The Economic Origins of Political Parties: Party slates at

nineteenth-century parliamentary elections in England and

Wales*

Christopher Kam and Adlai Newson

May 3, 2019

Abstract

We examine the changing patterns of district-level competition at nineteenth-century parlia-mentary elections in England and Wales. In particular, we seek to explain why in some districtsand at some times candidates of the same party tended to run individually, whereas in otherdistricts and at other times they tended to run as members of a party slate. Our argumentis that co-partisan candidates had strong �nancial incentives to run as slates, but a crediblecommitment problem meant that many nonetheless ran independently. The di�culty was thatneither candidate could be sure that his �nancial contribution to the slate would, in fact, workto get himself elected. We show that candidates frequently wrote contingent contracts to tryand get around this credible commitment problem. We also show that an increasingly party-oriented electorate resolved the problem by reassuring potential running-mates that votes that�owed to one would �ow to both. We provide statistical evidence to show that co-partisanswere more likely to form slates in districts where the electorate was highly party-oriented. Ourresults help to identify the micro-historical foundations of modern party organization and thenationalization of politics.

1 Introduction

This paper is concerned with two broad aspects of political modernization. The �rst is the rise oforganized national parties. The second is the concomitant shift, at least in advanced democracies,from clientelistic to programmatic electoral competition. We examine these developments in thecontext of parliamentary elections in England and Wales over the course of the nineteenth century.Our focus is on the changing patterns of district-level competition, with special attention paid tothe formation of organizational alliances (i.e., slates) between candidates at district elections. As

*Thanks to Ken Carty, Ben Nyblade, Alberto Simpser, Scott Desposato, Anjali Bohlken, participants at the UBCDept. of Economics Empirical Workshop Seminar, and particpants that the LSE Conference on Historical Institutionsfor their helpful comments. Funding for this work was provided by the Hampton Fund of the University of BritishColumbia.

Department of Political Science and Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, respectively.

1

we show, candidates' decisions to run either independently or as a member of a party alliance werestrongly in�uenced by the �nancial demands of Victorian elections, notably the great expense ofelections. By examining candidates' decisions to contest elections independently or as members ofa slate, we come to a theoretical and historical understanding of the relationship between the costsof electoral strategies and the emergence of political parties as electoral vehicles.

The custom in England and Wales in the early years of the nineteenth-century century was forparliamentary candidates to run on an individual basis (Cox (1987, 102 n.4)). This was true evenin multi-member districts where there were opportunities to join forces with a candidate of thesame party and run as a slate. As a result, elections in two-member districts (the modal formof district prior to 1885) were frequently fought as three-cornered contests, even when two of thethree candidates were nominally Liberals or Conservatives. This pattern of electoral competitionre�ected both the parochial and personal nature of British electoral politics in the early 1800s andthe corresponding weakness of party labels and organizations (O'Gorman 1984, 71-74). By the1880s, however, electoral competition ran mainly along party lines. Co-partisan candidates in multi-member districts tended to run a joint campaign and contest the election as a party alliance, sothat the modal pattern of electoral competition in two-member districts consisted of a slate of twoLiberal candidates contending against a slate of two Conservatives. Change thus proceeded on threedimensions: the modal number of candidates contesting two-member districts increased from threeto four; three-cornered contests gave way to bipartisan competition between party slates, and thenature of electoral competition evolved from personal to partisan. The formation of party allianceswas an important step in this process because it simultaneously imparted a bipartisan uniformity tothe structure of district-level competition at British parliamentary elections and subordinated theindividual candidate to the party label (Ostrogorski 1902). These development in turn facilitated thedevelopment of nationalized and programmatic electoral competition (Caramani 2003; Cox 1987).

The formation of partisan slates at parliamentary elections signalled the onset of what Lispet andRokkan (1967, 53) called local entrenchment. By local entrenchment, Lipset and Rokkan meant theprocess by which local party organizations emerged to de�ne the set of political alternatives availableto local electorates. For Lipset and Rokkan, as for many other scholars (e.g., Ostrogorski 1902;Duverger 1962; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966; Sartori 1976), it was the extension of the franchisethat spurred the emergence of local party organizations. Certainly, an enlarged electorate generatedsigni�cant returns to those capable of organizing the registration, mobilization and coordination ofvoters. But such an argument does not identify the causal process by which candidates put asidetheir personal ambitions and pooled their resources to form organizational alliances.

One can appeal to Cox's thesis of the growing party-orientation of British electorate to explain theincreasingly partisan nature of electoral competition. Rising party-orientation (i.e., the propensity ofvoters to vote on the basis of party labels) also helps to explain the increased number of candidatesin two member districts: if votes were cast on the basis of party a�liation rather than personalquality, then a district that was electorally promising for one Liberal (Conservative) candidate wasjust as promising for a second Liberal (Conservative) candidate (Cox 1987, 138). This still leavesunexplained how co-partisan candidates overcame the collective action problems inherent in comingtogether and contesting elections as an alliance (Aldrich 1995). It was not merely a matter of partyleaders compelling or inducing their candidates to cooperate at elections because central parties andleaders of that era lacked local in�uence and relied almost wholly on candidates to fund their owncampaigns (Pinto-Dushinsky 1981; Gash 1983; Hanham 1959).

We address this puzzle with the aid of original data on the structure and costs of district electionsheld between 1820-1906. These data show that co-partisan candidates had strong economic andelectoral incentives to run as part of a slate. First, the high cost of �ghting elections grew even

2

higher over the latter half of the period. Second, the marginal value of money on votes declined evenwhile voters in many constituencies continued to expect to be bribed. Third, the propensity of thelosing candidates to �le election petitions despite the high cost of doing so suggests that the value ofa parliamentary seat also increased over the period. Thus, candidates found that it remained bothe�ective and worthwhile to spend signi�cant sums on electioneering even as it became �nanciallyburdensome to do so.

Under such conditions, it made sense for co-partisan candidates to pool resources and contest theelection as a slate. Such a strategy allowed the candidates to split the overhead costs of running acampaign, and then either save the surplus or use it to win votes. Even so, organizing a slate requiredco-partisan candidates to overcome a signi�cant credible commitment problem. Speci�cally, eachcandidate required some assurance that their �nancial contribution to the joint campaign wouldnot serve merely to secure the election of their running-mate. Candidates sometimes tried to writecontingent contracts to solve this commitment problem, but such e�orts were often futile. Weargue that it was an increasingly party-oriented electorate that ultimately resolved co-partisans'credible commitment problem: if party-oriented voters voted for the party and not for the individualcandidates, then a candidate could be assured that votes would, in fact, not just �ow to his running-mate but to him as well. Consistent with this argument is the fact that co-partisan candidates weremore likely to run as part of a slate, the more party-oriented a district's electorate.

In sum, the paper makes three important points. First, it shows that there was a decidedly micro-economic impetus to the local entrenchment of political parties: British parliamentary candidatesformed slates because it allowed them to split the overhead costs of electioneering and this gave thema distinct �nancial and hence electoral advantage over candidates who ran individually. This resultdovetails with theoretical arguments that parties' are better understood as organizations that areconstituted principally to win elections rather than to advance a particular set of policies (e.g., Downs1957; Schlesinger 1984). Secondly, the paper establishes the early onset and causal force of the costpressures that would ultimately induce parties to evolve from amorphous, clientelistic, cadre-styleorganizations to cohesive, programmatic, and nationalized mass parties. Thirdly, in demonstratingthat party slates were more likely to form in districts with highly party-oriented electorates, thepaper shows that local entrenchment was nonetheless structured by national political forces.

Our work contributes to a rich literature on the evolution of representative democracy in Britain andelsewhere. Our work o�ers a theoretical account of how structural changes in the British economyand society spurred the development and evolution of the party-in-the-district. Our focus is thussomewhat di�erent than Cox's (1987); where Cox details the endogenous relationship between theparty-in-the-legislature and the party-in-the-electorate, we concentrate on the economic basis andevolution of the party-in-the-district. In this respect, our work has much in common with Stokes et.al. (2013), who share our interest in the changing organizational structure of local parties. However,whereas Stokes et. al focus on the declining e�cacy of vote-brokers as an explanation for the demiseof clientelistic competition, we focus on candidates' willingness to run as slates as an explanationfor the emergence of partisan competition. Our focus on the emergence and homogenization ofelectoral competition also connects our work to Caramani's (2003; 2004) study of the nationalizationof electoral competition throughout Western Europe, and to Chibber and Kollman's (2004) andHicken's (2009) studies of the evolution of partisan coordination at the district-level.

