Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

Ideology, party and interests in the British Parliament of 1841–47

Building upon Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE technique and Kalt and Zupan’s residualization approach, I seek to disentangle the influences of constituency interests, party and ideology on the votes of MPs in the famous Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I argue that while the Conservative party shared a distinct ideology, it was also a coalition of two interests-based alliances. The non-Peelite Conservatives represented mostly (protectionist oriented) agricultural districts while the Peelites represented districts with more free trade leaning interests. Before 1846, Peelites voted according to a general Conservative ideology, but in 1846 an abrupt change occurred: the pivotal Peelites appear to have eschewed Conservative party unity and their own personal ideology in favour more of the preferences of their constituents. Repeal appears to have gained passage as these MPs switched from voting more as trustees to voting more as delegates.

Measuring ideas more effectively: an analysis of Bush and Kerry's national security speeches

On Sunday, October 10 th , 2004, the New York Times Magazine featured an article with the cover title, “Really, What Does He Think? John Kerry and the Post-9/11 World” ( Bai 2004 ). On the cover of the magazine was a serious-looking photo of Senator Kerry, superimposed with keywords such as “Terrorism,” “Iraq,” “Al Qaeda,” “Multilateralism,” “Nuclear proliferation,” and so on. While the article itself was intriguing, even more intriguing was the magazines attempt to capture Kerrys core ideas on American national security with the use of keyword graphics—namely, the keywords on the cover, placed in what appeared to be a random order around the photo of Kerry, and the underlining of “John Kerry,” “terrorism,” and “Americans” in the inside title. Catchy graphics, but hardly an accurate depiction of the keywords that might actually represent Kerrys thinking on American national security. And, for all the comparison made in the article itself with President Bushs stance on national security, where were the graphics for George W.? (They did not emerge in the next New York Times Magazine .) The magazine was, nonetheless, making an important point: that words (and the ideas they represent) are emotive—particularly in the highly charged climate of the 2004 presidential campaign. I am grateful for comments and suggestions from Andrew Bailey, Diane Maurice, David Mayhew, and Frances Rosenbluth. I am also grateful to the Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy (Yale Center for International and Area Studies) for funding that initiated this article, and to Mina Moshkeri (LSE Design Unit) for her assistance in preparing the graphs.

Specific factors, capital markets, portfolio diversification and free trade: domestic determinants of the repeal of the Corn Laws

Whereas the Ricardo-Viner specific factors model implies that owners of land and capital stood diametrically opposed to one another on the issue of free trade in nineteenth-century Britain, studies in the economic history literature posit that the economic interests of these two groups of factor owners were not mutually exclusive but rather overlapped as a result of rapid economic changes in the 1830s that intensified landowner diversification into nonagri-cultural ventures. Hence, the former views the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 as capital gaining the political upper hand over the landed elite, whereas the latter implies that landowners with diversified portfolios stood to gain from, or simply became indifferent to, free trade in grain. This paper alters the specific factors model to include the concepts of diversification and investment capital flows. It then tests the political implications of diversification, hypothesizing a positive correlation between constituency diversification and parliamentary voting on repeal of the Corn Laws. Both individual and aggregate sets of data confirm that diversified interests contributed to the free-trade policy outcome.

Deliberating American Monetary Policy: A Textual Analysis

American monetary policy is formulated by the Federal Reserve and overseen by Congress. Both policy making and oversight are deliberative processes, although the effect of this deliberation has been difficult to quantify. In this book, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey provides a systematic examination of deliberation on monetary policy from 1976 to 2008 by the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) and House and Senate banking committees. Her innovative account employs automated textual analysis software to study the verbatim transcripts of FOMC meetings and congressional hearings; these empirical data are supplemented and supported by in-depth interviews with participants in these deliberations. The automated textual analysis measures the characteristic words, phrases, and arguments of committee members; the interviews offer a way to gauge the extent to which the empirical findings accord with the participants’ personal experiences. Analyzing why and under what conditions deliberation matters for monetary policy, the author identifies several strategies of persuasion used by FOMC members, including Paul Volcker’s emphasis on policy credibility and efforts to influence economic expectations. Members of Congress, however, constrained by political considerations, show a relative passivity on the details of monetary policy. .

The Congressional Debate on Partial-Birth Abortion: Constitutional Gravitas and Moral Passion

I employ automated content analysis to measure the dimensionality of Senate debates on the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and compare these results with the final vote. The underlying verbal conflict leading up to the final roll call vote contains two important dimensions: (1) an emotive battle over the abortion procedure itself, and (2) the battle over the constitutionality of the bill. Surprisingly, senators appear not to have voted along the first dimension of the verbal conflict, but rather along the second dimension. The analysis of the deliberations of senators not only enables us to understand the complexity of the arguments that is not captured in the vote, but it also uncovers (and measures empirically) the strategies employed by legislators to shape the relevant lines of conflict, and ultimately, the final content of the bill.

LESSONS IN LOBBYING FOR FREE TRADE IN 19TH-CENTURY BRITAIN: TO CONCENTRATE OR NOT

I present a modified version of the public choice interest group model that integrates concentrated and deconcentrated interests with successful lobbying. It is argued that effective free trade lobbying required the political fusion of the economic interests representing two fundamental changes in nineteenth-century Britains economy: (1) geographic concentration of the core export industry (cotton textiles) and (2) deconcentration of the broader export sector both geographically and in terms of industrial structure. Empirical evidence from both national and individual levels firmly supports the contention that the timing and political success of Britains nineteenth-century free trade lobby required the combined forces of core export interests and the more diverse and geographically more evenly distributed interests of the export sector as a whole.

Textual analysis of internal medicine residency personal statements: themes and gender differences

Applicants to US residency training programmes are required to submit a personal statement, the content of which is flexible but often requires them to describe their career goals and aspirations. Despite their importance, no systematic research has explored common themes and gender differences inherent to these statements.

Text Mining for Central Banks

Although often applied in other social sciences, text mining has been less frequently used in economics and in policy circles, particularly inside central banks. This Handbook is a brief introduction to the field, discussing how text mining is useful for addressing research topics of interest to central banks, and providing a step-by-step primer on how to mine text, including an overview of unsupervised and supervised techniques.

International Trade and Political Institutions

International Trade and Political Institutions broadens the public choice theory of trade politics to allow for the study of ideas and institutions within a longer time horizon. The authors use theoretically rigorous historical analysis of international political economy and four important case studies to help untangle the role of ideology, institutions and interests. This illuminating book connects the fields of economics, political economy and history to shed new light on trade theory.

Themes and topics in parliamentary oversight hearings: a new direction in textual data analysis

Abstract This paper contributes to the growing empirical work on deliberation in legislatures by proposing a novel approach to analysing parliamentary hearings using both thematic and topic modelling textual analysis software. We explore variations in deliberative quality across economic policy type (fiscal policy, monetary policy and financial stability) and across parliamentary chambers (Commons and Lords) in UK select committee oversight hearings during the 2010–2015 Parliament. Our overall focus is not only to suggest a multi-method approach to the textual analysis of parliamentary data, but also to explore more substantive aspects of parliamentary oversight, such as: (1) the extent to which oversight varies between unelected and elected policy makers; and (2) whether parliamentarians conduct oversight more forcefully or more along partisan lines when they are challenging fellow politicians as opposed to central bank officials. Our findings suggest consistent differences in deliberative styles between types of hearings (fiscal, monetary, financial stability) and between chambers (Commons, Lords).