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The Geography of Voting Behaviour: Towards a Roll-Call Analysis of England’S Reformed Electoral Map, 1832-68

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The geography of voting behaviour: towards a roll-call analysis of England’s reformed electoral map, 1832-68 This paper uses a constituency-led analysis of voting in the Commons between 1832 and 1868 to examine the diversity of party labels in the reformed UK electoral system, provide a four- nation analysis of MP behaviour in the division lobbies, and explore the political effects of the 1832 Boundary Act.1 It has evolved from the work that I’ve been doing to develop the History of Parliament and Eggers and Spirling dataset of UK parliamentary divisions, the first ever comprehensive digitised record of the 20,262 parliamentary divisions that took place in the Commons between 1836 and 1910. I started doing this work for my forthcoming book, which is the first monograph to offer a detailed analysis of the 1832 Boundary Act. I had a specific question that I wanted to answer for the book, which I’ll discuss in the final part of this paper: what impact did the substantial redrawing of England’s electoral map in 1832 have on the formation of governments, decision-making in the Commons and the evolution of party between 1832 and 1868? I’d done some basic analysis of party labels and voting in the Commons as part of my earlier attempts to answer this question, but I wanted to make use of this new dataset to complete a more comprehensive investigation. As well as providing an opportunity for the kind of detailed global structural analysis of the electoral system that I was immediately concerned with, I think this incredible dataset has the potential to be developed into a major research tool for historians trying to understand the relationship between Westminster, the reformed electoral system and nineteenth-century UK politics and political culture. But small steps first. I’ll use the first part of this paper to introduce the revisions and extensions that I’ve made to the division list dataset, before using the revised dataset to provide a four-nation overview of voting in the Commons between the first and second Reform Acts. This analysis will focus on voting in major confidence motions, and three key policy areas that defined Westminster politics between 1832 and 1868 – free trade, electoral reform and the reform of the Church. I’ll then turn my attention to England’s constituency system to give a taste of how I’ve been using the dataset to analyse England’s reformed electoral map. This paper draws from the techniques of roll-call analysis, which have been developed by political scientists and historians, in the British context at least, since the 1960s. As a quantitative method it is more commonly associated with examining the American legislature (hence the ‘roll-call’ name), but major work has been done on the voting records of the Commons between 1832 and 1868. Due to the vast resources required to create a comprehensive set of voting records, previous work has generally focused on analysing individual parliaments, and usually only a specific set of votes. It has also focused primarily on measuring partisanship and party discipline at Westminster, either by comparing the voting records of MPs against party labels, using scaling methods to identify the political positions of individual MPs, or comparing MPs’ votes against the activity of prototypical party whips in the Commons.2 Eggers and Spirling’s recent analysis of voting behaviour in the Commons 1 I would like to thank Dr Philip Salmon and Dr Kathryn Rix for their comments on an early version of this paper, and the latter for very kindly providing me with images of MPs voting in the lobbies and contemporary quotations on the neutralising impact of double-member seats. 2 For the first technique see: J. Lowell, ‘The Influence of Party on Legislation in England and America’, Annual Report for the American Historical Association (1901), i. 321-544; D. Beales, ‘Parliamentary Parties and the Independent Member’, 1810-1860’, in Robson, R. (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (1967), 1-19; Hugh Berrington, ‘Partisanship and Dissidence in the Nineteenth Century House of Commons’, Parliamentary Affairs (1968), xxi. 338-374; D. Close, ‘The Formation of a Two-Party Alignment in the House of Commons Martin Spychal 1 The geography of voting behaviour: towards a roll-call analysis of England’s reformed electoral map, 1832-68 between 1836 and 1910 (which utilised their new dataset) applied the latter technique, and suggested that Ian Newbould’s conclusions on party discipline in the Commons during the 1830s (whose work was based on the former technique), and the observations of a number of qualitative studies covering the entire period hold true. While ‘party’ organisation at Westminster was very gradually assuming some of its twentieth-century characteristics, between 1832 and 1868 government authority continued to rely on ‘cohesive, yet mutable, party connection[s]’ in the Commons. These connections, as will be reaffirmed