The repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in 1846--one of the most important economic policy decisions of the nineteenth century--has long intrigued and puzzled political scientists, historians, and economists. Why would a Conservative prime minister act against his own party's interests? The Conservatives entered government in 1841 with a strong commitment to protecting agriculture; five years later, the Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel presided over repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, violating party principles and undercutting the economic interests of the land-owning aristocracy. Only a third of Conservative members of Parliament supported the repeal legislation and within a month of repeal, Peel's government fell. The Conservatives remained out of power for decades. In this definitive book, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey examines the interacting forces that brought about the abrupt beginning of Britain's free-trade empire.Using a wide variety of methodological tools to measure both qualitative and quantitative data (including computer-assisted content analysis of thousands of pages of parliamentary debates), Schonhardt-Bailey concludes that economic interests provided the momentum behind repeal, a momentum that overshadowed almost all else. Indeed, as part of a broader momentum of democratic reform, these same interests, left unsatisfied, may easily have snowballed into revolution--as Sir Robert Peel and others feared. But interests alone did not explain why reform rather than revolution emerged in mid-nineteenth century Britain. In order to resolve more fully the long-standing puzzle of repeal, Schonhardt-Bailey traces the overlapping and intertwined forces of interest, ideas, and institutions.
Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey is Reader in Political Science in the Government Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she teaches courses in the politics of money, finance and trade, along with legislative politics.
Her research interests are in political economy and quantitative textual analysis. By measuring the words, arguments and debates of politicians and policy makers, she aims to gauge the extent to which ideas, interests and institutions shape political behavior.
She is author and editor of several books on trade policy, most recently, "From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective", in which she uses a variety of methodological tools to gauge both qualitative and quantitative data from the nineteenth century to resolve the long-standing puzzle of Britain's policy shift to free trade.
She is currently completing a book (co-authored with Andrew Bailey of the Bank of England and FSA) entitled "Deliberating Monetary Policy". This book examines deliberations on (1) the oversight of monetary policy in the House and Senate banking committees of Congress, (2) the assessment by senators of the sitting Federal Reserve chairman in respect of consideration of his re-appointment; and (3) the formulation of monetary policy by the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve. The focus of this work is on the relationship of the Federal Reserve vis-à-vis Congress, and in particular on the motivations of Members of Congress as they oversee the policy making decisions of the Fed. At the heart of the project is the role of ideas, arguments and understanding of monetary policy by Members of Congress vis-a-vis the thinking of central bankers as they formulate monetary policy in the committee setting of the FOMC. Very broadly, the book examines the similarities and differences between politicians and central bankers as they discuss and deliberate on monetary policy. Methodologically, the book is unique in that it employs textual analysis software to examine statistically the verbatim arguments and statements of politicians and central bankers as they deliberate on monetary policy over a period of 33 years (1976-2008). But, the book then challenges the results obtained from this analysis with extensive interviews with about two dozen former members of the FOMC, congressional staff and former members of the House and Senate banking committees in order to gauge the extent to which the empirical findings accord with the personal experiences of key individuals who have been active participants in the formulation and oversight of monetary policy.