The paper follows in six additional sections. Section 2 immediately follows this introduction; it out-lines the changing structure of electoral competition at nineteenth-century parliamentary elections,noting in particular how candidates of the same party increasingly tended to contest multi-memberdistricts as party slates rather than independently as had been common in early in the period. Sec-tion 3 describes the economic environment of nineteenth-century parliamentary elections, making

3

two related points: �rst, that campaign expenditures increased substantially over time; second, thatthe incentives to spend substantial sums in an e�ort to win a parliamentary seat nonetheless re-mained in place. Section 4 presents evidence that candidates of the same party confronted a chroniccredible commitment problem in forming slates, and argues that rising party-orientation in the elec-torate at large operated as an exogenous solution to this credible commitment problem. Section 5tests the argument that rising party-orientation in the electorate operated as a solution to this cred-ible commitment problem, showing that slates were more likely to form in districts that exhibitedlow levels of split-voting at previous elections, that slates enjoyed an economy of scale in campaignspending, and that candidates who ran as slates were more likely to win elections than candidateswho ran independently. Section 6 considers some alternative explanations for the formation of localparty organizations. Section 7 o�ers a concluding discussion.

2 The changing structure of electoral competition

Up until 1885, the modal electoral district in England and Wales returned two members of parlia-ment. Electors in these double-member districts could cast up to two votes, delivering either onevote apiece to two candidates or just a single vote to one candidate. Voters who cast two ballotscould also choose to give their votes to candidates of the same party or to split them between can-didates of di�erent parties. The voter's decision to cast a split-vote is particularly interesting asit indicates that the voter drew a material distinction between candidates bearing the same partylabel. The dashed gray trend line in Figure 1 indicates that the rate of split-voting among Victorianvoters in double-member districts declined steadily from the late 1850s until, by 1880, split-votingwas rare. This trend was central to Cox's argument that the Victorian electorate grew increasinglyparty-oriented over the course of the nineteenth century (Cox 1987, 95-97, 117-118).

The structure of district-level competition also changed as the Victorian electorate grew increasinglyparty-oriented. Cox's argument on this front was that,

If one candidate of a given party stood a good chance at winning [in a highly party-oriented district]... so should others have stood good chances. Thus increasingly when-ever one member of a party thought a particular double-member constituency was worth�ghting, there ought to have been another candidate of the same party who thought sotoo (Cox 1987, 138).

If both Liberal and Conservative candidates observed this logic, four-candidate contests ought tohave become the norm in double-member districts. The solid black trend line in Figure 1 tracesthe percentage of two-member districts in England and Wales that were contested by exactly fourcandidates; consistent with Cox's argument (see also Table 11.1 in Cox (1987)), this percentageincreased over time. There is an obvious negative relationship between the rate of split-voting andthe percentage of four-candidate contests. The decline in split-voting at the 1837 and 1841 electionscoincides with an increase in four-candidate contests at those same elections, for example. Thisevidence was critical to Cox's argument in that it set out a causal connection between the electorate'sgrowing party-orientation and the increasingly partisan character of electoral competition.

4

Figure 1: The structure of electoral competition and split-voting in double-member districts inEngland and Wales, 1832-1880

That said, the increase in four-candidate contests shown in Figure 1 does not directly indicatewhether candidates of the same party fought these elections independently or as a united front(as Cox himself carefully notes [n. 4, 102]). In fact, there is a great deal of variation on thisdimension. In some cases, as at the 1837 Windsor election, the four candidates comprised threeLiberals (Ramsbottom, Gordon, and DeBeauvoir) and a single Conservative (Bulkeley). Simplelogic tells us that the three Liberals cannot have contested the election as a united front; only twoseats were available.1 However, the degree of unity among candidates of the same party variessubstantially even if we con�ne our attention to elections in which two Liberals confronted twoConservatives. This was the situation at the 1837 Middlesex election, where two Liberal candidates(Hume and Byng) opposed two Conservatives (Wood and Pownal). The Conservatives did their partto make the election a party �ght, advertising in the Morning Post (Saturday, July 15, 1837) thata joint committee had been formed to secure the election of Wood and Pownal. The very same day,however, Hume and Byng's campaigns announced the there would be no coalition between the twoLiberals (Woolmer's Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Saturday, July 15, 1837; pg. 4; Issue 2376). Atthe 1847 Reading election, two Liberals (Talfourd and Piggott) also faced two Conservatives (Russelland Chelsea), but in this instance it was every candidate for himself. Russell and Chelsea were onopposite sides of their party's free trade split and their committees issued separate advertisements(Berkshire Chronicle, Saturday, July 24, 1847; pg. 1); the chairman of Talfourd's committee �atlydeclared that their candidate was not interested in a coalition �with a radical like Pigott� (BerkshireChronicle, Saturday, July 24, 1847; pg. 2).

The structure of electoral competition at Middlesex and Reading became more �rmly partisan overtime, but this was not necessarily re�ected in changes in the number or partisan distribution of thecandidates who contested these two districts. The 1874 elections at both Middlesex and Reading,for example, saw two Liberals confront two Conservatives � just as at the 1837 and 1847 elections ineach district, respectively. There is evidence that the organizational basis of the 1874 Middlesex andReading elections was quite di�erent, however. This evidence is provided by the �nancial accounts ofelection expenses that candidates were required to submit to Parliament from 1854 onwards. These

1Indeed, newspaper reports inform us that, "A coalition has been formed between Ramsbottom and Gordon"(Liverpool Mercury, Friday, July 7, 1837; Issue 1366). DeBeauvoir was presumably left to his own devices.

5

records show that the two Liberals who contested Reading (Goldsmid and Shaw Lefevre) submittedidentical expenses of l.846 s.16 d.-, and the two Conservatives, identical expenses of l.956 s.4 d.9 (P.P.1874 [358], 27). This was no coincidence; the expense accounts contain dozens of similar examples.These identical �gures suggest that the two Liberals jointly funded a campaign and ran as a coalition,what we would today term, a party slate. The Reading Conservatives apparently did the same. Thetwo Liberals at the 1874 Middlesex election (En�eld and Hamilton) did not even o�er individualaccounts of their campaign expenses; they simply submitted a single joint account of l.6126 s.- d.9.Their two Conservative opponents (Hamilton and Coope) did likewise, reporting joint expenses ofl.10,501 s.3 d.8)(P.P. 1874 [358], 7). Again, this suggests that candidates on both sides funded asingle electoral organization and ran as a party slate. This �nancial evidence is important because ittells us that by the 1870s the organizational basis of electoral competition was quite di�erent, withcandidates of the same party tending to contest multi-member districts as party slates rather thanindependently as had been common in earlier years.

3 The political economy of party slates

Our objective is to explain the variation, both across districts and over time, in the organizationalbasis of electoral competition. Put more directly, we seek to explain why in some districts and atsome times candidates of the same party tended to run individually whereas in other districts andat other times they tended to run as members of a party slate. Our argument is as follows. Quiteapart from any ideological or political considerations, there was a strong �nancial motivation forcandidates of the same party to run as a slate. Candidates tended to bear their own campaignexpenses, and these expenses grew substantially over time as the electorate expanded in size and aselectoral competition became more frequent and intense.

The incentives for any one candidate to rein in their spending unilaterally were weak. In the �rstplace, the marginal e�ect of money on votes was (as we show be below) high at Victorian elections.This meant that spending large sums on electioneering remained an e�ective and reliable if increas-ingly expensive way to win elections as late as the 1880s. Second, the propensity of losing candidatesto �le elections petitions�despite the growing cost of doing so and the declining probability of apetition reversing their defeat�suggests that the value that candidates attached to a parliamentaryseat also increased over the period. This in turn suggests that any fear of spending more on anelection than a parliamentary seat was worth was unlikely to have been strong enough on its ownto induce candidates to reduce their spending unilaterally.

By allying and sharing campaign costs with a co-partisan, a candidate could obtain signi�cant�nancial and electoral advantages over candidates who campaigned individually.2 Why then didsome candidates continue to campaign individually? Our argument on this front is that co-partisancandidates confronted a credible commitment problem: if voters could not be relied upon to caststraight party tickets, each candidate worried that his �nancial contribution would work primarilyto elect his running-mate not himself. This is evidenced by the fact that co-partisan candidatesoften took the trouble to write elaborate contingent contracts that set out each partner's �nancial

2To the extent that the argument requires formalization, assume that i) the probability of winning a parliamentaryseat increases in campaign spending, that ii) candidates try to maximize their probability of winning at lowest possibleexpenditure, and that iii) there exists a feasible level of expenditure that is a solution to candidate i 's optimizationproblem, E∗. It follows that should i and j form an alliance, each can contribute between E ∈ [E∗/2, E∗) and bestrictly better o� than were they to run independently: they can either spend less to achieve the same probability ofwinning a seat, or spend more (up to E∗) to achieve a much higher probability of winning a seat. One can elaboratethe model by specifying the mathematical relationship between money and votes, but we see such formalization asunnecessary.

6

obligations under various circumstances. Unsurprisingly (at least on our argument), these contingentcontracts tended to fail.

