Abstract
Cohesion measures have been used to analyse the behaviour of political parties across the world. Adapting these measures for the British government is problematic due to the whipped nature of parliamentary divisions and the small number of free votes. Early Day Motions (EDMs) provide Members of Parliament in the UK with the freedom to express organised opinion without undue pressure from government whips. This article proposes using the signing of these motions to gauge cohesiveness of political parties, and illustrates the link between EDMs and political events during the recent 2005/2006 parliamentary session. This article further uses the cohesion of EDM signatories to identify issues that cause political parties to unite or divide in opinion. Classifying EDMs from the 2001–2005 parliament into different types, a weighted cohesion measure is used to identify which EDMs cause maximal and minimal cohesion. The results are compared to political events and current affairs during the time span of the EDMs.
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Acknowledgements
DB gratefully acknowledges the support of an EPSRC DTA grant. All of our computations are performed using the free R program using the genalg package for our genetic algorithms. This is available from the CRAN archive www.cran.r-project.org. We thank L. Woodfield, M. Ryan, B. Ullmann and P. Hill for work classifying EDMs, M. Wemyss and I.R. Williams for fruitful conversations regarding political history and computational languages and J. Caplen for his help and patience in proof reading.
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Appendices
Appendix A
Examples of EDMs
A.1. Debated EDM
A motion put down by Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher, the then leader of the opposition, censuring the government. When this motion was debated on 28 March, it was agreed to, leading to a general election.
EDM Number: 351
Date: 22/03/1979
NO CONFIDENCE IN HER MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT
That this House has no confidence in Her Majestys Government.
Total number of signatures: 6.
A.2. Early day motion 1646
Date: 14/02/2006
SMOKING IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
Tabled by: Julia Goldsworthy
That this House notes that right hon. and hon. Members voted to ban smoking in all public places including private members’ clubs on 14 February 2006; further notes that the will of the House may not apply in the House itself since it is a royal palace; further notes that this means that staff working in the smoking room could still be exposed to the harmful effects of second-hand smoke; and calls for this anomaly to be rectified by the House authorities as soon as possible.
Total number of signatures: 69.
Appendix B
Obtaining and classifying data
Data were automatically downloaded from the internet using Unix commands and converted into a suitable form using Perl scripts. The classification of EDM types was performed by hand by the authors or a team of coders under close supervision by the authors. Two coders independently classified each session into primary and secondary (where appropriate) issues. Where the two agreed on a primary issue, or a primary issue from one and a secondary from the other, the corresponding classification was used. Where there was disagreement, a third classifier was used and the process repeated. Where no agreement could be found from three coders, the authors took the final decision.
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Bailey, D., Nason, G. Cohesion of Major Political Parties. Br Polit 3, 390–417 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2008.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2008.10