The Professor Will See You Now: Party unity
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: party unity
Published a century ago, The Behavior of Legislative Groups: A Method of Measurement did what it said on the tin. The Rice Index – as its creator Stuart Rice didn’t call it, but as it soon became known – has been a staple of legislative studies ever since.
Its appeal is its simplicity. To measure the cohesion of a parliamentary group, you take the absolute value of the percentage of ayes minus the percentage of noes. If a parliamentary party is united in one lobby, it will score 100. A party split right down the middle – half the MPs in one lobby, half in the other – scores 0.
It takes no account of absences, which can be a problem when there is mass deliberate abstention. Take, for example, Kirsty Blackman’s Ten Minute Rule Bill in September on the two child welfare limit: the government abstained; seven Labour MPs voted aye, none voted no. That’s a Rice score of 100. But is that really a totally united party?
It’s also not great with smaller parties, where idiosyncratic behaviour by one MP can have a disproportionate effect. Other indices are available, as they say. But they haven’t lasted 100 years.
Measurable cohesion is high. If you take the first 344 votes of this parliament – that is, from the general election up to the November recess – the mean average Rice score for Labour MPs was 96.2. It was a perfect 100 in almost 300 of those 344 votes.
For comparison, the mean score for Conservative MPs in the first session of the 2019 parliament was 96.9; in 2017 it was 94.2
The exceptions are revealing, though. On the various free votes, mostly on assisted dying and abortion, the Rice score has averaged 28.8. Every vote on assisted dying saw the Rice score for Labour MPs fall below 30 and it hit 9.0 in one vote. (Chicken or egg? Does removing the whip decrease cohesion? Or is the whip removed because cohesion will anyway be so low? Or both?)
On whipped votes, by contrast, the average has been a stonking 99.3. The only whipped votes to see Labour Rice scores of lower than 90 have come on the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, which averaged 85.4, falling to 74.3 at Second Reading.
That bill demonstrates the most significant issue with such measurements. Behold, as it says in Psalms 133, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity – but this is unity of eventual behaviour, not attitudes or intention. This was the cohesion after the government had backed down. Your guess is as good as mine what it would have been had they not done so. High scores don’t necessarily indicate togetherness – as the government might well discover on a few more issues before Christmas.
One other thing is worth note. For almost all the parliament there have been a non-trivial number of ex-Labour MPs sitting as independents, and often voting against the government. Their inclusion would lower Labour’s Rice scores, slightly, but we can’t just include them, because we don’t know if they would have behaved the same had they been in receipt of the whip. That said, I did spot that Apsana Begum – a Queen Mary alumnus, no less – regained the whip in late September and then rebelled against it on her very next vote. So maybe they wouldn’t have behaved all that differently after all.
A confession: although I’ve been merrily using the Rice index for decades, until this week I had not actually read the original paper. Confessing this reminds me of that scene in David Lodge’s campus novel, Changing Places, in which a group of English literature academics play a party game called ‘Humiliation’. It involves them confessing to famous works of literature they haven’t read – the more canonical the text, the more points they get. A few days later the game’s winner is denied tenure on the basis that the university can’t possibly employ someone who publicly admits to not having read Hamlet. Fingers crossed the same thing doesn’t happen here.
Further reading: S A Rice, The Behavior of Legislative Groups: A Method of Measurement, Political Science Quarterly (1925)
