Partisanship, Enfranchisement, and the Political
Economy of Electioneering in the United
∗
Kingdom, 1826-1906
Christopher Kam†
5 November 2009
Abstract
The character of British politics and elections changed dramatically
over the course of the nineteenth century, with parochialism and electoral
corruption giving way to programmatic, party-based political competition.
The extension of the franchise and the growth of a party-oriented
electorate are widely seen to have been critical to this transformation by
combining to make electoral corruption uneconomical.
However, origi-
nal data on electioneering costs and bribe prices at 498 district elections
in the the United Kingdom between 1826-1906 show that enfranchisement had a limited impact on candidates' electioneering costs and that
the electorate's growing party-orientation indirectly facilitated candidates'
capacity to fund electoral corruption.
∗ Thanks to Ken Carty, Ben Nyblade, Alberto Simpser and Scott Desposato for their helpful
comments and to the Hampton Fund of the University of British Columbia for its nancial
support of this research.
† Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, C-410 Buchanan Bldg,
1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C., CANADA, V6T 1Z1. Email: [email protected].
1
1
Introduction
There is a natural suspicion of the role that money plays in elections; it is a
necessity, of course, but it can as easily be used to undermine elections as to
conduct them. This suspicion is historically well-founded: nineteenth century
United Kingdom elections were often parochial, expensive, and corrupt (Gash
1953, 125; Hanham 1959, 263; Hoppen 1984). Over the course of the nineteenth
century, however, the British reined in electoral corruption and regulated local campaign spending.
Money remained integral to British elections, but it
was increasingly spent by parties and interest groups in support of programmatic national campaigns rather than by individual candidates in local districts
(Gwyn 1962; Pinto-Dushinsky 1981; Coetzee 1986). For Cox (1987, 92, 170),
these changes were due principally to the heightened party-orientation of an
expanding British electorate; the growing propensity of British voters to vote
for parties rather than individuals spurred politicians to compete on policies
and turn away from their old methods of bribery and treating, methods which
were in any case being rendered too costly by the electorate's growth (Cox,
1986, 199).
In making this argument, Cox was extending and enriching the
long-standing and widely-shared view that the extension of the franchise was
crucial to the development of party organization and programmatic political
competition (see, e.g., Ostrogorski 1902; Seymour 1915, 477; Weber 1946; Duverger 1962; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966; Lizzeri and Persico 2004; Sartori
2005, 19).
The transformation of parties and elections in the United Kingdom is one of
comparative politics' central examples of political development, and yet the
study of that transformation has been conducted without systematic data on
and analysis of local campaign spending.
To that end, I have used historical
reports of local elections to build an original data set of electioneering costs and
bribe prices at 498 electoral contests in Victorian Britain and Ireland between
1826 and 1906. These data show that the extension of the franchise had a limited impact on candidates' electioneering costs and that the electorate's growing
party-orientation actually facilitated candidates' capacity to fund electoral corruption. Rising party-orientation, that is, voters' propensity to vote for parties
rather than individuals, encouraged the formation of electoral-nancial coalitions that lowered candidates' individual nancial liability even while raising
aggregate electioneering spending in the district.
These higher levels of elec-
tioneering spending allowed candidates to continue to use bribery and treating
to win elections late into the nineteenth century despite the extension of the
franchise. In eect, electoral corruption in the United Kingdom was sustained
by intra-party cooperation among candidates in multi-member districts, a result
that stands in contrast to the more common argument that electoral corruption
a
is rooted in intra-party competition (e.g., Cox and Thies 1998; Samuels 2001 ,
b
28; Samuels 2001 , Golden and Chang 2001; Chang and Golden 2007). The results also underscore the economic (as opposed to the political) basis of political
parties.
2
The paper follows in seven sections. Following this introduction, Section 2 provides information on the electoral politics of the era and reviews arguments
about how the extension of the franchise and rise of a party-oriented electorate
contributed to the demise of electoral corruption and the development of programmatic politics in the United Kingdom. Section 3 describes the data that
I use to measure electioneering costs and bribe prices.
The analysis of these
data begins in Section 4 with a long-run, aggregate analysis of electioneering
costs revealing that these costs neither increased as the electorate expanded nor
declined as party-orientation rose. Sections 5 and 6 oer explanations for these
counter-intuitive patterns. The fth section shows that a large fraction of the
average campaign's electioneering budget was independent of the size of the
electorate; electioneering remained expensive, of course, but not because of the
extension of the franchise. The sixth section argues that candidates coped with
the heavy expenses of electioneering by running in harness, that is, by taking
on a running mate with whom they could split costs. The section shows that
voters' party-orientation facilitated candidates' capacity to forge these electoralnancial coalitions, and that these coalitions generated economies of scale in
electioneering spending. Section 7 oers a concluding discussion on the interaction of party-orientation, the electoral system, and the evolution of electioneering in the United Kingdom.
2
Elections and Electioneering in the Victorian
Era
The 1832 Reform Act marked the beginning of Britain's transformation from a
clientelistic oligarchy into a modern democracy. The Act is chiey remembered
for extending the franchise (as was done again in 1868 and 1885), but the reorganization of seats and electoral boundaries that accompanied the Act was
equally critical to Britain's political development. This reorganization severed
the boroughs from the surrounding counties, freeing the boroughs from aristocratic inuence and opening them to electoral competition.
1
It also eliminated
many rotten boroughs, but this changed only the form rather than the scale
of corruption that operated at borough elections.
The wholesale purchase of
rotten boroughs was replaced by a thriving market in votes that operated even
in larger towns (Seymour 1915, 192; Gash 1953, 127; Hanham 1959, 263).
This is not to say that the boroughs were devoid of political sentiment (Andrews
1998; Jaggard 2004). Economic and religious cleavages were evident, and the
balance of these forces made certain boroughs more or less promising for either
the Conservatives or the Liberals. This was reected in the pattern of competi-
1 The degree to which the 1832 Reform Act weakened aristocratic dominance in the counties
is a matter of debate (see, e.g., Gash (1953) and Moore (1976) versus O'Gorman (1984) and
Salmon (2002)). Even after 1832, however, county elections were far more likely than borough
elections to go uncontested and this remained so throughout the 1800s (see Lloyd 1965).
3
2
tion in double-member districts.
In industrial and non-conformist boroughs, for
example, where the Liberals' message of free trade and disestablishment played
well, two or three Liberal candidates might contend against a lone Conservative. The pattern would often be reversed in the more agricultural and Anglican
3
boroughs, with two Conservatives running against a single Liberal.
These var-
ied electoral circumstances oered voters a range of choices. In double-member
districts, where each elector had two votes, for example, the elector could either
deliver one vote apiece to two candidates or cast just a single vote (i.e., plump)
for one candidate. Voters who cast two ballots could also choose to give their
votes to candidates of the same party or to split them between candidates of
dierent parties. Voters who plumped, on the other hand, could vote for the
singleton Liberal or Conservative or one of a party's two candidates. The latter
two voting patterns (splitting and casting only a single vote for one of two candidates from the same party) are particularly interesting as they indicate that
the voter drew a material distinction between candidates of the same party and
hence was not party-oriented (Cox, 1987, 95-97, 117-118).
Cox (1986, 1987) used these voting patterns to argue that the development of
a party-oriented electorate in the 1850s was a critical aspect of Britain's transition away from the politics of bribery, personal inuence, and patronage and
toward the programmatic, party-based politics of mass appeals based on policy
commitments (Cox, 1986, 199). Cox's causal argument is that as the Cabinet
became the locus of power, the electorate grew increasingly sensitive to the
partisan identity and policy positions of the parties and their leaders and increasingly indierent to the personalities and blandishments of their local MPs.
This change in the electorates' behavior presumably induced candidates to rely
more heavily on their party aliation rather than their purses at elections. The
incentive to abandon bribery and compete on policies was amplied by the extension of the franchise which made bribery too costly (Seymour 1915, 453-54,
477; Hanham 1959, 247; O'Leary 1962, 208; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966; Cox
1987, 169-70). The same forces encouraged the formation of more ecient and
eective campaign strategies and machinery, notably the partisan press (Vincent, 1966) and the voluntary working men's associations, registration societies,
and caucuses that Ostrogorski (1902, 135-197, 250-286) described and which
Duverger (1962) and LaPalombara and Weiner (1966) identied as the precursors of the mass parties of the twentieth century. Looking at these changes, it
seems sensible to conclude, as Sartori (2005, 83) did, that the growth of mass
politics and democracy brings about a decrease, not an increase, in the power
of money.
