Enfranchisement, <scp>M</scp>alapportionment, and <scp>I</scp>nstitutional <scp>C</scp>hange in <scp>G</scp>reat <scp>B</scp>ritain, 1832–1868
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines why after 35 years of repeatedly rejecting the secret ballot, the British House of Commons enacted it with the Ballot Act of 1872. Drawing on roll‐call votes, I show that parliamentary opposition to the secret ballot was invariant between 1832 and 1867. In 1867, however, the Second Reform Act significantly extended the electoral franchise and substantially redistributed parliamentary seats; the House elected immediately following these changes to pass the Ballot Act of 1872. I show that a key reason for the change in the House's attitude on the ballot was that anti‐ballot MPs whom the redistribution threatened to expose to electoral competition were disproportionately likely to retire prior to the 1868 election. These results imply that it was the anticompetitive effects inherent in the gross malapportionment of the older electoral system rather than the restricted nature of the franchise that insulated MPs from public pressure and kept parliamentary opinion on the secret ballot in stasis. This is a useful lesson because while almost all modern democracies operate on a universal adult suffrage, many continue to be marked by significant malapportionment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".