Taking the Leap: Voting, Rhetoric, and the Determinants of Electoral Reform∗ Scott Mosery Andrew Reevesz May 1, 2013 Abstract The Second Reform Act ushered in the age of democratic politics in the UK by expanding the voting franchise to include the working classes and providing new representation to industri- alized cities. Using unsupervised topic model analysis of parliamentary debates and quantitative analysis of roll call votes, we use new historical data to investigate why electoral reform suc- cessfully passed the House of Commons in 1867. Specifically we consider why reform passed under a minority Conservative government while a similar bill failed under a majority Liberal government despite no election or change in membership of the House of Commons. We find that party, not constituency, is responsible for explaining votes on reform and that, ultimately, it was the reduction in the number of aspects in the debate over reform that allowed a minority Conservative government to enact the Second Reform Act. ∗Paper prepared for the The Westminster Model of Democracy in Crisis? Comparative Perspectives on Origins, Development and Responses, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, May 13-14, 2013. yAssistant Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Sta. A1800, Austin, TX, 78712; http://smoser.webhost.utexas.edu/,
[email protected], (512) 232-7305. zW. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, 232 Bay State Road, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215; http://andrewreeves.org,
[email protected], (650)723-8016. 1 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom's electoral system was trans- formed from an aristocratic oligarchy to one exhibiting most of the modern hallmarks of a democ- racy.