2 From
1832-67, there were 153 single-member districts and 248 multi-member districts (of
which 240 returned two MPs). The redistribution of seats that accompanied the 1868 Reform
Act created 196 single-member districts and 224 multi-member districts (of which 211 returned
two MPs). Only 27 multi-member districts (out of 643) survived the 1885 redistribution.
3 For
similar reasons, many constituencies went uncontested (Caramani, 2003); Conserva-
tive or Liberal candidates (as the case might be) preferring to contest districts where they
stood some chance of winning rather than ghting hopeless battles.
4
3
Following the Money: Using Election Petitions
to Recover Electioneering Costs
If some scholars dispute Cox's account of the transformation of the British electorate, it is principally because they disagree with Cox as to when in the nineteenth century British voters became party-oriented (e.g., Phillips and Wetherell,
1995). Little attention is directed at other crucial aspects of this debate, such
as whether the electorate's growth and its party-orientation actually dissuaded
candidates from engaging in bribery and other corrupt practices.
Evidence
required to establish the costs of electioneering and the scale of electoral corruption is hard to come by. One possible source of data, the ocial campaign
accounts that candidates were required to submit to Parliament from 1857 onward, is recognized as being habitually and extensively falsied (Seymour 1915,
441-42; Hanham 1959, 259; Hoppen 1984, 84).
4
More accurate gures can be
found in politicians' private correspondence, but this type of archival material
is not widely available (though where it is, I use it).
I have, however, con-
structed a comprehensive data set of electioneering costs and bribe prices from
election petitions (i.e., legal challenges to the conduct and outcome of an election).
The testimony taken at the parliamentary hearings of these petitions
provides detailed information on the costs and methods of Victorian election5
eering.
An investigation of the 1859 Wakeeld election, for example, revealed
that William Leatham, the Liberal candidate, and John Charlesworth Dodgson
Charlesworth, the Conservative candidate, actually spent ¿3,900 and ¿4,150
6
whilst reporting just ¿478 and ¿652, respectively (P.P. 1860 [2601], iii-iv).
A
similar investigation into the 1874 Gloucester City election showed that the two
Liberal candidates submitted joint expenses of ¿1,443 against a true expenditure of ¿4,048, and their two Conservative opponents, ¿1,035 against ¿4,050
(C. 1881 [2841], v.1, 3-4). In both these cases, and indeed as a general rule, the
dierence between what the ocal accounts reported the candidates had spent
and what they actually spent was disbursed on bribery, treating (i.e., the provision of free liquor) and colourable employment (i.e., the ctitious employment
of voters).
Sometimes the testimony at these hearing provided precise information on how
campaign funds were disbursed. An inquiry into the conduct of the 1868 election
in Dublin, for example, revealed both how much the Conservatives had spent
on bribery and its general distribution among voters:
Q: Would the entire expenditure, so far as you know of, for this
4 A good
deal of research (e.g., Gwyn 1962; Pinto-Dushinsky 1981; Coates and Dalton 1992,
1992b), nevertheless, relies on these ocial accounts.
5 Election
petitions were heard in three venues.
Until 1868, petitions were heard before
House of Commons committees. These committees could recommend further investigation by
a special or royal commission if they felt that the electoral corruption was gross or extensive.
After 1868, election petitions were heard in court.
6 Prices
and costs are reported in nominal terms unless otherwise noted.
Standardized
prices and costs are calculated using www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/.
5
purpose [bribery] be the ¿1,000, and the ¿150 of the second ¿1,000?
A: Yes...
Q: As far as you know, what might we take as a fair average of the
sum given to each freeman?
7
A: I dare say ¿4 was the average.
The testimony provided to the commissioners investigating corruption at Great
Yarmouth was even more detailed, allowing one to reconstruct bribery schedules
for the 1865 and 1859 elections for both the Conservative and Liberal candidates (see Figure 1). As in many districts where two seats were at stake, the
Conservative and Liberal candidates at Great Yarmouth ran in harness, that is,
as a political and nancial coalition. It was a general rule that candidates who
ran in harness did not negotiate bribes for split votes.
8
Thus, the bribe prices
in Figure 1 reect what voters were paid to cast both of their votes for the slate.
In 1865, for example, Lacon and Goodson paid a modal bribe of ¿15, the voter
receiving ¿7 10
s
(¿7.50) for giving one vote to Lacon and an additional ¿7 10
s
for giving their second vote to Goodson. All told, bribing and treating Great
Yarmouth's 1,645 electors at the 1865 election cost Lacon and Goodson ¿4,723,
far in excess of the ¿893 that they reported publicly (P.P. 1867 [16689]).
[FIGURE 1 HERE]
3.1 Data Quality: Veracity and Representativeness
It is worth emphasizing that the witnesses who appeared at these petition hearings had incentives to tell the truth because the ocials charged with hearing
these petitions could indemnify cooperative witnesses from subsequent prosecution or impose sti nes for perjury.
9
In contrast, there was eectively no
penalty for submitting a false campaign account and only a light penalty for
failing submit an account altogether. Nevertheless, to ensure that the data reect what did occur rather than what the petitions alleged to have occurred,
I record electioneering costs and bribe prices only when these gures are corroborated either by i) the ocials' own satisfaction with their veracity, or ii)
the concordant testimony of several witnesses. A bribe, for example, might be
7 C.
1870 [93], 915, Ÿ49547, Ÿ49555-56. The agent's estimate was quite accurate; my exam-
ination of the bribes showed the average bribe to have been ¿4 2
8 At
s 10d (¿4.14).
Great Yarmouth in 1847, for example, Robert Blake's oer to give Lennox and Coope
(the Conservative candidates) a split vote (his other vote going to one of the Liberal candidates) was rebued, the bribery agent replying, That is of no use at all; without you (sic)
promise that you will vote for Lennox and Coope, I shall not give you anything (P.P. 1847-48
[95], Ÿ1621).
9 Take
as an example this warning by one of the Royal Commissioners at Kingston-upon-
Hull to a recalcitrant witness: "I will tell you what the consequence [of perjury] is; it is this:
that if you do not tell us, and we nd it out elsewhere, you will be liable to a penalty of ¿500"
(P.P. 1854 [1703], 1778, Ÿ69457).
6
corroborated by both the briber and recipient. Similarly, the amount of money
spent by a candidate at an election might be veried by the local banker with
whom the candidate deposited funds. This coding rule helps to ensure that the
data reect legally established facts rather than allegations or exaggerations.
An additional methodological concern is that the elections from which these
data are derived are not a random sample of Victorian elections. The decision to
petition an election reected the political, legal, and nancial incentives inherent
in the petitioning process as much as the presence of electoral impropriety (Rix,
2008).
In particular, the high cost of petitions might lead one to worry that
petitioners challenged only those elections that stood a good chance of being
10
overturned.
Still, a practice of inquiring into past elections in a district means
that the data set includes electioneering costs and bribe prices from elections
that were not subject to petitions. Recording bribe prices and campaign costs
listed in authoritative secondary sources (Seymour 1915; Gash 1953; Hanham
1959; O'Leary 1962) also helps to oset the selection bias because historians
sometimes cited politicians' private correspondence on these matters.
Table 1 shows the distribution of elections and observations over time and how
they enter the data set (i.e., via a petitioned election or not). The rst row of
the table provides information on the population of elections in the 1818-1906
period, and the percentage of these elections that were petitioned; the second
row provides identical information about the sample. For example, there were
311 contested elections in the 1832-34 inter-election period (i.e., at the 1832
general election and at subsequent by-elections until the next general election
in 1835), of which 15.4 percent were petitioned. Electioneering costs or bribe
prices were observed at 25 of these 311 elections, and 40 percent of these 25 data
providing elections were petitioned.
Petitioned elections are therefore over-
represented in the sample, but do not comprise the majority of data-providing
elections in the 1832-34 period. The last two rows show how many electioneering
costs and bribe prices are observed at these data-providing elections. The 25
elections in the 1832-34 period, for example, provide 23 electioneering costs and
28 bribe prices.