Once the electorate was strongly party-oriented, however, a candidate could be relatively sure thatany vote for his running-mate would be cast in tandem with a vote for himself. In this respect, the riseof a party-oriented electorate resolved the candidates' credible commitment problem. Our argumentthus dovetails with Cox's in that we share the view that an increasingly party orientated electorateprovided a crucial impetus to changes in the structure and organizational basis of parliamentaryelections over the course of the nineteenth century. Where we part ways with Cox is with regardto the mechanism by the electorate's growing party-orientation e�ected these changes. It was notsimply that rising party-orientation ensured that a district that was promising for one Liberal wasjust as promising for another. It was rather that rising party-orientation resolved the crediblecommitment problem that confronted co-partisan candidates.

3.1 The cost of elections

Our explanation of the changing organizational basis of electoral competition rests on two assump-tions about the economic properties of nineteenth-century election campaigns. The �rst is thatelection campaigns were expensive and grew more so over time. Candidates thus operated underincreasing �nancial pressure. The second is that the incentives for any one candidate to rein intheir spending unilaterally were weak. This was not only because a candidate's electoral successor failure was closely related to the amount of money that they spent on electioneering, but alsobecause the value that candidates ostensibly attached to a parliamentary seat rose over time. Thissection provides evidence of these economic aspects of Victorian elections.

The basic expenses of a campaign involved retaining a local solicitor to act as an election agent,renting a hotel or pub to serve as a committee room, and advertising meetings and speeches. Inaddition, candidates were expected pay the costs of transporting voters to and from the polls,treating them with food and drink, and compensating them for their time away from work. In manyboroughs, candidates also confronted powerful incentives to engage in wholesale vote-buying. Inshort, the costs of an election were many, varied, and signi�cant.

Figure 2 presents data on candidates' average campaign expenditures. The data come from twosources. The �rst is the published accounts of elections expenses that candidates �led with theHouse of Commons in accordance with the Corrupt Practices Act, 1854. These data are numerous(N=4,120) and comprehensive, and for those reasons have been widely employed (see, e.g., Coatesand Dalton 1992; Mares and Zhu 2015; Kam 2017). These published expenditures have two draw-backs, however: they exist only from 1854 onward, and they systematically underestimate expendi-tures because candidates did not disclose sums spent on illegal activities, such as bribery (Seymour1915; Hanham 1959). We o�set this weakness by also using campaign expenditures acquired fromelection petitions, i.e., legal complaints against the conduct of an elections. The investigations thataccompanied an election petition often reveal what candidates actually spent on elections (manyof them prior to 1854), including sums spent on bribery, treating, and the like. These �revealed�expenditures are not numerous (N=583), concentrated almost exclusively on borough elections, andperhaps overstate spending levels (because petitions were directed at elections where corruption wasevident and expenditures, therefore, presumably higher than average). However, by using the pub-lished and revealed expenditures in tandem, we obtain a better sense of the true range of campaignspending than were we to rely on just one of these sources.

7

Figure 2 shows published expenditures at contested elections in both county and borough districts,and revealed expenditures at contested elections in borough districts.3 It may o�er some perspectiveon the sums involved to note that ¿1 from this era would be equivalent to upwards of ¿100 in 2015GDP-de�ated terms. These expenditures are worth three remarks. First, county elections werealways expensive and became more so over time, the average cost of a contested county electionincreasing from ¿2,741 in 1857 to ¿3,700 in 1880. Second, that trend is mirrored in both thepublished and revealed expenditures at contested borough elections, albeit at lower levels. Indeed,the published �gures indicate that the cost of borough elections increased by 250 percent between1857 and 1880, and revealed expenditures, that it increased by close to 300 percent. By 1880, theaverage candidate's expenditure was no less than ¿1,000 and probably signi�cantly more. Third, therevealed expenditures nonetheless suggest that the lower electioneering expenditures of the 1850swere atypical. One might explain the increase in election costs after 1857 as a function of a growingelectorate and a decline in uncontested elections (Lloyd 1965; Caramani 2003), but one could equallyview the trend as a return to the higher prices (about ¿1,800 on average) that generally prevailedin the market for parliamentary seats. Regardless, Figure 2 brings home the point that, save for anusual period in the early 1850s, candidates' generally faced signi�cant election expenses, and thoseexpenses increased substantially from 1857 onward.

Figure 2: Candidates' average campaign expenditures at parliamentary elections, 1832-1880

We know that these expenses weighed heavily on politicians because of their e�orts to containcampaign costs. For example, legislation was passed to reduce the number of polling days fromone week prior to 1832, to two days in 1832, and to a single day thereafter. As candidates werecustomarily expected to treat their supporters throughout the election, reducing the polling periodcorrespondingly reduced candidates' expenditures. Indeed, an election agent who testi�ed before the1835 Select Committee on Bribery at Elections contended that that con�ning polling to a single daywould �save thousands of pounds� (P.P. 1835 [547], 124 2194). The decline in revealed expendituresat the 1835 and 1837 elections corroborates this view.

3The keen-eyed reader will observe that the time-series of published borough expenditures begins in 1854 ratherthan in 1857. This is because the 1854 legislation applied to several by-elections (all in boroughs) that took placebetween 1854 and the general election in 1857. Expenditures are denominated in 1906 GDP-de�ated terms becausethat was the year of the last major investigation into electoral corruption in Great Britain (at Worcester City).

8

Local campaigns also sought ways to contain costs. Treating voters could be especially expensive, notjust because in the counties the electorates were so large, but also because the practice could spin outof control. Albery's (1864, 343-348) 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 wereperpetually drunk throughout the campaign. It was therefore common for campaigns to attempt tocap their treating expenses by printing up and distributing a �nite number of vouchers that voterscould exchange for food and drink at local taverns. These e�orts often failed under the pressureof electoral competition. Harry Froggat, a Conservative election agent at the 1880 Maccles�eldelection, described the underlying problem:

I should explain that in the onset of the canvass we agreed with our canvassers as tohow much a head they were to receive, and it was understood that it was to includeeverything. Then a day or two after that it cropped up that the Liberal party weredistributing to their canvassers and to other people tickets for refreshments. I think Ihave given to the clerk the tickets I produced before the judges at the petition. It turnedout that each canvasser on the other side, day-man, was receiving three tickets per night,which entitled him to 6d. each night for refreshment. I tried to limit it amongst ourcanvassers as well as I could. They said that they did not see why they should be treatedless liberally than the other side, and they wished me to give them tickets as well as theother other side, so that they could get refreshments (P.P. 1881 [2853], 32 1375).

Campaigns also attempted to reign in expenses related to �colourable� employment, i.e., the prac-tice of employing voters in nominal jobs. Opposing campaigns would sometimes negotiate to keepcolourable wages to pre-determined rates. At Norwich, this rate (of 3s 6d per diem and 5s on pollingday) was actually known as �the regulation price� (C. 1876 [1442], 8). The Liberal and Conserva-tive campaigns at the Hull election of 1852 went a step further and drafted a formal agreement toregulate both the number and wages of colourable employees (¿1 per day) and the period of theiremployment (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 thepressures of the contest, and the Conservatives ended up colourably employing over 400 men, theLiberals, over 750.

3.1.1 Campaign spending and election outcomes

E�orts to rein in campaigns costs so often failed because of a belief in the futility of campaigningcleanly. Such beliefs were widespread, and they gave each side an incentive to resort to electoralcorruption. In county districts, electoral corruption would typically be limited to excessive treating;in many boroughs, it descended into outright vote-buying. Once this happened, costs escalatedrapidly precisely because 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 Cityin 1859 perfectly expresses the prevailing mindset:

Q: What was the immediate cause that induced you to think that it would be necessaryto resort to extensive bribery?

A: What induced me to think it would be necessary to resort to bribery was this: thatI found that if we did not on the one side commence this system as it was commencedon the other, we should �nd the material taken away from us. By material, I mean thevotes (P.P. 1860 [2586], 63, 2647).

9

This logic, as another witness at the Gloucester City inquiry observed, infected every aspect of thecampaign: �If they would begin employing so many messengers on one side, we would do the sameon ours; if we began putting people down as clerks, they would feel called on to do the same; and soit was with the band and everything else� (P.P. 1860 [2586], 332, 14769). John Galloway, the legalagent of James Clay's campaign at Hull in 1852, put the matter succinctly when he remarked thatit was �perfectly absurd� to think that any candidate could win an election at Hull without payingvoters (P.P. 1854 [1703], 332 117781).

The belief that elections hinged on the signi�cant (and illicit) expenditure of money may have beenwidely-held, but estimating the marginal e�ect of those expenditures on election outcomes is notstraightforward. In the �rst instance, the marginal e�ect of a given candidate's expenditure is likelyconditional on their opponent's expenditure and vice versa. In the second, a candidate's vote shareor probability of winning depended on the number of candidates contesting the election, and thisnumber changed from place to place and over time. Sometimes districts went uncontested, no pollwas held, and the seats secured by acclamation.

We deal with these issues by focusing our attention on contested elections in which the number ofConservative and Liberal candidates was identical, and in which no independent candidates ran.These were elections in which candidates of each party presumably held reasonable and roughlyequal prospects of victory. We then compute two quantities:

1. The Conservative-Liberal �vote gap� in district j at election t (V OTE GAP jt), that is, theaggregate percentage of the vote won by the Conservative candidates minus the aggregatepercentage of the vote won by the Liberal candidates.

