The legislative consequences of internal conflict and inter-party divisions

Abstract

Governments must respond quickly to pressing economic and societal problems. However, institutional rules, public opinion and unanticipated world events often delay the legislative process. Building on theories of legislative decision-making and intra-party politics, this paper shows that the speed at which bills pass is also driven by the governing party’s internal cohesiveness and its ideological distance to the opposition. Governing parties that are internally divided have greater difficulty in forming the legislative majorities necessary to pass laws quickly, especially if their preferences are further away from the opposition. I test these hypotheses using a novel collection of laws passed in the UK Parliament and conference speeches given by Labour and Conservative party members over a 10-year period. I use automated text classification techniques to determine the relative location of actors’ preferences and the level of intra-party disagreement. I then predict the duration of lawmaking based on the...