[TABLE 1 HERE]
There are an average of 36 data-providing elections per period and 498 such
elections in total. Just under half (47.6 percent) of these data-providing elections were petitioned. Thus, as was the case with the 1832-34 period, petitioned
elections are over-represented in the sample, but do not dominate it. The 410
electioneering costs and 398 bribe prices observed at these 498 elections are
distributed fairly evenly across time, with an average of about 30 costs and 28
10 Petitions
were hugely expensive aairs that cost each side an average of ¿3,000 - 5,000
(Hanham, 1959, 258-59)(approximately ¿300,000 500,000 in 2006 GDP-deated prices).
Legal costs were apportioned according to the English rule, the loser shouldering the winner's
costs, but the courts tended to scale the parties' legal claims so that even winners were left
out several thousand pounds.
7
bribe prices available per period.
A caveat is that a scarcity of data in the
1826-31 Pre-Reform and 1885-1906 Post-3rd Reform Act periods makes it
necessary to group together electioneering costs and bribe prices from several
general elections in these periods to achieve samples of this size. The scarcity of
pre-reform data is due to the fact that most elections prior to 1832 were uncontested, and only patchy records exist of those that were. (This accounts for the
lack of information in Table 1 on how many contested and petitioned elections
there were in total between 1826 and 1831.)
A sharp decline in the number
and proportion of petitioned elections (and, presumably, a corresponding improvement in electoral propriety) is the reason for the paucity of data between
1885 and 1906 (when the last Royal Commission on electoral corruption was
convened).
4
Aggregate Relationships
The literature identies two forces as responsible for the decline of electoral
corruption in favour of programmatic, party-based politics:
the extension of
the surage (which made it too expensive to buy elections) and the growth of
a party-oriented electorate (which was receptive to programmatic rather than
particularistic appeals).
Consequently, I begin my analysis by examining the
long-run, aggregate relationship between the size of the electorate, its partyorientation, and the cost of electioneering.
One would expect electioneering
costs to increase in the size of the electorate and decrease as the electorate
became more party-oriented, but these expectations are not borne out by the
data. Figure 2 plots the average amount that a candidate (or candidates, where
two ran jointly in harness) spent in the attempt to win an election between 1826
and 1906, and alongside that amount, the mean number of electors per contested
district. Electioneering costs wander around a long-run mean of ¿2,620 with no
indication that costs varied in direct response to the average district electorate
or to the extension of the franchise more generally. Note, for example, how the
average contested district's electorate grew slowly and steadily between 1831
and 1865 whereas electioneering costs exhibited signicant variation over the
same period. In fact, the initial (albeit modest) expansion of the electorate in
1832 coincided with a sharp decline in electioneering costs from a mean of ¿8,424
11
in the 1826-31 pre-Reform period to ¿2,351 in 1832.
Save for the signicant
spike in costs (to ¿3,587) at the 1841 Corruption election, electioneering costs
declined steadily and directly opposite to the growth in electorate to a low of
¿1,355 at the 1857 election. From 1859 onward, however, and well before the
electorate was expanded again by the 1868 (Second) Reform Act, costs (and
11 The
average electioneering cost of the pre-reform period is inated by the 1830 Liverpool
by-election in which John Eveyln Denison spent ¿44,700 to William Ewart's ¿34,000 (1885
GDP-deated ¿).
This was reputed to have been the most expensive borough election in
British history, and my data do not contradict that assessment. With this exceptional election
omitted from the calculation, the average electioneering cost of the pre-reform period is ¿5,478
(1885 GDP-deated ¿). This is still much higher than subsequent reform-era costs.
8
with costs, corruption) escalated rapidly. A similar pattern is visible from 1868
to 1885, with candidates' electioneering costs exhibiting far more variation than
the size of the electorate in contested districts.
In sum, it is hard to make
the argument that the cost of electioneering in Victorian Britain was directly
determined by the size of the electorate.
[FIGURE 2 HERE]
Figure 2 also traces the rate of split-voting (SV) at the general elections of
the period.
This was one of Cox's main measures of the partisan orientation
of the Victorian electorate, and it refers to the extent to which voters in twomember districts cast a single vote for just one of a party's two candidates and
gave their second vote to a candidate of a dierent party (Cox 1987, 95-97).
Split-voting indicates that the elector did not vote on a purely partisan basis.
Consequently, as the Victorian electorate became more party-oriented, the SV
rate declined.
Figure 2 gives the impression that the SV rate runs counter
to electioneering costs, and indeed and the correlation between the two series
12
between 1832 and 1880 is -.72 (p = .008, n = 12).
This correlation is a product
of the SV rate surging and electioneering costs slumping at the 1847 election,
an election that was brought about by the collapse of Peel's government and the
rupture of the Conservative party over the repeal of the Corn Laws. Only when
the SV rate declines in response to the reconsolidation of the party system
in the late 1850s do electioneering costs begin to increase again.
The initial
evidence, then, is that electioneering costs did not diminish with, but grew
alongside, party competition and party-orientation. This is a puzzling pattern
in that the lion's share of electioneering costs (as the examples above indicated)
funded corrupt and illegal activities, and yet presumably these tactics were
being rendered increasingly ineective by the electorate's growing preference
for party-oriented politics.
This should have induced candidates to abandon
their old, expensive, methods of bribery and treating in favour of cheaper and
more eective programmatic campaigns.
It is worth remarking that the secret ballot was introduced too late in the period (1872) to have any appreciable eect on the long-run relationship between
electioneering costs and the size or party-orientation of the electorate. Plainly,
12 The
correlation between electioneering costs and the non-partisan plumping rate, Cox's
other measure of partisanship, is -.76 (p = .004, n = 12). Non-partisan plumping occurred
when a voter in a two-member district gave one of his votes to one of a party's two candidates and withheld his second vote entirely. Non-partisan plumping indicates that the voter
drew a distinction between candidates of the same party. The negative relationship between
electioneering costs and NPP and SV rates persists irrespective of whether one weights the
spending data to adjust for the proportion of borough and county, controverted (i.e., petitioned) and uncontroverted, or contested and uncontested district elections at any general
election. Median costs are also negatively related to the NPP rates (r = -.63, p = .03) so the
relationship is not due to outliers skewing the spending data. Cox, himself, argued against
any relationship between bribery and party-oriented voting on the grounds that there was no
statistically signicant relationship between the split-voting rate and the number of election
petitions led at any election (Cox 1987, 116).
9
electioneering costs declined at the 1874 election (the rst held under the ballot),
but whether the secret ballot was responsible for the decline is matter of speculation. Certainly, the fact that electioneering costs climbed so sharply again at
the 1880 election, and did so precisely because of the gross and extensive corruption that was practiced at that election, directly contradicts any claims that the
secret ballot eliminated electoral corruption (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006, 3)
or sparked programmatic political competition(Keefer and Vlaicu, 2007, 390).
The data are, in fact, more corroborative of the view that the ballot had little
impact on electoral corruption (Hanham 1959, 274-75; Seymour 1915, 433-35).
5
Why the extension of the franchise had a limited impact on electioneering costs
The data in Figure 2 present two puzzles.
First, they show that candidates
electioneering costs were a direct function of the size of the electorate. It was
therefore unlikely that the expansion of the franchise in and of itself made it
too expensive for candidates to engage in electoral corruption. Second, the data
suggest that electioneering costs grew alongside the British electorate's partyorientation. Yet, a party-oriented electorate, even if not fully immune to bribery
and treating, should not have encouraged candidates to step up their eorts at
electoral corruption. Both results are counter-intuitive and run against political scientists' understanding of the development of programmatic politics and
political parties.
In this section, I show that the explanation for the rst of
these puzzling results lies in the nature and structure of candidates' electioneering budgets. Upwards of 50 percent of the typical candidates' electioneering
budget was comprised by items and activities that were not increasing in the
size of the electorate. This substantially insulated electioneering costs from the
inationary pressures of an expanding electorate.