2. The Conservative-Liberal �spending gap� in district j at election t (SPENDGAP jt), that is,the amount the Conservative candidates jointly spent minus the amount the Liberal candidatesjointly spent, denominated in 100s. To ensure that the spending gap does not merely re�ectvariation in the availability of spending data, we limit our analysis to elections for whichpublished spending �gures are available for all four candidates.4

We estimate the marginal e�ect of campaign spending on votes by regressing the vote gap on thespending gap, controlling for the log of the number of electors in the district (lnELECTORSjt).Our estimating equation is thus,

4We are aware that our approach can be criticized on substantive and statistical grounds. A substantive criticism ofour approach is that it is ahistorical in that it assumes that nineteenth-century elections ran along strictly bipartisanlines that did not emerge until very late in the period. The fact that we rely on candidates' published accounts tocompute the Conservative-Liberal spending gap means that the analysis is limited to the 1857-1885 period. Thiswas an era of two-party politics. The Chartist movement had completely subsided by 1857, and the vast bulk ofthe Peelites had either left politics or been subsumed into the Liberal party by the time of the 1859 election. Otherin�uential third-party options (e.g., the Liberal-Unionists) arrived on the scene only after the 1885 election or werecon�ned to Ireland (e.g., the Home Ruler) and thus do not impinge on our analysis.There are two obvious statistical criticisms of our approach. The �rst is that the spending gap is an endogenous

function of the candidates' electoral expectations. We deal with this criticism explicitly below. The second is thatour estimate of the marginal e�ect of the spending gap on the vote gap is subject to a selection bias precisely becausewe restrict the analysis to contested elections at which there were an identical number of Liberals and Conservativecandidates. This is certainly a concern, but there are countervailing considerations. First, no votes were counted atuncontested elections, and hence there is no vote gap associated with these elections. Thus, such elections would fallout of the analysis whether or not we explicitly excluded them. Second, we were to open up the sample to electionsin which Liberal candidates outnumbered Conservatives (or vice versa), the the spending gap would come to measurethe balance of candidates across parties as much as the balance of capital across parties. This would impair anyapples-to-apples comparison of the spending gap across districts and over time. Similar problems would e�ect thevote gap.

10

V OTE GAP%jt = β0 + β1SPEND GAP jt + β2 lnELECTORSjt + �jt, (1)

with β1 providing our estimate of the marginal e�ect of campaign spending on votes.

Figure 3: The Conservative-Liberal vote gap by the Conservative-Liberal spending gap at contestedelections in which there were an identical number of Conservative and Liberal candidates, 1854-1906

-100

-75

-50

-25

0

25

50

75

100

Cons

erva

tive

- Lib

eral

Vot

e G

ap (%

)

-75 -50 -25 0 25 50 75 100 125Conservative - Liberal Spending Gap (₤100s)*

*Denominated in 1906 GDP-deflated terms

Figure 3 plots the Conservative-Liberal vote gap against the spending gap in the 553 elections inour sample. The positive skew of the spending gap indicates that Conservative candidates generallyoutspent their Liberal opponents. The spending gap was rarely very large, however, amounting to±270 or less at 50 percent of elections, and ±600 or less at 75 percent of elections. In contrast,the voting gap exhibits signi�cantly greater variation. Elections at which one party's vote shareexceeded the other's by 10 percent or more were common. Even so, the vote gap at 20 percent ofelections was just 2.5 percent.5

We estimate three speci�cations of Eq. 1 via OLS (see Table 1 below). The �rst speci�cationis estimated on the pooled data without regard to district and election period �xed e�ects. Thisspeci�cation returns an estimate of β1 of .25. Thus, every 100 increase in the Conservative-Liberal

5The vote gap is also an extremely strong predictor of winning a parliamentary seat. If we translate the number ofseats won by the Conservatives as a proportion of the district magnitude (e.g., winning one seat in a double-memberdistrict equals .5 of the available seats, winning both equal 1, and so forth), then regressing the proportion of seatswon on the vote gap returns,

Pr(SEATSjt) = .52(.01)

+ .02(.001)

V OTE GAPjt

N = 553

R2 = .47

These results indicates that every 1 percentage point increase in the Conservative-Liberal vote gap increased theprobability of the Conservatives winning all of a district's seats by .02.

11

spending gap is associated with a .25 percentage point increase in the Conservative-Liberal vote gap.The estimate of β1 increases to .28 when election period �xed e�ects are added to the model (seeSpeci�cation 2). Replacing the election period e�ects with district �xed e�ects (see Speci�cation 3)has no e�ect on the estimate of β1 (which remains at .28) but boosts the adjusted R

2 of the modelconsiderably, indicating that much of the variation in the Conservative-Liberal vote gap is relatedto district-speci�c factors.

To the extent that the Liberals (or Conservatives) allowed themselves to be outspent in preciselythose elections where they anticipated spending to have little impact on the outcome, the spendinggap is endogenous to candidates' expectations about their electoral prospects. Such a dynamicwould imply that the OLS estimates of Eq. 1 in Table 1 are biased.6 We address this concern byusing the �slate gap� and the district magnitude as instruments for the spending gap. The slategap consists of the number of Conservative slates contesting the election in a given district minusthe number of Liberal slates contesting the same election.7 As the number of slates on either sideis either 0 or 1, this variable takes on just three values: +1 when the Conservatives are organizedas a slate and the Liberals are not, 0 when neither or both sides are organized as slates, and -1when the Liberals are organized as a slate and the Conservatives are not. To the extent that thechief bene�t of running as a slate was to provide candidates with an economy of scale in campaignspending (as we argue below), the slate gap should e�ect the vote gap only through the spendinggap. Put di�erently, given that the vote gap consists of the di�erence in the aggregate Conservativevote share minus the aggregate Liberal vote share, the vote gap should not be a�ected directly bywhether the Conservative or Liberal candidates ran as a slate or independently.8 The resulting IVestimate of β1 = 1.04 is shown in the fourth column of Table 1. This estimate is substantially largerthan the OLS estimates.

It is helpful to place these marginal e�ects in context. The inter-quartile range of the spending gap isapproximately 570. A spending gap of this size in favour of the Conservatives is associated with avote advantage over the Liberals of 1.4 percent based on the OLS estimates, and of 5.9 percent basedon the IV estimates. The lower bound of this estimate exceeded the margin of votes between the last-winning candidate and the �rst-losing candidate at just over 15 percent of contested elections, and theupper bound, at just over 50 percent of contested elections. In short, these estimates corroboratethe widespread belief among Victorian-era politicians that election outcomes were contingent oncampaign expenditures.

6The bias could be upward or downward depending on whether the Liberals (Conservatives) allowed themselves tobe outspent in districts where they anticipated they would nonetheless win, or alternatively, in districts where theyanticipated they would lose no matter what they spent.

7The measurement and coding of slates is described in Section 5.1 below.8We use an interaction between the slate gap and the district magnitude as a means to di�erentiate between a

slate gap of zero in single-member districts (where it is zero by construction) and multi-member districts (where itimplies an equal number of slates on both sides).The �rst-stage equation is:

SPEND GAPjt = α0 + α1 lnELECTORSjt + α2SLATE GAPjt + α3Mjt + α4SLATE GAP ×Mjt + µjt

for which we obtain the following estimates:

SPEND GAPjt = −14.45(3.86)

+ 2.13(.53)

lnELECTORSjt − 42.75(12.73)

SLATE GAPjt + .19(1.07)

Mjt + 20.72(5.87)

SLATE GAP ×Mjt

N = 553

R2 = .07

F (4, 548) = 9.22

We concede that our instrument is not particularly strong.

12

Table 1: Regression of Conservative-Liberal vote gaps on Conservative-Liberal spending gaps atparliamentary elections, 1857-1906.

OLS IV1 2 3 4

Spending Gap (in 100s) .25∗∗∗ .28∗∗∗ .28∗∗∗ 1.04∗∗

(.06) (.09) (.09) (.47)

District Fixed E�ects No No Yes NoElection Fixed E�ects No Yes No NoAdj. R2 .03 .06 .50 -N Obs 553N Clusters 225Subscripts denote the election in district j at year t.

Cell entries are regression coe�cients. Numbers in parentheses are robust standard errors clustered by district.

Each regression controls for the size of the district electorate (in 100s) and district magnitude

∗∗∗p < .01 ∗∗p < .05 ∗p < .10

The estimates reported in Table 1 do not convey the manner in which the marginal e�ect of campaignspending on electoral outcomes changed over time. The sample we have constructed to isolate themarginal e�ect of campaign spending on votes is not ideal for such a task because, in con�ning theanalysis to districts in which the elections were very similar from a partisan perspective, we are leftwith only a few data points per district over time. The problem is compounded by relying on thepublished campaign accounts, which exist only from 1854 onwards. Even so, we can get some senseas to how the marginal e�ect of campaign spending on electoral outcomes evolved and maintainsome comparability with the OLS estimates in Table 1 by including in Eq. 1 a set of interactionsbetween the Conservative-Liberal spending gap and a set of election period dummies. The resultsof this exercise are expressed visually in Figure 3 below.

