicians and the Trans- formation of British Welfare Provision. PhD thesis Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

22