5.1 Fixed Costs
The argument that the expansion of the franchise made it too expensive for
candidates to engage in electoral corruption follows from the assumption that
electioneering costs were increasing in the number of voters in the district. In
fact, a signicant fraction a campaign's expenses were not related to the size of
the electorate in this fashion. In the rst place, any campaign, whether comprised of single candidate running alone or two candidates running in harness,
faced a set of xed overhead costs. Candidates were, for example, jointly liable
for the cost of conducting the election, with localities billing the each candidate
a share of the costs of constructing the hustings, providing copies of the electoral register, publishing the poll books, and the like. These sorts of costs were
only weakly related to the size of the electorate. The City of York, for example,
charged candidates ¿556 for the 1832 election (P.P. 1833 [189]) as compared to
10
¿487 for the 1880 election (P.P. 1880 [382]) despite the fact that the electorate
at York had increased from 2873 to 10,971 in the interim. It was also common
for campaigns to retain the services of a local solicitor to manage the payment
of such charges and to oversee similar matters. While the associated fees were
signicant even in small boroughs, they also varied widely across similarly sized
districts.
At Lewes, with just 853 voters at the 1841 election, for example,
Harford and Elphinstone's' legal fees amounted to ¿350 (P.P. 1842 [548], 102,
Ÿ14011). By comparison, Hugh Taylor paid ¿455 in legal fees at the 1852 election in Tynemouth, a district with 883 voters (P.P. 1854 [1729], Appendix B).
In addition to these expenses, a local hotel or hall had to be rented to serve as
campaign headquarters. Altogether, the overhead costs of even clean campaigns
tended to run between ¿300-600, an amount that represented about 20% of the
average campaign's total expenditure.
5.2 Variable Costs
Campaigns also incurred a series of variable costs that did not increase in the
size of the electorate.
For example, while one might expect the cost of dis-
tributing political messages to have increased as candidates relied more heavily
on programmatic appeals to reach the growing electorate, the removal of various duties and taxes on paper and advertising, technological improvements in
printing, and heightened newspaper competition combined to limit candidates'
printing and advertising costs over the course of the century (Lee 1976; Weedon
2003). The expansion of the electorate was particularly unlikely have exerted
upward pressure on the cost of bribery. Bribery was an expensive activity, costing campaigns an average of ¿645 (in 1885 GDP-deated terms) and consuming
13
approximately 30 percent of their budgets.
In theory, however, bribery costs
were kept in check by the relationship that existed between the price of a vote
13 One
can calculate the percentage of the budget devoted to bribery in two ways. First,
one can compute mean bribery costs from the set of cases in which these costs are observed
and without regard to whether overall campaign expenditures in these cases are also observed.
Overall campaign expenditures are similarly recovered from cases in which overall expenses are
observed without regard to whether bribery costs are also observed. This method of relying
on
unmatched cases makes maximum use of the available data but assumes that there is no
systematic dierence between cases in which only bribery costs or only overall expenditures
are observed. Alternatively, one can base the calculation on the subset of cases in which both
bribery costs and overall expenditures are observed, i.e., on
matched
cases.
This method
ensures that bribery costs and overall expenditures are drawn from the same distribution of
cases, but it does not use all the information in the data set.
The unmatched cases show an average expenditure on bribery in contested districts of ¿787
(N=214, s.d. = ¿1,994) against a total expenditure of ¿2,709 (N=390, s.d.= ¿3,340) (29.1
percent). (Amounts are expressed here in terms of 1885 GDP deated pounds.) If one restricts
the comparison to the 133 campaigns for which one observes matching data (i.e., both what
was spent on bribery and what was spent in total), the data show an average expenditure on
bribery of ¿985 (s.d. = ¿2,314) against a total expenditure of ¿2,544 (s.d. = ¿4,279) (38.7
percent). Further limiting matching cases to the post-1832 Reform era (N = 128) alters these
gures to ¿735 (s.d.= ¿949) out of a total budget of ¿2,023 (36.3 percent), so the proportion
of the budget devoted to bribery remains much the same, but standard error of the estimate
is much reduced.
11
and how pivotal it was in determining the outcome of the election.
A larger
electorate meant that any single vote was less inuential and correspondingly
less valuable.
This was evident to the electioneering agents of the day.
For
example, when John Lankaster, a bribery agent at the Southampton election of
1841, was asked by a parliamentary committee whether, the extension of the
surage would tend to check bribery or increase it, he replied that, it would
depend on upon the demand and the supply; the price would come down, that
is the fact (P.P. 1842 [457], 188, Ÿ5289-91). Ostrogorski (1902, 469) reached the
same conclusion, observing that the chief eect of the extension of the surage
in 1867 had not been to eliminate bribery but merely to depress the price of
bribes. Thus, even if an extension of the franchise increased the number of voters
a candidate had to bribe, it simultaneously decreased the price of bribes. The
eect of an expansion of the electorate on the overall cost of bribery therefore
depended on whether the size of the electorate increased at a faster or slower
rate than the corresponding decline in the price of bribes.
Figure 3 addresses this issue; it plots the (logged) average bribe that a campaign
paid to voters at a given election against the (logged) size of the district's
14
electorate.
The data in Figure 3 bear out John Lankaster's assertion and
Ostrogorski's observation: the larger the district electorate, the lower the price
of bribe (though plainly some campaigns, whether out of principle or lack of
funds, paid no bribes). Additional analysis shows that this relationship is neither
spurious nor solely the product of cross-sectional variation.
Table 2 shows a
series of log-log regressions of bribe prices on district electorate size controlling
for local poverty rates and the competitiveness of the election, two variables
that might well have aected the price of bribes. The poverty rate is measured
by the proportion of the local population in receipt of poor relief (
Relief ).
Per Capita in
While poor relief recipients were not entitled to vote, the disagreeable
nature of poor relief (indoor relief, in particular) provides grounds for taking
the proportion of the populace in receipt of relief as an indicator of economic
distress. The more distressed and poverty-stricken the district, the lower one
would expect bribe prices to be because poor voters are more likely to have
accepted small bribes out of necessity. In contrast, more competitive elections
should have elicited higher bribe prices as candidates sought to outbid each
other for potentially pivotal votes (though, plainly, the competitiveness of the
election was itself contingent on candidates' bribery eorts).
competitiveness of the election by the
last-rst margin,
I measure the
that is, the number of
votes separating the last winning candidate from the rst losing candidate. To
avoid endogeneity, the regressions in Table 2 use an instrumental version of the
last-rst margin that is based on the district magnitude, the last-rst margin
at the last previously contested election in the district, and the number of years
between contested elections in the district.
14 A
constant of .0083 (2
d.)
is added to bribe prices so that bribes of zero remain dened
when logged. Other constants, e.g. .004 (1
d.), .016 (3 d.), can be used without altering the
results. Bribe prices are expressed on a per vote basis, and hence in double-member districts
the prices reect the amounts that voters received for each of their two votes.
12
[FIGURE 3 AND TABLE 3 HERE]
The coecients of a log-log model are commonly interpreted as elasticities.
Thus, Specication 1 indicates that every 1 percent increase in the number
of electors in a district was associated with a 1.12 percent decline in bribe
prices. The second specication, which controls for the closeness of the election,
suggests an even sharper decline in bribe prices of 1.72 percent for every 1
percent increase in the district's electorate.
The nal specication puts the
elasticity of bribe prices at -2.17. Even the most conservative of these estimates
indicates that impact of the growth in the electorate on candidates' bribery
costs was fully oset by a corresponding decline in the price of bribes. Bribery
remained an expensive activity, of course, but its overall cost to the candidate
was quite independent of the size of the district electorate and hence unaected
by the extension of the franchise.
5.3 Cost-containment eorts
The net eect of these results is that roughly 50 percent of electioneering costs
(i.e., xed costs, printing costs, and bribery costs) were insulated from the natural growth of the electorate and the extension of the surage. That still left
the other half of candidates' electioneering budgets exposed to inationary pressures, with treating and colourable employment the most expensive remaining
items.
The average campaign spent ¿782 (N=184, s.d.
= ¿1,161) on treat-
ing and colourable employment, a sum that comprised about 30 percent of the
average electioneering budget.
15
The relationship between the amounts that
campaigns spent on treating and colourable employment and the size of the
district electorate was more complex that it was for bribery. From the candidates' perspective, the problem with treating and colourable employment was
that they were indiscriminate, the benets as easily available to opponents and
non-voters as to supporters.