13

Figure 4: OLS estimates of the marginal e�ect of the Conservative-Liberal spending gap on Conser-vative vote shares, 1857-1880.

n=23

n=38

n=54

n=118

n=128

n=162

n=29

1857

1859

1865

1868

1874

1880

1885

-2 -1 0 1 2 3 4∂VOTE GAP / ∂ SPEND GAP

Figure 4 shows a marked decline in the marginal e�ect of campaign spending on vote shares overtime. The Conservative-Liberal vote gap at the 1857 and 1859 elections increased by 1 percent ormore for every 100 by which the Conservatives candidates outspent their Liberal opponents. From1865 onwards, however, every 100 of �outspending� was associated with increase in the vote gap ofbetween only .2-.5 percent. It may have had no e�ect whatsoever at the 1865 election.

Some caution is required in interpreting these results. First, the estimates of the large marginale�ects of spending on votes at the 1857 and 1859 elections are based on only a small number ofdistricts. The same can be said about the ostensible recovery in the marginal e�ect of spending atthe 1885 election. Second, these estimates do not account for district-speci�c e�ects; they re�ect theaverage marginal e�ect of the spending gap on the vote gap across all districts at a given election.Equally, the decline in the marginal e�ect of spending on votes from 1865 onwards mirrors the tenorof the qualitative evidence we have presented above and the results of other research (see Stokes2011; Stokes, Dunning, and Nazareno 2013; Kam 2017; Kuo 2019). The timing of the decline alsocorresponds to the signi�cant expansion of the franchise in 1868 and the introduction of the secretballot in 1872. The former meant that any �xed campaign expenditure was spread more thinlyacross a much larger number of voters, the latter undercut the e�ectiveness of direct bribery. Bothevents thus combined to reduce the marginal e�ect of campaign expenditures on electoral outcomes.

What then can we generally say about the cost of electioneering and the relationship betweencampaign spending and electoral outcomes? Campaign expenditures increased signi�cantly from the1857 election onwards, and anecdotal evidence suggests that candidates felt the �nancial pressureof these increased expenditures. There was a widespread belief that such vast expenditures werenecessary if a candidate was to be competitive. This belief was not wholly misplaced. The marginale�ect of spending on votes was not large in absolute terms, but it was large enough to representthe di�erence between victory and defeat in perhaps 25 percent of contested elections. There weresigns that the impact of money on elections was declining, however, and that the political model of

14

contesting elections by delivering private goods to voters in the form of bribes, treats, and �ctionaljobs was coming under pressure.

3.1.2 Petitions and the value of a parliamentary seat

Candidates might have unilaterally reined in their spending were the value attached to a parliamen-tary seat to have declined over time. Such a decline would have raised the fear of spending moreto win a seat in Parliament than the seat was itself worth. However, the propensity with whichlosing candidates petitioned election results suggests that the value that candidates attached to aparliamentary seat rose rather than fell over time.

An election petition was a legal action against the conduct or result of an election, �led either bythe losing candidate(s) or their associates. Petitions o�er a useful mean of gauging the value of aparliamentary seat because the we observe the outcome of every petition that was �led, the costsrelated to prosecuting and defending against a petition are well-documented, and the legal rules thatgoverned petitions are well-de�ned. Petitions were tried before committees of the House of Commonsuntil 1868, and thereafter in the Courts. A petition trial had three broad outcomes: i) the petitionwould be dismissed with the winning candidate retaining the seat; ii) the election would be annulledand the seat granted to the losing candidate either directly or won by the losing candidate via asubsequent by-election, or iii) the election would be annulled and the seat would remain vacant orgo to a third actor, again via a subsequent by-election. In short, the winning candidate (respondent)would retain the seat, the losing candidate (petitioner) would obtain the seat, or neither wouldobtain the seat.

The costs associated with a petition were signi�cant. The initial costs bore more heavily on thepetitioner, who was required to deposit a surety of 1,000, but both sides could expect to pay1,000 before the petition reached the trial stage (Hanham 1959, 258). A petition that went to trialbecame �a �nancial nightmare for all concerned with it, save the solicitors who got up the evidence,and the counsels who appeared before the judges� (Hanham 1959, 258). Our own analysis of 101petition costs that were published across a variety of parliamentary papers between 1835 and 1897(see PP1837-38(50); PP1860(329); PP1874(219); PP1875(225); PP1897(347)) puts the mean cost ofa petition on each side at 1,940.

Up until 1841, the law favoured the winning candidate by making it di�cult to bring in evidenceof electoral corruption. Legal changes brought about just before the 1841 elections reversed thisstate of a�airs and made it easier to bring home charges of corruption against the sitting member(Seymour 1915, 216). The transfer of jurisdiction of election petitions to the Courts in 1868 not onlydiminished partisan bias in the outcomes (Eggers and Spirling 2013), it altered the cost structure ofmounting and defending against a petition. Whereas the committees of the House of Commons hadgenerally been content to let each side bear their own legal costs (PP1836(496)), the Courts tendedto ensure that costs followed the verdict. The practical upshot of this change was that the winningside could expect to bear one-quarter of the total cost of the petition, and the loser, three-quarters.9

We use a strategic-form game to model to link the expected utility of a petition to the value of aparliamentary seat. Following the election, the losing candidate, L, may either: concede the electionresult; or 2) petition against the election at a cost of c > 0. In turn, the winning candidate, W,may either: 1) surrender the seat; or 2) defend their seat at a cost of c > 0. We assume that both

9Theoretically, the loser should have been liable for the whole of the winner's costs. The Courts, however, heavilytaxed each sides' expenditure so that even the winner of the petition was out a substantial sum (see Hanham 1959,258-59)

15

candidates value the seat at v > 0. If L petitions and W defends, the petition proceeds to trial andthe legal costs on both sides increase to kc where k ≥ 1. To proxy the British rule of legal costs,we say that the player who loses the petition pays αkc, and the player who wins the petition pays(1− α)kc where α ∈ [0, 1]. Petitions have three possible outcomes:

1. With probability γ the petition is dismissed with and W retains the seat;

2. with probability θ the petition succeeds and L obtains the seat;10

3. with probability 1− γ − θ the petition succeeds but the seat goes to neither L nor W.

Table 2 below shows the payo� matrix of the game. The fact that losing candidates routinely �ledelection petitions suggests that v > c. However, following Hanham's description of a petition as a��nancial nightmare for all involved�, we assume that v − c > 0 > γv − λkc and that v − c > 0 >θv − δkc. The game thus resembles a game of �chicken� in that the best possible outcome for eachplayer is for their opponent to concede or surrender (as the case may be) whereas Defend, Petitionis the worst possible outcome for both players.

Table 2: Payo� matrix of the election petition gameL

(1− q) qConcede Petition

W (1− p) Surrender 0, 0 0,v − cp Defend v − c, 0 γv − λkc, θv − δkc

λ =[12+ (γ − θ)( 1

2− α)

], δ =

[12+ (θ − γ)( 1

2− α)

]

The game has two pure strategy Nash equilibria at Defend,Concede and Surrender, Petition, anda mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in which W's plays Defend with probability p∗ such that

p∗((S,D), q∗(C,P )) =v − c

(1− θ)v − c(1− δk),

and L plays Petition with probability q∗ such that,

q∗((C,P ), p∗(S,D)) =v − c

(1− γ)v + λkc,

where λ =[12 + (γ − θ)(

12 − α)

]and δ =

[12 + (θ − γ)(

12 − α)

].

The mixed strategy equilibrium is of central interest as we can estimate the relevant parametersof the equilibrium from the data at hand. The model thus provides a framework to estimate thevalue of a parliamentary seat relative to changes in the values of the parameters over time. Now,we cannot estimate either p or q directly, but we know that the probability of a petition being triedwas p× q, and this quantity can be estimated directly from the data. We must also normalize oneparameter to identify the model, and we do so by �xing the value of c at 1. Following our descriptionabove of the key institutional changes in the petition process, we estimate values of the remaining

10We assume that θ incorporates the probability that L wins any subsequent by-election.

16

parameters for three periods, 1832-1840, 1841-67, and 1868-1880. These estimates appear in Table3 below.

The estimates suggest that the value of a parliamentary seat increased in value by approximately 35percent relative to the expected cost of a petition between 1832 and 1880. The estimate is robustin the sense that we obtain a similar trend even if we alter θ and γ to include the probability thatthe seat is obtained by the party of the petitioner (or retained by the party of the respondent)at any subsequent by-election. The result is driven by the brute fact that petitions grew moreexpensive even as they were less likely to deliver the seat to the losing candidate, and withoutany corresponding decline in the probability with which they were �led. The result also coincideswith another pertinent dynamic: the number of candidates per seat increased and the proportion ofcontested elections rose substantially from the 1868 election onwards (Lloyd 1965). The increaseddemand for parliamentary seats, on one hand, and the �xed supply of parliamentary seats, on theother hand, also points to an increase in the price of parliamentary seats.

