Premium
Property and Power: MP s' Assets and Support for Democratization in the 1867 Reform Act
Author(s) -
Bronner Laura
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
legislative studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.728
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1939-9162
pISSN - 0362-9805
DOI - 10.1111/lsq.12054
Subject(s) - democratization , expropriation , redistribution (election) , democracy , economics , commons , power (physics) , capital (architecture) , political science , political economy , market economy , politics , law , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , history
Influential theories of democratization emphasize elites' fear of the redistributive consequences of democratic reform as an important limit on democratization. They also argue that landowners are more likely than capital owners to fear redistribution, as their assets are less mobile and thus more vulnerable to expropriation. To test these claims on the micro level, this article uses the 1867 U . K . Reform Act, which doubled the enfranchised population to include much of the urban working class, as a case study. Using an original dataset on the members of the 1865–68 House of Commons, this article finds that in fact, the most substantively important variable for votes on democratization was partisanship, which has been neglected by the distributional conflict literature. Material interests, particularly landowning, do matter, but they are crucially mediated by strategic partisan electoral concerns.