Albery's (1864, 343-48) colourful account of the
1847 election in Horsham, for example, describes the treating in the borough
as being so widespread that even women and children were perpetually drunk
throughout the campaign. Colourable employment was only a little more tightly
regulated. Hiring was often decentralized, so that men could secure employment
on both sides. There were also incentives to hire non-voters, either as conduits
15 The
unmatched cases (see note 15) show a mean expenditure on treating and colourable
employment of ¿782 against a mean total expenditure of ¿2,620 (29.8 percent).
However,
if the gures are based on the 124 matched cases (i.e., for which treating and colourable
employment are observed alongside total expenditures), one arrives at a mean expenditure on
treating and colourable employment of ¿852 (s.d. = 1,141) out of a total budget of ¿2,545,
that is, 33.5 percent of electioneering costs. Further limiting matching cases to the post-1832
Reform era does not appreciably alter these gures (¿797 out of a total budget of ¿2,501 (31.9
percent, N=122), but reduces the standard deviation considerably (s.d.= ¿940). It is dicult,
and often pointless, to try to disentangle precisely how much campaigns spent on treating as
distinct from colourable employment because colourable wages were frequently paid in tickets
or scrip that could be exchanged for food and drink.
13
for money to voters or to abduct and intimidate voters. The associated costs, as
an 1827 parliamentary report recognized, were as much a function of the length
of the campaign and size of the local population as the number of electors:
It must be obvious to the House, that in populous places the excitement occasioned by a contested election is very great; that it is not
conned to the electors, but pervades every class of the community;
and that any means which can be devised to shorten the period of
such excitement, and lessen the licentiousness and riot which are its
usual accompaniments, are worth of the attention of the legislature
(P.P. 1826-27 [394], 1).
Legislative measures were taken to restrict the number of polling days, and the
initial decline in electioneering costs shown in Figure 1 was due primarily to
the contraction of the polling period from one week prior to 1832, to two days
in 1832, and to a single day thereafter.
Candidates' treating and colourable
employment bills declined proportionately with the reduction in polling days.
Legislation, however, could neither alter the indiscriminate nature of these activities nor control population growth. The central party organizations lacked
the funds to assist more than a handful of candidates (Pinto-Dushinsky, 1981),
and hence local campaigns sought ways to contain costs. Treating tickets were a
common means of cost containment: a campaign would print up and distribute
a nite number of vouchers that voters could exchange for food and drink at
local taverns. The drawback of these systems, as an election agent at the 1880
Maccleseld election noted, was that, the tickets are always there, and come
in as evidence [at a petition trial] (P.P. 1881 [2853], 32 Ÿ1375).
Colourable
employment costs were often limited by the campaigns agreeing to pay at pre-
s 6d
determined rates. At Norwich, this rate (of 3
s
per diem and 5
on polling
day) was actually known as the regulation price (C. 1876 [1442], 8).
The
Liberal and Conservative campaigns at the Hull election of 1852 went a step
further and drafted a formal agreement to regulate both the number and wages
of colourable employees (¿1 per day) and the period of their employment (P.P.
1854 [1703], xiii).
These sorts of cost-containment pacts were rarely successful. The agreement to
limit colourable employment at Hull, for example, quickly fell apart under the
pressures of the contest, and the Conservatives ended up colourably employing
over 400 men, the Liberals, over 750. The underlying problem was the prisoners' dilemma nature of electoral corruption: a widespread belief in the futility
of campaigning cleanly gave each side an incentive to resort to electoral corruption, and once this happened, the other side felt compelled to respond in kind
for fear of losing the election. John Wilton's testimony to the commissioners
investigating electoral corruption at Gloucester City in 1859 perfectly expresses
the prevailing mindset:
Q: What was the immediate cause that induced you to think that it
would be necessary to resort to extensive bribery?
14
A: What induced me to think it would be necessary to resort to
bribery was this: that I found that if we did not on the one side
commence this system as it was commenced on the other, we should
nd the material taken away from us. By material, I mean the votes
(P.P. 1860 [2586], 63, Ÿ2647).
This logic, as another witness at the Gloucester City inquiry observed, infected
every aspect of the campaign: If they would begin employing so many messengers on one side, we would do the same on ours; if we began putting people
down as clerks, they would feel called on to do the same; and so it was with
the band and everything else (P.P. 1860 [2586], 332, Ÿ14769). It was this prisoners' dilemma character of electoral corruption, rather than any expansion of
the electorate, that drove up electioneering costs.
6
How party-orientation indirectly sustained electoral corruption
The evidence presented so far explains why candidates' electioneering costs
were only weakly related to the size of the electorate not why electioneering
costs increased alongside the electorate's party-orientation. This section examines the counter-intuitive relationship between electioneering costs and partyorientation.
I argue that the electorate's rising party-orientation facilitated
candidates' capacity to forge electoral-nancial coalitions in double-member districts. I then demonstrate statistically that candidates of the same party were
indeed more likely to run in harness (i.e., as a coalition) in highly party-oriented
districts. Finally, I show that running in harness allowed candidates to spend
more jointly but less individually than candidates who ran independently. In
eect, the economies of scale inherent in these electoral coalitions allowed candidates to fund electoral corruption late into the nineteenth century despite the
high cost
6.1 Coalitions, cost-sharing, and credible commitment
The inationary pressures inherent in electioneering weighed especially heavily on singleton candidates who contested double-member districts. Singletons
had to bear single-handedly the xed costs of mounting an election and enjoyed no savings in the market for votes because of a widespread tendency for
16
plumpers to cost at least twice as much as single votes.
16 The
premium value of plumpers was common knowledge.
sue 17711, 2, col.
These circumstances
The Times (1 July 1841, Is-
D), for example, explained Henry G. R. Yorke's reputed expenditure of
¿10,000 at the 1841 York City election by the fact that, . . . Mr. Yorke polled no less than
1355 plumpers, which, of course, are dearer than split votes, and may account for his vast
expenditure.
15
placed singletons at a nancial disadvantage especially in contests against two
co-partisans who were running in harness. Singletons thus had strong incentives
to secure a running-mate with whom to split electioneering costs. Adopting a
running-mate was a sensitive matter, however. The prevailing belief was that
an unpopular or polarizing running-mate could result in the defeat of both candidates. Meaburn Staniland, for example, blamed his defeat at Boston in 1868
on the fact that his running mate's radicalism frightened the district's moderate
voters (C. 1441 [1876], 242 Ÿ13078 -13090). Gash(1953, 281-295) records a similar dynamic at work at Reading, and his description suggests that a poor choice
of running-mate was more damaging in diverse boroughs.
Reading's vibrant
dissenting community and nascent industrial sector ostensibly made it fertile
ground for radicalism, but its inhabitants were too solidly middle class and
prosperous to welcome extreme measures, (Gash, 1953, 285) and the borough's
agricultural connections, too strong for them to embrace free trade wholeheartedly. The more radical of Reading's Liberals nevertheless insisted on nominating
extremists to the party ticket with the same eects as at Boston. If Reading
had been less diverse, this situation might not have arisen: a coalition of two
radicals would have been unproblematic in a thoroughly liberal district, and
radical candidates would not have entered, and hence not have disrupted, a
thoroughly conservative district. As it was, singletons in diverse districts like
Reading confronted the dicult decision of whether to run alone, take on a
potentially polarizing running-mate, or drop out of the contest altogether.
Potential running-mates faced parallel concerns.
While a second Liberal or
Conservative candidate would appear to have had a corresponding nancial
incentive to run in harness rather than running alone, he needed assurance that
his nancial contribution would help to get himself rather than his runningmate (often an incumbent in the borough) elected.
That this was a concern
is indicated by the fact that candidates sometimes took the trouble to write
contingent contracts specifying how the electioneering costs and parliamentary
seats were to be shared between them. For example, Lord Goderich and James
Clay (the incumbent) signed a formal agreement to run in harness at the 1852
election at Hull, the terms stipulating that:
. . . if the Liberal party in Hull can only return one man, Mr. Clay is
to be that one. That Lord Goderich pays the rst ¿1,000 expenses.
That above ¿1,000 Mr. Clay pays half the expenses up to the sum
of ¿3,000, inclusive of the rst ¿1,000, beyond which amount it is
agreed that the expenses shall not go.
That the above expenses
commence, except that they include the street lists, from Monday
17
next June 14th.
A highly party-oriented electorate addressed both sides' concerns.