Table 3: The relative value of a parliamentary seat over time given estimates of petition gameparameters

1832-40 1841-67 1868-1880p× q .09 .15 .12θ .36 .13 .09γ .59 .51 .58c 1.00 1.00 1.00k 1.47 1.47 1.94α .50 .50 .75v̂ 1.40 1.66 1.92

We can sum up the economic context of nineteenth-century parliamentary elections as follows. First,elections grew more expensive over time, with candidates themselves personally responsible for thebulk of their campaign expenditures. Second, candidates, election agents, and voters shared awidespread belief that election outcomes hinged (and perhaps ought to hinge) on the expenditureof signi�cant sums of money, directed mainly to the delivery of private goods to voters. Third,the marginal e�ect of all this spending on electoral outcomes was signi�cant but in decline. Yet,fourth, the propensity with which losing candidates �led election petitions suggests that the valuecandidates attached to a parliamentary seat rose over the course of the period.

This environment placed the individual candidate in a dilemma. If he unilaterally reduced hiscampaign expenditures, he would ease his heavy �nancial burden but was unlikely to be elected.Yet the value of a parliamentary seat ostensibly remained high enough for him (and his opponents)to justify spending signi�cant sums on elections and petitions in an e�ort to secure one.

4 Cost-sharing and credible commitment

The standard argument given for a candidate to adopt a running-mate was reduce the likelihoodof the candidate's own defeat.11 The logic is that, absent a running-mate, a candidate's supporterswould be tempted to give their second votes to the opposing candidate that they saw as the lesser of

11The other political advantage to running as a slate is that it opened up the possibility of the party in questionsweeping the district's seats. But this is to consider the matter from the perspective of party leaders (who required

17

two evils. In this fashion, a candidate might be defeated by the second votes of his own supporters(Cox 1987, 102; Hanham 1978, 197).12 Adopting a running-mate was a sensitive matter, however.There were, of course, political considerations. The prevailing belief was that an unpopular orpolarizing running-mate would bring about the defeat of both candidates. The coalition betweenBeckett and Tempest at the 1835 Leeds election, for example, was described as having �corrosivee�ects" on Beckett's election prospects (The Morning Chronicle, January 8, 1835), for example.Meaburn Staniland similarly blamed his defeat at Boston in 1868 on the fact that his running-mate'sradicalism frightened the district's moderate voters (C. 1441 [1876], 242 13078 -13090). Gash (1953,281-295) records similar dynamics at work at Reading at the 1835 and 1837 elections. Reading'svibrant dissenting community and nascent industrial sector ostensibly made it fertile ground forradicalism, but its inhabitants �were too solidly middle class and prosperous to welcome extrememeasures,�(Gash, 1953, 285) and the borough's agricultural connections, too strong for Reading'svoters to embrace free trade wholeheartedly. The more radical of Reading's Liberals neverthelessinsisted on nominating extremists to the party ticket with the same e�ects as at Boston.

We do not deny the electoral logic for adopting a running-mate or that countervailing politicalconsiderations bore on the matter. We contend, however, that �nancial motives played a crucial rolein the formation of party alliances. The cost of electioneering weighed especially heavily on singletoncandidates who contested double-member districts. Singletons had to bear single-handedly the costsof mounting an election and enjoyed no savings in the market for votes because of a widespreadtendency for plumpers to cost at least twice as much as single votes. The premium cost of plumperswas common knowledge. The Times (1 July 1841, Issue 17711, 2, col. D), for example, explainedHenry 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 1,355 plumpers, which, of course, are dearer than split votes,and may account for his vast expenditure.� These circumstances placed singleton candidates at a�nancial disadvantage especially in contests against two co-partisans who were running as a slate.This in turn (per the results in Table 1) implied that singleton candidates were at a distinct electoraldisadvantage. Singletons thus had strong �nancial and electoral motives to secure a running-matewith whom to split electioneering costs.

A second Liberal or Conservative candidate would appear to have had a corresponding �nancialincentive to run as a slate rather than running alone. The di�culty was that both candidatesneeded assurance that their �nancial contributions to the joint campaign would help to get them-selves elected rather than their running-mates alone. That this was a concern is indicated by thefact that nascent slates would often fall apart because one candidate's supporters would not votefor the running-mate. At the 1835 Stockport election, for example, the Liberal candidates, HenryMarsland and Edward Davenport reportedly fell out and used "very severe language towards eachother" due to Marsland's supporters not splitting votes with Davenport (Chester Chronicle andCheshire and North Wales General Advertiser, 23 January 1835, 3). Under such conditions, �-nances were predictably a source of tension between co-partisans. At Northhamptonshire South,for example, �[Henry] Cartwright's election debts proved an enduring problem over the subsequentdecade [the 1850s & 60s], causing increasing tension between himself and [Rainald] Knightley asthe latter became wary of shouldering the burden of the Conservative interest in the division�(http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1832-1868/constituencies/northamptonshire-south.Accessed 15 January 2018).

parliamentary majorities) or local partisans (for whom a monopoly on the district's parliamentary representationwould grant a monopoly on local patronage). Whatever value candidates placed on being elected alongside a co-partisan colleague, we can safely assume that they placed greater value on ensuring their own election in the �rstplace.

12Running-mates who were recruited for this reason were sometimes referred to as �vote-traps.� The label wasapplied to Charles Bracebridge, the second (and indeed secondary) Liberal candidate at the 1837 election forWarwickshire North. See http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1832-1868/constituencies/warwickshire-north. Accessed 12/1/2018.

18

We �nd even more compelling evidence that co-partisan candidates confronted a credible commit-ment problem in the fact that candidates sometimes took the trouble to write contingent contractsspecifying how the electioneering costs and parliamentary seats were to be shared between them.An elaborate example of a contingent contract of this sort is provided by the 1847 election for thewestern division of Somersetshire. The agents of the two Liberal candidates, Bickham Escott andP. P. Bouverie, signed a memorandum of understanding, initialled in the margins by the candidates,that stated,

The Honorable Philip Playdell Bouverie and Bickham Escott, Esq, Candidates.

For the purpose of securing the Election of the above named Candidates it is agreedby the respective committees on their behalf that the Expense of the Election shall beborne by each of the Candidates in the following manner, viz. in case one thousandElectors (more or less) shall split their votes for "Bouverie and Escott" the expense ofbringing such Electors to the Poll and of refreshments for those Electors afterwards shallbe borne and paid by and between the above named candidates equally. But the expenseof bringing to the Poll any Electors who may split their votes for "Bouverie and Hood" or"Bouverie and Moody" shall be borne solely by Mr Bouverie and the Expense of bringingto the Poll any Elector who may split their votes for "Escott and Hood" or "Escott andMoody" shall be borne solely by Mr Escott.

It is further agreed that the Expense of the Committee Rooms and Check clerks andany other Expenses incidental to the Committee Rooms shall be borne equally betweenMr Bouverie and Mr Escott. At this Eleventh day of August 1847. (SO Record O�ce,DD/SF 13/3/16)

The agreement did not end well. Correspondence between Escott and his agent indicates that Escottfound the agreement to be highly unsatisfactory ex post. In an angry letter, Escott charged that hewas being asked to pay more than he agreed to pay, and that if there were �any intelligible reasonwhy I should pay part of Mr Bouverie's debts on account of that contest I never heard such reasonstated.� Escott felt that Mr Bouverie's agents had taken advantage of him. Escott closed the letterdeclaring �atly that he �refuse[d] to pay one shilling more.�

Another example of a contingent contract comes from the 1852 election at Hull, where the twoLiberal candidates, Lord Goderich and James Clay (the incumbent), signed a formal agreement to�run in harness� i.e., form a slate. The terms of the agreement stipulated that:

That Lord Goderich pays the �rst ¿1,000 expenses. That above ¿1,000 Mr. Clay payshalf the expenses up to the sum of ¿3,000, inclusive of the �rst ¿1,000, beyond whichamount it is agreed that the expenses shall not go. That the above expenses commence,except that they include the street lists, from Monday next June 14th.13

As our previous remarks about the 1852 Hull election suggest, this agreement also proved to be apaper tiger: an investigation revealed that Goderich and Clay's expenses came to ¿5,955 almosttwice their agreed limit! The Esscott-Bouverie and Goderich-Clay agreements are exceptional onlyin their written formality; the Liberal candidates at Gloucester in 1859 (P.P. 1860 [2586], 169, 7035)and the Conservatives at Chester in 1881 (C. 1881 [2824], xii) struck verbal agreements of a similarnature.

13See P.P. 1854 (1703), xiii.

19

The credible commitment problem that potential running mates confronted was exacerbated by thefact that candidates tended to be quite transient. Losing candidates had good reasons to search formore promising districts (or to simply give up their e�orts to get elected). However, incumbents alsofrequently decamped to safer seats (Coates and Dalton 1992). This churn of candidates across seatsmeant that approximately 70 percent of slates were one-time relationships. Reputational concerns ora fear of retaliation were unlikely to have been su�ciently strong in such an environment to inducecandidates to live up to the political or �nancial obligations that came with running as part of aslate.

