Recent research has shown an increasing interest in the historical evolution of legislative institutions. The development of the UK Parliament has received particularly extensive attention. In this article, we contribute to this literature in three important ways. First, we introduce a complete, machine‐readable data set of all the Standing Orders of the UK House of Commons between 1811 and 2015. Second, we demonstrate how this data set can be used to construct innovative measures of procedural change. Third, we illustrate a potential empirical application of the data set, offering an exploratory test of several expectations drawn from recent theories of formal rule change in parliamentary democracies. We conclude that the new data set has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and beyond.

What explains the power of parliamentary committees? A large literature on the United States Congress sees strong legislative committees as a consequence of legislators’ incentives to cultivate a personal vote. These incentives are typically understood to be determined by formal electoral rules. How legislatures are elected thus shapes how they are organised. This article argues that explanations of legislative organisation should also consider a non‐institutional source of personal vote‐seeking incentives: voters’ partisanship. Where partisan dealignment is more extensive, legislators have stronger incentives to develop a personal vote. Where committee systems are more powerful, legislators have better opportunities to do so. Partisan dealignment should thus lead to stronger committee systems. This argument is supported by analysis of original data on the postwar evolution of committee systems in five ‘Westminster’ parliaments. Partisan dealignment is associated with larger committee systems, and with larger expansions of committee systems.

Partisanship and the Effectiveness of Personal Vote Seekingrecent work suggests that partisan dealignment should undermine political parties by giving members of Parliament (MPs) greater incentives for personal vote seeking. the key mechanism underlying such arguments is that voters with stronger party ties are less responsive to the records of individual MPs. However, existing tests of this mechanism are largely either indirect, based on responses to rebellious voting or nonlegislative behavior, or drawn from the united states. this article thus provides a new test of whether partisan voters are less responsive to MPs' parliamentary activity. i present two complementary analyses-a natural experiment in New Zealand and a survey experiment in the united Kingdom. Both suggest that more active MPs are more popular, but that this relationship is moderated by voters' partisanship. MPs' parliamentary activity chiefly influences the behavior of voters with the weakest partisanship. this offers new evidence that partisan dealignment heightens legislators' incentives for personal vote seeking.the widespread dealignment of modern electorates poses major challenges to political parties. existing scholarship has particularly highlighted challenges in the electoral arena: declining party loyalties and increasing electoral volatility have forced parties to adopt new strategies for attracting votes (see dalton and Wattenberg 2000). However, recent work has suggested these challenges may also extend to the legislative arena. specifically, scholars have argued that when voters have weaker party loyalties, members of parliament (MPs) have greater incentives to generate their own individual electoral support: a personal vote. this personal vote seeking affects their legislative behavior, as they place more priority on improving their personal reputation and less on furthering their party's collective goals (andré, depauw, and Beyens 2015;Kam 2009).

What shapes legislators’ incentives for personal vote-seeking in parliament? Recent work suggests that partisanship among voters deters personal vote-seeking, by limiting its effectiveness. This has potentially significant implications for policy-making, election results and patterns of accountability. However, empirical tests of this argument remain few in number and have several limitations. This article thus offers a new test of the relationship between partisanship and personal vote-seeking. Using legislators’ bill proposals as an indicator of their personal vote-seeking activity, I analyse legislative behaviour in the UK House of Commons between 1964 and 2017. I find that members of parliament make more legislative proposals when voters are less partisan. Moreover, partisanship appears to moderate the influence of other drivers of personal vote-seeking: electorally vulnerable legislators make more legislative proposals, but only at low levels of partisanship. These findings provide new evidence that voters’ relationships with political parties affect legislators’ electoral strategies and parliamentary behaviour.

Incumbent prime ministers who win re-election often reshuffle their cabinet ministers. These post-election cabinet reshuffles have important implications for policymaking and present a puzzle: why would prime ministers alter the ‘winning team’ that has just received an electoral mandate? Existing literature has largely overlooked post-election reshuffles, so offers few compelling answers. At most, a plausible but under-theorised and untested conventional wisdom suggests that electoral success increases prime ministers’ authority over their ministers. This article thus provides the first systematic study of post-election cabinet reshuffles in single-party governments. It argues that re-elected prime ministers use a temporary increase in their authority to pre-empt future leadership challenges by moving or sacking cabinet rivals. Larger election victories should thus produce larger reshuffles. However, analysis of post-election cabinet reshuffles in four ‘Westminster’ democracies since 1945 shows no support for this expectation, suggesting that further work is needed to understand these important political events.