17 See
If party-
P.P. 1854 (1703), xiii. Goderich and Clay's arrangement was exceptional only in its
written formality; the Liberal candidates at Gloucester in 1859 (P.P. 1860 [2586], 169, Ÿ7035)
and the Conservatives at Chester in 1881 (C. 1881 [2824], xii) struck verbal agreements of a
similar nature.
16
oriented voters voted for the party and not for the individual candidates, then
any running-mate willing to contribute nancially was politically satisfactory
from the incumbent singleton's perspective.
Similarly, if party-oriented vot-
ers voted for the party and not for the individual candidates, then the entering candidate could be assured that votes would, in fact, not just ow to his
running-mate but to him as well. In eect, a party-oriented electorate resolved
co-partisans' credible commitment problem.
This is a critical insight: it ex-
plains both how candidates could continue to fund electoral corruption and why
electioneering expenditures rose and fell with the electorate's party-orientation.
6.2 Data and methods
The direct observable implication of this argument is that candidates of the
same party were more likely to run in harness in double-member districts with
highly party-oriented electorates. The diculty in testing this hypothesis is that
co-partisans' decision to run as an electoral coalition was contingent on their
decision to enter the district and contest the election and the latter decision
may well have hinged on the promise of running in harness and, by dint of
this, the party-orientation of the local electorate.
In comparing coalitioning
rates across double-member districts some attention must therefore be paid to
possibility of reverse causation and spurious correlation.
I deal with these complications by employing a conditional mixed process (CMP)
model in which i) Liberal and Conservative candidates' coalitioning decisions
are contingent on the number of Liberal and Conservative candidates who entered the election (and vice versa), and ii) all candidates' coalitioning and entry
decisions are themselves contingent on the party-orientation of the district's
electorate. The model is predicated on four main assumptions, to wit, that:
1. candidates had nancial incentives to run in harness;
2. the nancial incentives to running in harness were stronger, and the political disincentives, weaker, in large, homogeneous, and highly party-oriented
districts (for all the reasons discussed in sections 5.3 and 6);
3. the opportunity to run in harness nevertheless hinged on the number of
candidates of the same party contesting the election (i.e., requiring a minimum of two); and
4. candidates preferred to contest elections in districts that oered better
rather than worse odds of winning a seat.
To the extent that electoral competition between the parties was zero-sum (and
in double-member districts it need not have been), the fourth assumption implies that districts that were promising ground for one party's candidates were
unpromising for the other's.
17
Mathematically, the model takes the form of a system of equations:
P r(HarnessLIB it = 1) = Φ(α0 + α1 %SV it−k + α2 Y ears to Contestsit
+ α3 ln(P opulationit ) + α4 IncumbentsLIB it + α5 Diversityit
+ α6 ln(N CandidatesLIB it )
(1)
ln(N CandidatesLIB it ) = β0 + β1 %SV it−k + β2 Y ears to Contestsit
+ β3 ln(Electorsit ) + β4 InterestCON it + β5 %Agriit
+ β6 ln(N CandidatesCON it ) + β7 HarnessLIB it
(2)
P r(HarnessCON it = 1) = Φ(δ0 + δ1 %SV it−k + δ2 Y ears to Contestsit
+ δ3 ln(P opulationit ) + δ4 IncumbentsCON it + δ5 Diversityit
+ δ6 ln(N CandidatesCON it )
(3)
ln(N CandidatesCON it ) = γ0 + γ1 %SV it−k + γ2 Y ears to Contestsit
+ γ3 ln(Electorsit ) + γ4 InterestLIB it + γ5 %COEit
+ γ6 ln(N Candidates)LIB it + γ7 HarnessCON it ,
(4)
where Equations 1 and 2 estimate Liberal candidates' coalitioning and entry
decisions, respectively, and Equations 3 and 4, Conservative candidates' coalitioning and entry decisions, respectively.
For both parties, the coalitioning equations (1 and 3) estimate the probability
Pr (Harness Jit =1)) in district
i in year t as a probit function of the district's party-orientation (measured by
%SV it−k ), logged population (ln (Population it )) and socio-economic diversity
18
(Diversity it ),
and the number of incumbents (Incumbents it ) and candidates
that the candidates of that party run in harness (
18
Diversity it
is measured by a convex combination of the variance of the percentage of
%Agri it ) and the percentage of marriages
%COE it ) normalized to a range of one, i.e., Diversity it =[(%Agri )it (100-%Agri )it +(%COE )it (100-%COE )it ]/5000. Agricultural statistics are
the district's labour force engaged in agriculture (
performed by the Church of England (
taken from decennial censuses and linearly interpolated for the intervening years, Church of
England marriages are taken from the annual reports of the Registrar of Births, Deaths and
Marriages.
18
(
ln (N Candidates it ))
of the party contesting the election.
19
In turn, the entry
equations (2 and 4) estimate the (logged) number of the party's candidates entering the election as a linear function of the party-orientation and size of the
district electorate (
ln (Electors it )), whether the candidates in question ran in
Harness Jit ),20 and by a set of variables that reect the
harness or separately (
party's underlying electoral strength in the area. The number of Liberal candidates is determined by the percentage of the labour force engaged in agriculture
(
%Agri it ),
the presence of a Conservative landlord with a proprietary interest
Interest CON it ),21
in the district (
and the number of Conservative candidates
contesting the election. Similarly, the number of Conservative candidates entering the election is estimated by the percentage of marriages performed by
the Church of England (
%COE it ),
the presence of a Liberal landlord with a
proprietary interest in the district, and by the number of Liberal candidates
contesting the election. The underlying model of candidate entry is thus one
in which Liberal candidates prefer to enter urban districts that lack a strong
Conservative presence, and Conservative candidates correspondingly prefer to
enter strongly Anglican districts that lack a Liberal presence.
The district electorate's party-orientation is measured by the percentage of splitvotes cast at the
last
%SV it−k )
contested election in the district (
controlling
Years to
for the number of years between contested elections in the district (
Contests it ).
I rely on a lagged measure of party-orientation because candidates
who ran in harness tended to bribe voters to cast one vote for each the slate's
two candidates.
Voting patterns that identify a district's electorate as more
or less party-oriented are therefore a consequence not a cause of candidates'
coalitioning decisions at that election. Using
orientation avoid this endogeneity.
Note also that
%SV it−k
22
%SV it−k
as a measure of party-
appears in all four equations. The reason for this spec-
ication is that the opportunity to run in harness was contingent on at least two
co-partisans entering a double-member district and
19 A
a priori
this was more likely
constant of 1 is added to the number of Liberal or Conservative candidates contesting
the election so that if no Liberals or Conservative enter,
ln (N Candidates it ) = 0.
Ideally,
of course, the number of Liberal or Conservative candidates contesting the election would be
modeled as a Poisson process. The mathematical and practical obstacles to solving a system
non-linear endogenous equations (i.e., simultaneous endogenous probit and Poisson equations)
are considerable enough to recommend the probit-OLS model presented above.
20 To be clear,
Harness Jit , is not considered as exogenous in Equations 2 and 4 but estimated
via Equations 1 and 3. Data on whether candidates ran separately or in harness are obtained
from three sources:
the election petitions (which often noted organizational details of the
campaigns), news articles in the
Times (which sometimes noted that candidates issued a joint
address or canvassed for votes together), and the ocial campaign accounts (candidates in
harness tended to submit a single joint account, albeit one that was invariably falsied).
Interest is based on lists provided by Gash (1953) and Hanham (1959).
21
22 One
can object that the voting patterns at the last contested election in a district are
also likely to have been aected by bribery.
However, the econometric requirement here is
merely that lagged voting patterns in a district be statistically independent of candidates'
coalitioning decisions in the current election.
This is not an overly strong requirement in
light of the variation in the number of contested districts and participating candidates at the
general elections of the period and the mobility of incumbents.
19
to occur in highly party-oriented districts.
After all, a highly party-oriented
electorate ensured that double-member districts that were promising electoral
territory for one member of a party were just as promising for another candidate
of the same party Cox (1987, 138). Party-orientation and running in harness
might co-vary, then, not because of any causal relationship but because contested elections involving two Liberals or two Conservatives tended to occur in
highly party-oriented districts. Controlling for
%SV it−k
in the entry equations
ensures that the coalitioning equations estimate the impact of party-orientation
on running in harness net of its impact on candidates' entry decisions.
