Procedural Change in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

Abstract

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.

‘Going institutional’ to overcome obstruction: Explaining the suppression of minority rights in Western European parliaments, 1945−2010

“…Single‐country studies are mostly descriptive; if offering inductive explanations, they predominantly stress the functional need for reform and consensual decisions by all actors in parliament rather than the competitive motives highlighted by research on Congress (e.g., Thaysen ; Norton ; Capano & Giuliani ; Leston‐Bandeira & Freire ; Murphy ; Flinders ; but see Goet et al. ; Goet , for competition‐based arguments similar to ours).…”

“…We have derived these hypotheses informally starting from the assumption of parties as unitary actors (Laver & Schofield 1990). Interestingly, similar expectations follow from a formal model that explains the adoption of anti-dilatory rules (i.e., a reduction of minorities' rights to speak in the chamber) based on the cost-benefit calculations of individual members of parliament (Goet 2017(Goet , 2019. In Goet's theory, an over-extraction of parliamentary time due to greater demands by a more diverse group of MPs fosters the creation of strong parties (see also Cox 1987Cox , 2006.…”

“…However, similar conflicts and associated institutional reforms exist outside the United States. The British House of Commons witnessed enduring minority obstruction in the late nineteenth century, which was ultimately resolved by restricting minority rights in the chamber (Redlich 1903;Dion 1997: Chapter 8;Koß 2015;Goet et al 2019). More recently, the 1958 constitution of the Fifth French Republic massively restricted minority rights to overcome cabinet instability (Huber 1996), and the Italian parliament abolished secret voting on legislation in 1988 to curb the power of intra-party minorities (Hine 1993).…”

“…The few available comparative studies focus on cross-sectional variation without analysing change (Taylor 2006), use highly aggregated data including reforms that are not driven by actors' attempts to gain an advantage over their competitors (Sieberer et al 2011(Sieberer et al , 2016, or focus on a small number of countries and institutional rules (Koß 2015). Single-country studies are mostly descriptive; if offering inductive explanations, they predominantly stress the functional need for reform and consensual decisions by all actors in parliament rather than the competitive motives highlighted by research on Congress (e.g., Thaysen 1972;Norton 2001;Capano & Giuliani 2003;Leston-Bandeira & Freire 2003;Murphy 2006;Flinders 2007; but see Goet et al 2019;Goet 2019, for competition-based arguments similar to ours).…”

The Politics of Procedural Choice: Regulating Legislative Debate in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

“…I first 'reconstructed' consolidated versions of the standing orders of the UK lower house for each amendment date over this period by manually comparing successive versions of the rules. An updated, more comprehensive and machine-readable version of these data in xml and json format is available in Goet, Fleming, and Zubek (2019). Details of the dataset and sources used are provided in Appendix A.…”