“I Intend Therefore to Prorogue”: the effects of political conflict and the Glorious Revolution in parliament, 1660–1702
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides evidence that the Glorious Revolution removed political barriers to changing property rights in seventeenth century England.I study parliament's passage of estate bills, a legislation that broke restrictions on land use and made up most of parliament's legislative output from to .Using a new dataset on estate bills, I first document that the sudden closure (prorogation) of parliament by the monarch caused bills to fail.Probit and OLS estimates show estate bills were percentage points more likely to fail in these sessions.Second, I show conflict delaying revenue bills and conflict with the monarch's interests made sudden prorogations more likely before the Glorious Revolution.Political and constitutional changes with the Glorious Revolution were thus important for England's economic development.They improved parliament's provision of legislation that made property rights more flexible to changing economic opportunities throughout the preindustrial era. . IntroductionHow to set up and change property rights is a fundamental problem for societies. For example, for land to be traded today, there are titling agencies and registries to securely transfer ownership.States and governments play a key role in this system, but can be impeded by political barriers and influenced by political factors. This paper studies how political barriers to changing property rights were removed in seventeenth century English parliament.The lessons from this particular period in English history loom large in the economic history, political economy, and development literatures as well as for policy makers today.Specifically, I study how politics and conflict influenced parliament's passage of legislation that reorganized property rights in land markets, so-called estate bills.Land was not easily transferred or improved because there were complex, opaque restrictions from England's inheritance system and norms.Parliament provided estate bills as a legislative service to its land and property-holding constituents so they could reallocate their rights and use resources in new ways.An Act passed in , for example, was titled "An Act to enable Sir Edward Hungerford Knight of the Bath, to make Leases for Years of Hungerford House in the Strand."Hungerford cited that the "Houses Buildings and Shoppes are too old and ruinous" and that with the rights to lease land "encouragment might be given to those who See, for example, Coase (), de Soto (), Lamoreaux (), Libecap and Lueck (), and Besley and Ghatak ().
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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; 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".