Competition and Communication The development of campaigning in Britain from the Second Reform Act to the First World War by Laura Bronner A thesis submitted to the Department of Government of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work, with the exception of the data collection for Chapters 3 and 4, and Chapter 3 itself, both of which were a collaboration with Daniel Ziblatt. On the data collection, Daniel Ziblatt provided the funding for the digitization of the election addresses, while I managed and validated the process. On Chapter 3, I am solely responsible for the analysis and the writing, though Daniel Ziblatt did contribute to earlier iterations of this paper. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 37,551 words. 3 For my loved ones Thank you for putting up with me 4 Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful for the help of my supervisor, Cheryl Schonhardt- Bailey, and my advisor, Ben Lauderdale. Cheryl’s command of the literature, her scholarly intuition for framing and her sense for seeking out puzzles have made this a vastly better and more interesting piece of work than it would otherwise have been. Ben’s expertise, his unfailing methodological guidance and his generosity with his code – as well as his appreciation for beautiful plots – have made this thesis more rigorous, and much prettier (despite my eventual abandonment of base R for ggplot2). Though I had no way of knowing this when I started, Cheryl and Ben proved a very complementary pair of advisers, and this thesis benefited enormously from their help and support. I owe a huge debt to Daniel Ziblatt. This thesis would have been entirely different, and a lot worse, without his magnanimity in offering to work withmeon the data collection project underlying Chapters 3 and 4; his wide-ranging curiosity and genuine excitement about historical work have been a huge inspiration and great help. I thank Petra Schleiter, who started me off on this path when she introduced me to comparative political institutions in my first year at Oxford. It is thanks to her contagious enthusiasm for the subject that I got hooked, and thanks to her encouragement and astute guidance that I felt confident enough to try this whole scholarship thing in the first place. Special thanks also goto Arthur Spirling, who generously hosted me at both Harvard and NYU and thereby literally changed my life. His work has obviously been an inspiration to me, but his advice and his perspective have been even more important. The friends I made during this process not only materially improved the thesis 5 itself, but also made me a vastly happier person while writing it. I thank Øyvind, for frequently re-igniting my interest in my own work with his unrelenting passion, across institutions and countries. I thank Jack, for having all the same crises one step ahead of me, so I could see that they do, in fact, have an end. I thank Dave, for doing work that was sufficiently different from mine that we rarely talked about it, and for instead supplying decompression and snark at the pub at the end of both long and short days at LSE. This process would have been a far bleaker one without the kindness, humor, and alcohol the three of you provided. For advice, both professional and personal, and a lot of fun over coffee, food, and drinks, I thank Judith, Pablo, Nick, Fabian, David and Maud. I can safely say that when I set out on this PhD journey, I had no idea what I was in for. While there were a lot of good times – many involving the people mentioned above – there were also some extremely tough ones, and my greatest thanks go to the people that helped me push past those. I thank my parents, who didn’t always understand what I was trying to explain, but were always there to help, disregarding distance and time difference, and regardless of whether the crisis was work-related or not. I thank Lenny, who did understand what I was doing, though perhaps not always why. Your coding support was greatly appreciated; your moral support was invaluable. And I am enormously indebted to Drew, whose seemingly inexhaustible encouragement, help, patience, and love made finishing this thesis possible, and who was there for me unfailingly despite finishing his own before he was comfortable showing me his worst self. I couldn’t have done this without you. 6 Abstract This thesis traces the development of political competition in Britain by exploring the relationship between politicians and their constituents; in particular, it exam- ines the decisions rank-and-file politicians made when choosing how to run election campaigns. Between the pre-Reform period and the First World War, three major developments changed campaigning. Firstly, campaigning shifted from clientelis- tic to programmatic. Secondly, competition became polarized along an economic left-right