In theory, this credible commitment problem was easier to overcome in highly party-oriented districts.A highly party-oriented electorate addressed both sides' concerns in this way: If party-oriented votersvoted 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 voters voted for the party and not for the individual candidates, then the entering candidatecould be assured that votes would, in fact, not just �ow to his running-mate but to him as well. Aparty-oriented electorate e�ectively resolved co-partisans' credible commitment problem.

5 Testing the cost-sharing and credible commitment argument

The central observable implication of our argument is that candidates of the same party should havebeen more (less) likely to run as a slate in a multi-member district the more (less) party-orientedthe district's electorate. Our argument also implies that there was an economy of scale to runningin coalition (i.e., they could spend less individually and more jointly); absent such an advantage,there was no obvious economic incentive to run in coalition and the credible commitment problemthat we have just described was moot. In this section, we �rst examine the relationship betweensplit voting and the formation of co-partisan coalitions, and then consider the �nancial implicationsof forming a coalition.

5.1 Data and Methods

5.1.1 Identifying and coding slates

As we have noted several times above, the prevailing norm for much of this period was that candi-dates ought to run independently. There were also well-known (though not well-recorded) politicaldivisions within each party (e.g., between whiggish and radical Liberals and protectionist and Peel-ite Conservatives) that prevent one from automatically assuming that co-partisan candidates werein coalition. We examined four sources for evidence about the relationship between co-partisancandidates at the same election:

1. O�cial campaign accounts: As we noted in our earlier discussion of the changing structureof electoral competition at Middlesex and Reading, candidates who ran in coalition tendedeither to submit a single joint account of their election expenses or submit identical accounts,each candidate bearing precisely 50 percent of their joint expenditure. We use the publishedaccounts of candidates' expenditures to code coalitions at elections from 1857 onward.

Published campaign expenditures are not available for elections prior to 1857. For earlierelections, we relied on the following alternative sources.

20

2. Newspaper accounts of the campaign: Candidates frequently placed advertisements calling onvoters and local businesses to send in their outstanding �nancial claims or to invite voters toa meeting. When candidates did this jointly, we code the candidates as being in coalition.

3. Election petitions: Investigations of election petitions sometimes revealed candidates' organi-zational arrangements. The agreement between Clay and Goderich that was presented above,for example, is evidence that the two candidates were in coalition.

4. Historical descriptions of a district's electoral history : Speci�cally, we rely on the histor-ical descriptions of elections and candidate provided by the History of Parliament Group(http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/). These descriptions often described the relation-ship between the candidates and the structure of competition at speci�c elections in eachconstituency.

The appendix provides examples of these data sources and our coding decisions. On the basis of theinformation in these data sources, we code each campaign (i.e., an e�ort by the candidates of partyi in district j to win the election at t) as being comprised of an individual candidate or a slate. Ourdependent variable, SLATEikjt thus indicates whether candidates of party k operated as a slate (1)or not (0) at the election in district j at time t.

5.1.2 Party-orientation and split-voting

The party-orientation of a given district's electorate is the key causal force in our argument. Wemeasure the party-orientation of a district in the same fashion as Cox, that is, via the proportionof split-votes cast at an election (SVjt); the higher the electorate's party-orientation, the lower theproportion of split-votes.

We appreciate that the rate of split-voting at a given election was as much an e�ect of candidates'coalition arrangements as a cause. Consequently, in some of the speci�cations below we use a setof instruments for SVjt and estimate the impact of split-vote on slate formation via 2SLS. We usethe split-voting rate at the last contested election in the district (SVjt−k) as one instrument, butour instrumental variables strategy also exploits the fact that the Conservatives were the party ofagriculture and Anglicanism, whereas the Liberals represented industrial and dissenting interests.Split-voting was presumably more prevalent in districts where these cleavages bisected rather thanreinforced one another. Accordingly, we also use the percentage of the district's workforce engagedin agriculture (AGRIjt), the percentage of marriages in the district conducted by the Church ofEngland (COEjt), and their interaction (AGRI × COEjt) as instruments.14

These four variables (SVjt−m, AGRIjt, COEjt, and AGRI × COEjt) provide us with relevantinstruments for SVjt. A plausible case can also be made that each of them e�ects slate formation onlyvia their impact on the split-voting rate. We see SVjt−m as unproblematic in regards to the exclusionrestriction because we �nd it di�cult to conceive of how split-voting rates from years past wouldexert a more direct force on candidates' decisions to run as a slate than the contemporaneous rateof split-voting. The presence of a dominant agricultural sector (or Anglican community), however,might well dissuade a second Liberal candidate from contesting a district, and in that way directlyundercut the possibility of a Liberal slate forming at an election. However, with the analysis by itsnature con�ned to instances in which a second co-partisan had entered the district there is littleroom for the structural factors represented by AGRIjt and COEjt to e�ect slate-formation in thisdirect manner.

14By standardizing AGRIjt and COEjt within each election period we ensure that AGRI × COEjt is positive forelections in districts where the agricultural workforce and Anglican marriages are both above- or below-average, andnegative for elections in districts above-average on one dimension and below-average on the other.

21

5.1.3 Control variables

We control for the (logged) size of the district's electorate, lnELECTORSjt, which ostensibly am-pli�ed the incentive to seek a coalition because districts with larger electorates were more expensiveto contest. We also control for the presence of a co-partisan incumbent (or incumbents) who stoodfor re-election in the district, INCUMBENTSkjt. An incumbent co-partisan was presumably anattractive running-mate; they had established political organizations at their disposal and a partnermight ride on their electoral coat tails. Finally, we control for the number of other co-partisans thatentered the election, COPARTISANSkjt. In general, COPARTISANSkjt equals 1, implying thatcandidate A of party k is joined in district j at t by a single co-partisan. However, there are casesin which two or more co-partisans entered a district. Such situations o�ered the candidates of partyk more opportunities to form a slate, but they also created the potential for coordination problemsto emerge.

5.1.4 Estimation strategy

Our resulting linear probability model can be written as:

Pr(SLATEikjt = 1) = θ0 + θ1%SV jt + θ2 lnELECTORSjt + θ3INCUMBENTSkjt + θ4COPARTISANSkjt(2)

The expectation is that θ1 < 0. Equation 2 is estimated across Liberal and Conservative campaignsin contested multi-member-member districts in which the candidates of party k had an opportunityto run as a member of a slate (i.e., where at least one other co-partisan entered the election). Thus,an election contested by two Liberal candidates and two Conservative contributes two records, onenoting whether the Liberals ran as a slate or independently, the other noting the same informationfor the Conservatives.15

As speci�ed, the model implies that there are no systematic di�erences in coalition incentives andarrangements across parties. One can relax this assumption by adding a party dummy to themodel but doing so has no impact on the results. A less obvious assumption is that the Liberaland Conservative candidates made their slate arrangements independently, i.e., the Conservatives(Liberals) were neither more nor less likely to run as a slate given the Liberals' (Conservatives')decision run as a slate or not. We cluster standard errors by the district-election (i.e., by j and t)in deference to the possibility that the two parties' decisions were not entirely independent.

5.2 Results

5.2.1 Split-voting and slate formation

Our estimates of Equation 2 are shown in Table 4. The �rst three speci�cations of the model areestimated via OLS. The negative coe�cient of SVjt in these �rst three speci�cations is in line with

15Put more generally, we have one degree of freedom less than the number of co-partisans in a given district election.This is because the value of SLATEijkt for co-partisan A is fully determined by co-partisan B's decision to run ona slate or not. That said, we must continue to subscript SLATE by i as well as k because there are some complexif infrequent cases in which three or more co-partisans contest a district. In such cases, A could form a slate withB, with C, run independently, or�depending on the district magnitude�form a slate with both B and C. Thesecomplex cases thus contribute multiple records to the analysis.

22

the prediction that higher levels of split-voting (i.e., lower levels of party-orientation) discouragedcandidates of the same party from running as a slate. The coe�cient ranges from -1.95 to -1.60,depending on the inclusion of election period and district �xed e�ects in the model. These �guresimply that every percentage point increase in the split-voting rate was associated with a decrease inthe probability of co-partisan candidates running as a slate of between .0195 and .016. The inter-quartile range of the split-voting rate was approximately 12 percent. A decline in the split-votingrate of that magnitude would increase the probability of a slate forming by about .2. This is a largee�ect relative to the baseline probability of a slate forming of .46 in this sample.

