Arthur Spirling

Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies

Cohesive government-versus-opposition voting is a robust empirical regularity in Westminster democracies. Using new data from the modern Scottish Parliament, we show that this pattern cannot be explained by similarity of preferences within or between the government and opposition ranks. We look at differences in the way that parties operate in Westminster and Holyrood, and use roll call records to show that the observed behavior is unlikely to be determined by preferences on any underlying issue dimension. Using a simple variant of the agenda-setting model—in which members of parliament can commit to their voting strategies—we show that the procedural rules for reaching collective decisions in Westminster systems can explain this phenomenon: in the equilibrium, on some bills, members of the opposition vote against the government irrespective of the proposal. Such strategic opposition can reinforce government cohesiveness and have a moderating effect on policy outcomes. We introduce new data from the House of Lords, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Assembly to distinguish our claims from competing accounts of the data.

Identifying Intraparty Voting Blocs in the U.K. House of Commons

Legislative voting records are an important source of information about legislator preferences, intraparty cohesiveness, and the divisiveness of various policy issues. Standard methods of analyzing a legislative voting record tend to have serious drawbacks when applied to legislatures, such as the United Kingdom House of Commons, that feature highly disciplined parties, strategic voting, and large amounts of missing data. We present a method (based on a Dirichlet process mixture model) for analyzing such voting records that does not suffer from these same problems. Our method is model-based and thus allows one to make probability statements about quantities of interest. It allows one to estimate the number of voting blocs within a party or any other group of members of parliament (MPs). Finally, it can be used as both a predictive model and an exploratory model. We illustrate these points through an application of the method to the voting records of Labour Party MPs in the 1997–2001 session of the U.K. House of Commons.

None of the Above The UK House of Commons votes on Reforming the House of Lords, February 2003 ⁄

In February 2003, members of the UK House of Commons voted on seven resolutions as to the future of the House of Lords. In quick succession, each possibility for reform was considered and then rejected at division. This paper examines plausible causes of this strange result. Inter alia, we reject notions of a voting cycle. We find that myopic and/or strategic voting by MPs was salient. We then explore the main voting groups and their party compositions.

Scaling the Critics: Uncovering the Latent Dimensions of Movie Criticism With an Item Response Approach

We study the critical opinions of expert movie reviewers as an item response problem. Building on earlier “unfolding” models, we develop a framework that models an individual’s decision to approve or disapprove of an item. Using this approach, we are able to recover the locations of movies and ideal points of critics in the same multidimensional space. We demonstrate that a three-dimensional model captures much of the variation in critical opinions. The first dimension signifies movie “quality” while the other two connote the nature and subject matter of the films. We then demonstrate that the dimensions uncovered from our “utility threshold model” are statistically significant predictors of a movie’s success, and are particularly useful in predicting the success of independent films.

Turning points in the Iraq conflict : Reversible jump markov chain Monte Carlo in political science

We consider and explore structural breaks in a day-by-day time series of civilian casualties for the current Iraq conflict: an undertaking of potential interest to scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics. We review Bayesian change-point techniques already used by political methodologists before advocating and briefly describing the use of reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to solve the estimation problem at hand. We find evidence of four change points, all associated with increasing violence, approximately contemporaneous with some important state building events. We conclude with a discussion of avenues for future research.

Party Cohesion in Westminster Systems: Inducements, Replacement and Discipline in the House of Commons, 1836–1910

We consider the historical development of a characteristic crucial for the functioning and normative appeal of Westminster systems: cohesive legislative parties. To do this, we gather the universe of the twenty thousand parliamentary divisions that took place between 1836 and 1910 in the British House of Commons, construct a voting record for every Member of Parliament serving during this time, and carry out analysis that aims to both describe and explain the development of cohesive party voting. In line with previous work, we show that|with the exception of a chaotic period in the 1840s and 1850s|median discipline was always high and increased throughout the century, with an obvious uptick around 1868. We use novel methods to show that much of the rise in cohesion results from the elimination of a rebellious ‘left tail’ from the 1860s onwards, rather than central tendency shifts. In explaining the aggregate trends, we use panel data techniques to show that there is scant evidence for ‘replacement’ explanations that involve new intakes of members behaving in more disciplined ways than those leaving the chamber. We oer evidence that more loyal MPs were more likely to obtain ministerial posts, and speculate that this and other ‘inducement’-based accounts oer more promising explanations of increasingly cohesive parties.

Modeling “Effectiveness” in International Relations

Are democracies better at winning wars and militarized disputes? Is there an advantage associated with initiating a war or dispute? Noting that pairwise contest data are the norm in applied research, we motivate a straightforward Bradley–Terry statistical model for these problems from first principles, which will allow for a closer integration of theoretical and statistical practice for scholars of international relations. The essence of this approach is that we learn about the latent abilities of states from observing conflict outcomes between them. We demonstrate the novelty and appeal of this setup with reference to previous attempts to capture estimands of interest and show that for many questions of concern—especially regarding “democratic effectiveness” and “initiation effects”—our approach may be preferred on theoretical and statistical grounds. The evidence we find only partially supports the ideas of “democratic triumphalists”: democracy aids effectiveness, but only in certain contexts (while in others it actually impairs fighting ability). We also provide estimates of possible “initiation effects,” and show that moving first seems to carry little advantage in interstate wars, but a substantial one in lower-level disputes.

Guarding the Guardians: Legislative Self-Policing and Electoral Corruption in Victorian Britain

We offer an institutional explanation for the dramatic decline in corrupt practices that characterizes British political development in the mass suffrage era. Parliamentary candidates who faced corruption charges were judged by tribunals of sitting MPs until 1868, when this responsibility was passed to the courts. We draw on theory and empirical evidence to demonstrate that delegating responsibility over corruption trials to judges was an important institutional step in cleaning up elections. By focusing on an institutional explanation for Victorian electoral corruption (and its demise), we provide an account that complements the existing literature while offering clearer implications for contemporary policy debates.

Incumbency Effects and the Strength of Party Preferences: Evidence from Multiparty Elections in the United Kingdom

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the United Kingdom’s multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that UK voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems.

Democratization and Linguistic Complexity The Eect of Franchise Extension on Parliamentary Discourse, 1832{1915

We consider the impact of the Second Reform Act, and the doubling of the electorate it delivered, on the linguistic complexity of speeches made by members of parliament in Britain. Noting that the new voters were generally poorer and less educated than those who already enjoyed the suffrage, we hypothesize that cabinet ministers had strong incentives—relative to other members—to appeal to these new electors with simpler statements during parliamentary debates. We assess this claim with a data set of over half a million speeches for the period between the Great Reform Act and Great War, along with methods for measuring the comprehensibility of texts—which we validate in some detail. The theorized relationship holds: ministers become statistically significantly easier to understand (on average) relative to backbenchers, and this effect occurs almost immediately after the 1868 election. We show that this result is not an artifact of new personnel in the House of Commons.