dimension. And thirdly, elections became a venue for holding incum- bents accountable by means of retrospective voting. Together, these three changes transformed political competition in Britain. Each of the three papers in this dissertation addresses one of these changes. The first paper shows how the Second Reform Act caused a shift in politicians’ preferences away from clientelistic campaigning. It uses a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the causal impact enfranchisement had on how MPs spoke in the House of Commons, finding that reform increased the extent to which MPs – particularly Liberals – discussed corruption. It argues that this increase raised the salience of corruption so much that previously abstaining or opposing Liberals came around and passed the Ballot Act in 1872. The second and third papers get more directly at the relationship between politicians and constituents by introducing a new dataset of all ‘election addresses’ issued by all parliamentary candidates in the six elections between 1892 and 1910, which provide, for each candidate, a comparable text advertising their political positions and personal qualities. The second paper, joint work with Daniel Zi- 7 blatt, uses these manifestos to show how campaigning became concentrated on an economic left-right dimension, and increasingly polarized. It also addresses the long-running debate over whether the rise of Labour doomed the Liberal Party into third place, showing that while Labour did initially stake out a unique pro- grammatic identity, by 1910 the Liberals moved to occupy the same ideological space, positioning themselves as the natural party of progressivism going into World War I. Finally, the third paper shows the rise of retrospective accountability in cam- paigning. It uses a regression discontinuity design to show that the way candidates appealed to their constituents depended on their position: incumbent candidates’ campaign addresses are more positive than those of challengers, indicating that politicians appeal to their constituents on the basis of their record in govern- ment. I show that this effect developed around the turn of the century, andis particularly strong in those constituencies in which the Third Reform Act of 1884 enfranchised more people. Together, the papers capture these three distinct facets of the transformation of campaigning. By using quantitative text analysis to explore parliamentary speeches and campaign manifestos, I am able to examine how rank-and-file politi- cians spoke about – and to – their constituents, and how this changed. Focusing on rank-and-file politicians rather than party leaders, the thesis shows the impor- tance of the decisions made by backbench politicians in changing how they related to their voters. 8 Contents Declaration 2 Acknowledgments 5 Abstract 7 List of figures 14 List of tables 15 1 Introduction 16 1.1 British political development ..................... 20 1.2 Capturing political preferences .................... 24 1.3 Methods ................................ 29 1.3.1 Text analysis ......................... 29 1.3.2 Causal and descriptive inference . 32 1.4 The papers .............................. 34 1.5 Data contribution ........................... 37 1.5.1 Election addresses ...................... 37 1.5.2 The six elections. ....................... 42 1.5.3 Our dataset .......................... 44 1.6 Structure ............................... 50 2 Franchise extension and the Ballot: The effects of the Second Reform Act on parliamentary debate 51 9 2.1 Background .............................. 53 2.1.1 The Second Reform Act ................... 54 2.1.2 The Ballot bill ........................ 57 2.2 Data and Method ........................... 62 2.2.1 Data .............................. 62 2.2.2 Getting at corruption .................... 64 2.2.3 Identification strategy .................... 67 2.3 Results ................................. 72 2.3.1 Findings ............................ 72 2.3.2 Mechanism: changing party dynamics . 73 2.3.3 Alternative explanations ................... 79 2.4 Conclusion ............................... 87 3 The Rise of the Modern Election Campaign: The Peers, the People, and the Polarization of the British Party System 90 3.1 The decline of the Liberals; the rise of Labour . 95 3.2 Data .................................. 100 3.2.1 Campaign election addresses . 100 3.2.2 Other datasources . 101 3.3 Method ................................ 102 3.4 Results ................................. 104 3.4.1 Campaign dimensionality . 104 3.4.2 Validating the dimensions . 106 3.4.3 Polarization . 114 3.4.4 Replacement . 117 3.4.5 Robustness checks . 121 10 3.5 Conclusion ............................... 124 4 Candidates’ use of emotive language in campaigning 127 4.1 Strategic campaigning . 129 4.2 Data and Method .