23

Table4:Linearprobabilitymodelofpartyslatesform

ingin

double-m

ember

districts

OLS

2SLS

Proxy

12

34

56

7SVjt

-1.95∗∗

∗-1.73∗∗

∗-1.60∗∗

∗-3.56∗∗

∗-3.41∗∗

∗-3.92∗∗

∗-.49∗

(.21)

(.26)

(.28)

(.75)

(.76)

(1.20)

(.27)

lnELECTORSjt

.11∗∗

∗.21∗∗

∗.13∗∗

.06∗∗

.05

.11∗

.21∗∗

∗

(.01)

(.03)

(.06)

(.02)

(.03)

(.07)

(.03)

INCUMBENTSkjt

.02

.01

-.01

.03

.03

.02

.02

(.02)

(.02)

(.02)

(.03)

(.03)

(.03)

(.02)

COPARTISANSkjt

-.04

-.05

.002

.01

.02

.11

-.20∗∗

∗

(.04)

(.05)

(.05)

(.12)

(.11)

(.13)

(.06)

Constant

-.15

.27

(.11)

(.23)

DistrictFE

No

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

ElectionPeriodFE

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

AdditionalControls

No

No

No

No

No

Yes

No

NObservations

758

466

754

NClusters

541

348

534

NDistricts

152

105

154

Adj.R

2.28

.43

.44

.18

.24

.29

.32

1st-stageF-statistic

21.67

14.64

306.32

Cellentriesare

regressioncoe�cients

withstandard

errors

clusteredbydistrict-election(i.e.,

jt)

inparentheses.

*p<

.10**p<

.05

***p<

.01

24

As we noted above the split-voting rate at a given election was as much an e�ect of candidates'coalition arrangements as a cause. This is because once two co-partisans formed a slate, they wouldjointly work to convince voters to cast both their votes for the slate (although�as we related above�such arrangements sometimes fell apart). We address this problem via the instrumental variablesstrategy outlined in Section 5.1.2 above. Speci�cations 4-6 report 2SLS estimates of the coe�cientsin Equation 2. The 2SLS estimates of SVjt are approximately twice as large in magnitude as theOLS estimates, with a one percentage point increase in the split-voting rate implying a .034− .039decrease in the probability of co-partisan candidates running as a slate.

We �nd that our 2SLS estimates are robust to the inclusion of election period �xed e�ects. Ourinstruments are substantially weakened when we try to add district �xed e�ects to the model,however. The chief problem is that split-voting rates were only sporadically reported in newspapersand poll books so that we have only a few districts where the time series of split-voting rates exceeds4 data points. These data points, moreover, are not always from consecutive elections. Thus, evenwhen SVjt is observed, SVjt−m, may not be. This explains the sharp drop o� in the number ofobservations between Speci�cations 1-3 and 4-6, and why our 2SLS are not robust to the inclusionof district �xed e�ects.

We adopt two strategies to deal with this issue. First, we add a series of covariates to the model in ane�ort to control for unobserved district-speci�c factors that might account for slate formation. Thesecontrols include the district population and dummy variables for the district's area, borough-countystatus, region, and county. Speci�cation 6 reports the resulting coe�cient estimates. The additionof these covariates increases the standard error of the SVjt coe�cient but does not otherwise alterour results.

The second strategy is to employ the lagged split-voting rate, SVjt−m, as a direct proxy for SVjtand estimate Eq. 2 via OLS (see Speci�cation 7). Speci�cation 2 serves as a useful benchmark toSpeci�cation 7 as both include district �xed e�ects. Using SVjt−m, as a proxy for SVjt decreasesthe magnitude of the coe�cient on split-voting by about three-quarters relative to Speci�cation2. This in turn indicates that impact of the decline split-voting on slate formation was far moremodest than suggested by the other estimates. The fact that the speci�cations returning the smallestcoe�cient estimates include district �xed e�ects also suggests to us that the formation of slates wascontingent not only on the split-voting rate but also on unobserved district-speci�c factors. Evenso, the coe�cient estimate on split-voting in Speci�cation 7 is negative and almost twice as large asits standard error (t = 1.83).

5.3 Additional Implications

5.3.1 The �nancial returns

Table 5 provides information on the �nancial impact of running as a slate or independently, settingout the average electioneering expenditures (in 1906 GDP-de�ated terms) per candidate in double-member districts contingent on the con�guration of the election contest. For example, in a three-candidate contest in which one candidate ran independently and the other two ran as a slate, i.e.2 v. 1, we see that the independent candidate in such contests reported to Parliament an averageexpenditure of ¿1,348 as compared to ¿810 apiece for the two partners.

25

Table 5: Electioneering spending in contested double-member boroughs, 1820-1906Con�guration of Competition Published Expenditures Revealed Expenditure

Mean se N Mean se NRan independently

1 v. 1 v. 1 745 39 460 2,350 259 732 v. 1 1,348 125 106 2,823 442 32

2 v. 1 v. 1 908 101 89 1,884 487 7

Ran as a slate2 v. 1 765 55 107 1,902 297 36

2 v 1. v 1 810 93 46 1,747 975 42 v. 2 854 48 234 1,700 144 81

The data in Table 5 show that running as a slate o�ered candidates an economy of scale anda signi�cant electoral advantage. This is most evident with regard to the revealed �gures, butthe published ones tell much the same story. In a three-candidate race where all candidates ranindividually, revealed spending averaged ¿2,350. If two candidates were able to form a slate andturn the election into a 2 v. 1 contest, however, their individual spending would decline to ¿1,902 (asavings of ¿448 apiece) whilst their joint spending would climb to ¿3,804. The two partners wouldthus enjoy a spending advantage of just shy of ¿1,000 over their singleton rival.

The electoral advantage that a ¿1,000 spending gap represented was signi�cant as we demonstratedin Section 3.1.1 above. In the long-run such unbalanced contests cannot have been in equilibrium.Not only did the two co-partisan candidates enjoy signi�cant savings by running as a slate, theircooperation put �nancial and electoral pressure on their independent opponent. Once this occurred,the independent candidate had a strong �nancial incentive to secure a running-mate (to wit, savingsof ¿1,123, i.e., ¿2,823-1,700) and the potential running-mate had a corresponding incentive to agreeto run as a slate. The spending patterns in Table 5 are thus consistent with our argument.

5.3.2 The electoral returns

We can conjecture, then, that one e�ect of the �nancial advantages of running as a slate was torestructure local electoral competition along two-Liberal-versus-two-Conservative lines, and by dintof that, to reinforce the partisan nature of electoral competition. Indeed, not only were elections indouble-member districts increasingly contested by four rather than three candidate as Cox showed(see Figure 1 above), it was also that the four candidates increasingly organized themselves into twocontending slates, one Conservative and one Liberal, and that one slate would win both seats. Thisdynamic is shown in Figure 5.

26

Figure 5: Trends in slate formation and party sweeps at double-member districts, 1832-1880

0

20

40

60

80%

1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880

Contested elections in 2-member districts at which candidates of one party won both seatsCandidates in 2-member contests who ran on a slateSplit vote cast at contested elections in 2-member districts

Figure 5 does not establish that candidates who organized themselves into slates enjoyed an electoraladvantage relative to those who ran independently. (Rising party orientation on its own could havegenerated both party slates and party sweeps.) However, we can directly assess and compare theelectoral performance of candidates on slates to those who ran independently by examining the rankorder in which candidates polled (i.e., 1st, 2st, etc.) in multi-member districts. If slates o�eredcandidates an electoral advantage, then candidates running on slates should tend to �nish aheadof candidates who run independently all else equal. We test this argument by regressing the rankorder in which candidates polled (RANKijt) in contested elections in double-member districts on twodummy variables indicating whether or not the candidate in question 1) ran as part of a slate (ONijt)and 2) contended against a slate (V Sijt), respectively, controlling for the number of candidates atthe election (NCANDIDATESjt). The model can then be written as,

RANKijt = α0 + α1ON ijt + α2V Sijt + α3NCANDIDATES +∑

τtEt +∑

δjDj + �jt, (3)

where Et and Dj represent sets of election period and district indicators, respectively. If slateso�ered the candidates on them an electoral advantage, then we should observe α1 < 0 and α2 > 0.

Estimating Eq. 3 via OLS provides the following results:

27

RANKijt = .52(.03)

∗∗∗ − .29(.03)

∗∗∗ON ijt + .21(.03)

∗∗∗V Sijt + .50(.004)

∗∗∗NCANDIDATES,

+∑

τtEt +∑

δjDj

N Obs. (Clusters) = 5, 112 (1,497) Adj. R2=.06

Standard errors clustered by district-election (i.e., jt) in parentheses.* p < .10 ** p < .05 *** p < .01

One can interpret the results as follows. The average rank order in which a candidate �nishedwas .52 (the constant) plus .5 for every additional candidate that contested the election. Withfour candidates contesting an election, for example, the average ranking of a candidate was 2.52,almost exactly the mid-point between the last-winning candidate (i.e., 2nd place) and the �rst-losingcandidate (i.e., 3rd place) at the election. Being on a slate reduced a candidate's expected rankordering by .29. In contrast, contending as an independent against a slate increased one's rankordering by .21. The outcomes of contests in which a lone candidate contended against two alliedopponents were thus decidedly skewed in favour of the latter. However�and as one might expect�the advantage th