6.3 Results
Table 3 shows several specications of the CMP model. Recall that split-voting
indicates that electors were not voting on a purely partisan basis. Consequently,
the lower the SV rate, the more likely co-partisans should have been to run in
harness. The negative coecient on
%SV it−k
is consistent with this prediction.
This is not an artifact of candidates preferring to enter more highly partyoriented double-member districts; the statistical insignicance of
%SV it−k
in
the entry equations in Specication 1 rules out that possibility. The results of
the Liberal coalitioning equations imply that a 25-point change in split-voting
(roughly, the range between the top to the bottom decile in the sample) increased the probability of Liberal candidates running in harness by between
10-15 percent.
23
In contrast, there is no statistically signicant relationship between
%SV it−k
and the propensity of Conservative candidates to run in harness. Specications
3-5 suggest that Conservative candidates were nevertheless indirectly aected
by the growth of a party-oriented electorate. These three specications endogenize candidates' harnessing decisions so that the candidates' decision to form
an electoral coalition is contingent on whether or not their opponents ran in
harness. Of these three specications, Specication 5 oers the best statistical
representation of the evolution of party organization and electoral competition
(e.g., a markedly lower negative log-likelihood and tighter standard errors on
(Opponents in) Harness∼Jit
than Specications 3 and 4), with Liberal candi-
dates forming electoral coalitions in response to rising party-orientation and
Conservative candidates mimicking their Liberals' opponents' coalitioning decisions.
[TABLE 3 HERE]
23 This
eect is estimated conditional on two Liberal candidates entering a district with no
Liberal incumbent and all other variables held at their means.
The unconditional average
of Liberal candidates running in harness was 42 percent, so changing levels of split-voting
increased the odds of running in harness by between a quarter and a third.
20
6.4 Economies of Scale
What was the nancial impact of running in harness? Table 4 provides information on this front, setting out the average electioneering costs, overall (i.e., by all
participants) and on per coalition and per candidate bases, in double-member
24
districts contingent on the conguration of the election contest.
For example,
in a three-candidate contest in which two candidates ran in harness against a
single opponent, the mean overall expenditure was ¿5,608, the singleton candidate bearing average costs of ¿3,207 as compared to the ¿3,161 borne jointly
and ¿1,581 borne individually by the two allied candidates.
[TABLE 4 HERE]
The data in Table 4 show that running in harness oered candidates a clear
economy of scale. At ¿1,627, the per candidate costs of two-versus-two races
were signicantly lower than they were for singletons in two-versus-one (¿3,207)
or two-versus-one-versus-one (¿2,225) races. Only elections in which all candidates ran separately were nearly as inexpensive on a per candidate basis (i.e.,
¿1,767 in three-cornered contests and ¿1,714 in four-cornered contests). However, if the electorate was suciently party-oriented to resolve co-partisans'
credible commitment problems, these types of contests were not in equilibrium.
The two co-partisan candidates in a three-cornered, three-candidate race, for
example, could save ¿186 apiece by running in harness.
Once this occurred,
the remaining singleton had a nancial incentive (savings of ¿1,580) to secure
a running-mate, and the potential running-mate had a corresponding incentive to agree to run in harness rather than independently.
Similar dynamics
destabilized two-versus-one-versus-one and four-cornered races (and hence explain the infrequency of these types of contests.)
One eect of the nancial
advantages of running in harness was therefore to restructure electoral competition along two-Liberal-versus-two-Conservative lines, and by dint of that, to
reinforce the partisan nature of electoral competition. A second, less desirable,
eect of two-versus-two competition was to sustain electoral corruption. Part of
the problem on this front was the sheer amount of electioneering spending that
two-versus-two races generated.
Overall electioneering spending was highest
(¿6,661) in two-versus-two races, and to the extent that the bulk of this money
was channelled into bribery, treating, colourable employment (and a prevailing
belief that elections could not be won without resorting to corruption all but
guaranteed this), higher levels of electioneering spending invariably led to more
24 Note
that overall totals can only be calculated for districts in which all participants'
spending is observed. This accounts for the smaller samples sizes for those statistics, and it also
means that overall spending gures are not simple multiples of the per coalition gures. The
gures given per harnessed candidate are derived by dividing the harnessed coalition spending
gures by two, however.
It was common for coalition partners to divide costs equally, but
other divisions (e.g., Goderich and Clay's arrangement detailed above) were also frequent.
Note also that some logically possible congurations of four-candidate contests (e.g., twoversus-two-versus-one races) are omitted from Table 4 because they occurred too infrequently
in practice to aord any basis for generalization.
21
extensively corrupt elections. In large measure, however, the high level of overall spending in two-versus-two simply reected the fact that electioneering was
being nanced by four candidates rather than three. What made two-versus-two
races especially problematic from this perspective is that the economies of scale
inherent in running in harness insulated all candidates from the full economic
costs of their electoral corruption, and in doing so, allowed them to continue to
fund electoral corruption even as the electorate expanded.
7
Conclusion
The extension of the franchise had less of an impact on the conduct of elections
and electioneering in the United Kingdom than political scientists have generally
appreciated. In the main, this was because over half of the average campaign's
budget was devoted to xed costs or to variable costs that were either inversely
related to the size of district's electorate (e.g., bribery costs) or that declined
over time (e.g., printing and advertising costs). This did not make electioneering
inexpensive or aordable as such, but it helps to explain why the expansion
of the electorate was not sucient to induce candidates to abandon electoral
corruption in favour of programmatic campaign strategies.
The growth of a party-oriented electorate had more subtle, even contradictory,
eects on the development of partisan and programmatic electoral competition.
Party-orientation appears to have served as a commitment device that increased
the propensity of candidates of the same party to run in harness, that is, as an
electoral-nancial coalition. Running in harness oered candidates an economy
of scale in electioneering costs that allowed them to spend less individually and
more jointly than candidates who ran independently.
On one hand, the eco-
nomic eciencies inherent in running in harness reinforced the partisan nature
of electoral competition by encouraging Liberals and Conservative to contest
double-member districts as contending electoral coalitions. On the other hand,
these same economic eciencies inhibited the development of programmatic
political campaigns because they ensured that bribery, treating, and colourable
employment remained nancially viable electoral strategies notwithstanding the
expansion of the electorate.
These results also invite a reconsideration of the role that electoral systems
play in fostering programmatic politics and constraining electoral corruption.
Three comments can be made on this front. First, electoral systems that foster
intra-party competition are generally seen to discourage programmatic politics and invite electoral corruption, the logic being that candidates who cannot
dierentiate themselves in ideological or partisan terms will dierentiate them-
ab
selves on the basis of money (Cox and Thies, 1998; Samuels, 2001 , ; Chang
and Golden, 2007).
The results here stand in stark contrast to this view in
that electioneering spending and electoral corruption in Victorian Britain were
not fuelled by intra-party
competition
but rather by intra-party
22
cooperation
between co-partisans running in harness. Second, Colomer (2007) has argued
that multi-member plurality electoral systems
member districts in Victorian Britain
such as that in use in multi-
provide incentives for candidates to
form electoral coalitions to secure a single-party sweep of the seats. While that
may be true, the evidence that I have presented here suggests that there were
powerful economic (as opposed to electoral or political) motives for candidates
to form electoral coalitions. Certainly, it is clear that electoral coalitions were
not initially formed to advance programmatic agendas more eectively. Finally,
my results suggest that the near-complete adoption of single-member districts
in the United Kingdom in 1885 be credited with two eects. The direct eect
was to constrain electioneering spending by limiting the number of viable candidates in the race. The indirect eect was toundercut the system of running
in harness and in consequence the economies of scale that harnessed candidates
enjoyed. In economic jargon, the wholesale adoption of single-member districts
in 1885 ensured that candidates internalized the social costs of their electioneering spending. Given the mores of the era, these direct and indirect eects
were benecial to the emergence of free and fair elections.
23
Figure 1: Bribes at the Great Yarmouth Elections of 1859 and 1865
Lacon & Strachey (Cons), 1859
Vanderbyl & Brogden (Libs), 1865
Watkin & Young (Libs), 1859
0
60
45
30
15
0
N Voters
15
30
45
60
Lacon & Goodson (Cons), 1865
0
5
10
15
20
0
Direct Bribe in £ per Voter
Source: P.P. 16689 (1867)
24
5
10
15
20
25
311
25
23
28
23
26
N electioneering costs
N bribe prices
elections (% petitioned)
N data-providing
(40.0)
(15.4)
22
?
