Pro-Civil Liberties but Anti-Suffrage: Why Would Legislators Support Some Dimensions of Democracy but Not Others?

Why did MPs support some democratic bills but not others? MPs in the 1865-68 British Parliament voted on a wide variety of different democracy-related reforms - including suffrage expansions, civil liberties restrictions, vote-buying constraints and ballot bills. Using Bayesian ideal point estimation to compare MPs’ votes across these different pieces of legislation, I show that a multidimensional model fits the data better than a unidimensional model does. This suggests that democratization may have heterogenous causes: variables linked to supporting suffrage expansions may differ significantly from those linked to supporting civil liberties, for example. I make use of both an original dataset providing detailed individual-level characteristics of MPs in the 1865-68 House of Commons and constituency-level economic data in order to test microlevel predictors of variability in ideal points across dimensions. I take advantage of this disaggregation by testing highly specific political and economic causal mechanisms; preliminary evidence suggests that Irish MPs were particularly likely to support the extension of civil liberties, for example, as this included several roll calls regarding Catholic rights, but did not necessarily support other dimensions, while MPs who were to lose their seats as a result were likelier to vote against the amendments addressing malapportionment. On the economic side, I test hypotheses linking urbanization, wealth and inequality to support for different dimensions of democracy.