UC Irvine

The political and institutional changes in late seventeenth century England and their role in its subsequent development have been the subject of much debate. The focus has largely been on constraining the executive, constitutional change, and security of property rights. This dissertation provides novel insight to the political economic changes from 1660 to 1702 using new datasets and the tools of applied economics. It is organized as three self-contained chapters on different dimensions of politics and property rights change of the period. All offer more general lessons on these fundamental factors influencing economic development.

The first chapter studies the impact of conflict between the monarch and parliament on parliament's capacity to provide legislation that reorganized property rights to land use, so-called estate acts, for individual landholding families. I collect a new dataset on the population of estate bills and their legislative life-cycle from primary sources as well as create proxies for political conflict to study the effect of conflict on bill success. I first show that fiscal conflict caused estate bills to fail by leading the monarch to suddenly close parliament. The conflict created a political barrier to parliament's functioning and ability to reorganize property rights. Second, I show that political and institutional changes with the Glorious Revolution mitigated the effects of this conflict and in turn improved parliament's capacity to reorganize rights.

Chapter 2 focuses on property rights change by studying the economic and legal functions of estate acts. I examine the individual clauses of a random sample of estate acts collected from the Parliamentary Archives for the period from 1660 to 1702. I first document that were four main types of acts that reorganized property rights for economic purposes, such as refinancing a family's estates (pay debts) and exploiting new opportunities made possible by England's growing economy. Second, I find that the composition of estate acts evolved over time. The evolution is connected to the rise of strict settlements and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Last, at odds with the literature, I find estate acts had large economic benefits for property markets and families in part because they allowed economic transactions in London and Middlesex and were for members of the lower gentry.

The last chapter studies how the occupations and elections of Members of Parliament (MPs) influenced their political support. I use a new panel dataset of the population of MPs elected from 1660 to 1702 and multinomial logit models to examine the choice to support different political parties: the Court and Opposition from 1660 to 1685 and the Tories and Whigs from 1689 to 1702. First, the evidence for the Court and Opposition is consistent with the monarchs' attempt to build support in parliament through patronage with the Court and the growing importance of elections for the Opposition during this era. Second, I provide evidence that there was continuity and change in the occupational and electoral support from the Court to the Tories and the Opposition to the Whigs after 1688. The evidence is consistent with the argument that the Glorious Revolution led to a new political economic equilibrium.

By way of a conclusion, this dissertation offers more general lessons. It provides insight to how the Glorious Revolution improved England's state, in particular legislative, capacity to reorganize property rights. It also highlights the importance of this capacity to reorganize feudal (or traditional) rights to resources as economic opportunities changed throughout the preindustrial era.