34
(Pre-Reform)
(22.7)
petitioned)
& by-elections (%
N of contested general
1832-
1826-31
16
26
(19.6)
46
(12.5)
271
36
1835-
17
27
(44.4)
36
(28.1)
302
40
1837-
31
50
(44.0)
50
(28.7)
251
46
1841-
44
30
(38.2)
55
(21.3)
239
51
1847-
54
43
(55.2)
67
(37.1)
329
56
1852-
22
20
(54.2)
24
(34.3)
210
58
1857-
38
34
(66.7)
30
(22.6)
266
64
1859-
Inter-election Period
26
25
(53.8)
26
(27.5)
251
67
1865-
21
27
(66.7)
27
(26.3)
384
73
1868-
15
30
(36.7)
30
(8.5)
425
79
1874-
24
27
(32.4)
34
(11.7)
452
84
1880-
Table 1: Distribution of Elections and Observations over Time and by Nature of Entry into Data Set
34
24
(77.8)
36
(1.6)
3338
Act)
Reform
(Post-3rd
1885-1906
396
410
(47.6)
498
(12.2)
7029
Total
Figure 2: Electioneering costs, the size of district electorates, and party-oriented
voting, 1826-1906
10.00
8.00
%
1,000s
6.00
4.00
2.00
0.00
)
06
19
588
(1
rm
fo
Re
stPo
80
18
74
18
68
18
65
18
59
18
57
18
52
18
47
18
41
18
37
18
)
31
35
818
81
(1
32 m
18 efor
R
ePr
Electors (in 1,000s) per Contested District (Craig 1979)
Electioneering Costs (in 1,000s, 1885 GDP-deflated £)
Split-Voting Rate in % (Cox 1987)
26
−5
−4
−3
ln(Bribe £ per Vote)
−2 −1 0
1
2
3
4
5
Figure 3: Bribe Prices and the Size of District Electorates
4
5
6
7
8
9
ln(N Electors in District)
Bribe prices expressed in terms of 1885 average earnings
27
10
11
12
Table 2: Linear regression models of bribe prices
Variable
ln (N Electorsit )
ln (Last-First it )
ln (Per Capita in Relief it )
1
2
3
-1.10**
-1.73**
-2.17***
(.45)
(.69)
(.77)
-
.91
-1.10
(1.30)
(2.02)
-
-
-1.72
(1.23)
District Fixed Eects
2
Adjusted R
RMSE
N Obs
(N Clusters)
Included
Included
.42
.38
Included
.61
2.38
2.46
1.96
356
317
147
(207)
(184)
(84)
Cell entries are OLS regression coecients with robust standard errors
clustered by election contest in parentheses
**
p < .05
***
p < .01
28
29
N Candidates∼jit
Interest∼jit
ρ
σ
N Obs
Log Likelihood
Constant
Harnessjit
(Opposing)
%COEit
%Agriit
(Opposing)
ln (Electorsit )
Years to Contestsit
%SVit−k
Entry
Constant
Harness∼jit
N Candidatesjit
(Opponents in )
(Co-partisan)
Incumbentsjit
ln (Populationit )
Years to Contestsit
Diversityit
%SVit−k
Coalitioning
-.021
.27
.40
.22
-.10
-2.122
_
(7.204)
5.744
(1.523)
-.061
(2.96)
-.100
(.265)
-.118
(1.740)
(.001)
.003***
_
(.045)
-.043
(.017)
-.023
_
_
.32
-.72
(.167)
1.150***
(.035)
.428***
(.066)
-.907***
324
-.80
-.27
(.051)
(27.091)
131
(.129)
Con
-.007
-4.763***
-38.08
(.257)
(.199)
1.240***
(.054)
.178***
(.027)
2
-28.49
(.051)
1.967***
.442***
.179***
(.033)
(.087)
(.043)
1.236***
-.767***
-.422***
-.468***
_
_
(.002)
(.001)
-.002
-.004**
_
(.002)
-.002
(.046)
(.076)
(.074)
-.074
(.017))
-.012
(.026)
_
_
(1.665)
.177
_
(1.434)
1.731
(.243)
.327
(.150)
-.028
-.166**
.077***
.020
(.007)
(.022)
-.018**
-.007
(.005)
.001
(.003)
.001
(3.335)
(1.492)
(.002)
-4.309
.124
_
(1.002)
_
3.194***
(.691)
(.358)
(.177)
2.105***
-.062
.177
-.068
.225
(.278)
-.116
(.128)
(.036)
(.134)
(.039)
-.006**
-.019
(.992)
-3.244***
-1.348
(1.467)
(.016)
(.854)
(.023)
(.015)
Lib
-.034**
-2.764***
Con
-.017
Lib
-.022
1
Lib
Con
.22
-.08
(.113)
324
.32
-.64
(.152)
1.202***
(.030)
.368***
(.058)
-1.026***
(.001)
.002
_
(.037)
-.033
(.017)
-.012
_
_
(11.100)
-13.32
1.185***
(.020)
.150***
(.026)
-.511***
_
(.001)
-.002
(.038)
-.062
(.013)
-.011
_
_
(1.619)
-2.61
(1.587)
(.364)
-.396
.412
(1.991)
6.219***
(.721)
-.190
(1.145)
-.045
(.239)
-.201
(2.031)
-4.114**
(.031)
-.018
.598*
(.747)
2.249***
(.201)
.364*
(.145)
-.092
(.037)
-.019
(.937)
-2.753***
(.016)
-.035**
3
Table 3: Conditional Mixed Process Models of Running in Harness
Lib
.22
-.07
(.120)
324
Con
(.027)
-.015
.31
-.64
(.162)
1.177***
(.035)
.444***
(.063)
-.886***
(.001)
.002**
_
(.045)
-.046
(.017)
-.024
_
_
(3.994)
-2.162
_
(1.800)
5.677***
(.486)
-.131
(.344)
-.017
(.152)
-.219
(1.983)
-4.869**
-44.41
1.242***
(.023)
.175***
(.027)
-.462***
_
(.001)
-.004***
(.045)
-.073*
(.014)
-.021
_
_
(1.620)
-.413
(.367)
.367
(.725)
1.983***
(.204)
.418**
(.145)
-.071
(.037)
-.022
(.949)
-2.828***
(.016)
-.030*
4
Lib
.22
-.32
(.131)
324
(.123)
.060
(.085)
.175**
_
(.805)
-1.436*
_
Con
.30
-.84
(.230)
1.083***
(.032)
.538***
(.070)
-.696***
(.001)
.002
_
(.048)
-.060
(.019)
-.039**
_
_
(1.159)
-7.542***
(.478)
1.577***
(.736)
6.931***
-63.08
1.184***
(.030)
.216***
(.041)
-.432***
_
(.001)
-.003**
(.038)
-.101**
(.016)
-.020
_
_
(1.464)
.271
_
(.427)
1.629***
(.158)
.296*
(.129)
-.072
(.032)
-.0261
(.766)
-2.919***
(.017)
-.041**
5
Table 4: Electioneering spending in multi-member districts by conguration of
competition
Conguration of Electoral Competition
Avg. Expenditure*
N
5,190
10
One v. One v. One
Overall Total
(565)
Singleton Coalition
1,767
(i.e. per candidate)
(160)
59
Two v. One
Overall Total
5,608
22
(736)
3,207
Singleton Coalitions
36
(575)
3,161
Harnessed Coalitions
32
(471)
1,581
per Harnessed Candidate
One v. One v. One v. One
Overall Total
6,572
2
(6,572)
1,714
Singleton Coalitions
17
(383)
Two v. One v. One
Overall Total
5,763
3
(366)
2,226
Singleton Coalitions
5
(593)
1,879
Harnessed Coalitions
4
(493)
940
per Harnessed Candidate
Two v. Two
Overall Total
6,661
37
(629)
3,253
Harnessed Coalitions
91
(251)
1,627
per Harnessed Candidate
Numbers in parentheses are standard errors of the respective means
* GDP-deated 1885 ¿; prices computed at www.measuringworth.com
30
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