Enfranchisement, Malapportionment, and Electoral Responsiveness in Great Britain, 1832-1868
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses changes in British MPs' positions on the secret ballot to assess the political impact of sweeping electoral changes effected by the Second Reform Act. Between 1832 and 1867, the House of Commons repeatedly defeated motions to adopt the secret ballot, but shortly following the 1868 election, the first elected under the new franchise and new distribution of seats, the House voted to pass the Ballot Act of 1872. Extant research downplays the existence of any general relationship between democratic enfranchisement and the subsequent adoption of the secret ballot (Aidt and Jensen 2011), questions the notion that the Second Reform Act had any short-run impact on the 1868 election (Berlinski and Dewan 2011), and suggests that the adoption of the secret ballot was non-issue at the election (Kinzer 1982). The paper shows that the 1868 election, the first fought under the enfranchisement and redistribution of seats mandated by the Second Reform Act, brought about a decisive change in the balance of pro- and anti-ballot MPs in the House of Commons. A key reason for this change was that anti-ballot MPs were disproportionately likely to retire and not contest the 1868 election than were pro-ballot MPs, and they were more likely to do so the greater the impact of the redistribution (but not the enfranchisement) on their constituencies. The argument exploits the fact that the House of Commons voted on the adoption of the secret ballot almost annually between 1832 and 1867 to show that balance of opinion in the House was “frozen” against the ballot right up until 1868 election. The argument that anti-ballot MPs retired in anticipation of being displaced by more radical candidates, especially in constituencies where the redistribution promised to intensify electoral competition, is corroborated by the by fact that the vote shares of pro-ballot Liberals were on average two percent higher than those of anti-ballot Liberal incumbents who nevertheless chose to contest the 1868 election. This comparison is compelling because it is based on the relative performance of Liberal candidates who ran for election in the same districts, and hence it addresses the concern that the redistribution simply forced anti-ballot Liberals to run in districts where Liberal support was weaker than average. The results show how sensitive electoral responsiveness is to malapportionment and serve as a concrete example of how politicians strategically anticipate and respond to electoral pressure.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".