App Stats: Spirling on "Partisan Convergence in Executive-Legislative Interactions: Modeling Debates in the House of Commons, 1832-1915" 

 We hope you can join us this Wednesday, September 28, 2011 for the  Applied Statistics Workshop .  Arthur Spirling , Assistant Professor at the  Department of Government  at Harvard University, will present a paper entitled "Partisan Convergence in Executive-Legislative Interactions: Modeling Debates in the House of Commons, 1832-1915". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. 

 "Partisan Convergence in Executive-Legislative Interactions: Modeling Debates in the House of Commons, 1832-1915" 
Arthur Spirling 
Government Department, Harvard University 
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)  
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 12.00 pm 

 Abstract: 
 We consider the interaction between members of the executive and backbenchers in the House of Commons between the Great Reform Act and the Great War, a period of radical internal reform that birthed the Westminster system in its current form. We gather new data of over a million speeches in seventeen thousand debates to model the way in which the cabinet-legislative relationship changed over time. In particular, we conceptualize debates as Markov chains moving between speaker states and focus on estimating transition probabilities of the same. We take a Bayesian mixed model approach, allowing for debate-level and ministry-level variation. We show a remarkable "convergence" in the behavior of ministers from different parties, beginning between the mid-1870s and late-1880s and coinciding with a series of important standing orders relating to the ability to ask questions in the Commons. While Tory ministers generally become more responsive, Liberal ministers are less involved in debate.