in this analysis, could quickly break down if an opposition identified sufficient weakness among a government’s supporters to turn a policy question into an issue of confidence – a tactic that remained the general method of bringing down a government throughout the period.3 Comparatively less attention has been paid by roll-call analysis to the links between constituencies and voting habits in the Commons. Work completed by a number of historians on William Aydelotte’s pioneering dataset of votes for the 1841-1847 parliament linked constituency size (according to its electorate) and a constituency’s socio-economic profile to the behaviour of MPs. Aydelotte, and later Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, both observed a clear correlation between a Conservative MPs decision to support free trade or protection in 1846, and the economic interest of his constituency. They also revealed that boroughs with large electorates were more likely to favour politically and economically liberal policies between 1841 and 1847, whereas MPs returned for distinctively rural, small boroughs and counties were most zealous in their advocacy of agricultural protection.4 between 1830 and 1841’, English Historical Review, 84, 331 (1969), 257-77; Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 17-23; ‘The Emergence of a Two-Party system’, 25-31; ‘Whiggery and the Growth of Party’, 137-56. For the second technique see: W. O. Aydelotte, ‘Voting Patterns in the British House of Commons in the 1840s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1963), v. 134-163; Idem, Study 521 (Codebook). British House of Commons 1841– 1847 (1970) Iowa City, IA, Regional Social Science Data Archive of Iowa; J. Bylsma, ‘Party Structure in the 1852-1857 House of Commons: A Scalogram Analysis’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1977), 617-635; J. Bylsma, ‘Political Issues and Party Unity in the House of Commons, 1852-1857: A Scalogram Analysis’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 1968; R. G. Watt, ‘Parties and Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain, 1857-1859: a Study in Quantification’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1975; V. Cromwell, ‘Mapping the Political World of 1861: A Multidimensional Analysis of the House of Commons’, Legislative Studies Quarterly (1982), vii. 281-297; C. Schonhardt-Bailey, From the Corn Laws to Free Trade (Cambridge MA, 2006). For the third technique see: A. C. Eggers & A. Spirling, ‘Party Cohesion in Westminster Systems: Inducements, Replacement and Discipline in the House of Commons, 1836-1910’, British Journal of Political Science, 46 (2014), 571, 573-8. For an alternative method see: J. Coohill, Ideas of the Liberal Party: Perceptions, Agendas and Liberal Politics in the House of Commons, 1832-52 (2011), 113- 203. 3 Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 128-31; Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 17-23; ‘The Emergence of a Two-Party system’, 25-31; ‘Whiggery and the Growth of Party’, 137-56. Also see, Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 157-99; Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics; Hilton, Mad, Bad, 513-24. 4 W. Aydelotte, ‘Constituency Influence on the British House of Commons’, in W. Aydelotte (ed.), The History of Parliamentary Behaviour (New Jersey, 1977), 225-46; C. Schonhardt-Bailey, ‘Ideology, Party and Interests in the British Parliament of 1841–47’, British Journal of Political Science (2003), 581-605; C. Schonhardt- Bailey, From the Corn Laws to Free Trade (Cambridge MA, 2006); I. MacLean ‘Interests and Ideology in the United Kingdom Parliament of 1841-7: An Analysis of Roll Call Voting’, Contemporary Political Studies, 1 (1995), 1-20; I. MacLean, Rational choice and British politics - an analysis of rhetoric and manipulation from Peel to Blair (2001), 45-56; G. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the development of Political Parties in Victorian England (1987), 148-150. The only other examples of constituency based roll-call analyses have been provided by Cox, who utilised Aydelotte and Bylsma’s datasets to suggest a correlation between cross- party dissent and MPs that relied on cross-party splits at elections, and Eggers and Spirling, who revealed that MPs who were returned unopposed, or that represented Irish and Welsh constituencies, exhibited the poorest Martin Spychal 2 The geography of voting behaviour: towards a roll-call analysis of England’s reformed electoral map, 1832-68 These findings can be combined with the party label analysis completed by a number of historians to offer a basic bird’s eye view of how MPs from the four nations and certain types of constituency might have behaved at Westminster between 1832 and 1868. As the late Angus Hawkins noted, ‘deeply ingrained differences’ in electoral culture across the four nations produced markedly different national outcomes at each general election during the period.5 In England the Conservatives returned majorities between 1837 and 1852, and Wales was a Conservative stronghold aside from 1832 and 1865.
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