Early Day Motions: exploring backbench opinion during 1997--2000.

Guy P. Nason

Early Day Motions (EDMs) are expressions of opinion originating from the U.K.\ House of Commons. Any Member of Parliament (MP) can propose a motion on any topic which can then be supported by the signatures of other MPs followed by publication which then becomes a permanent record of backbench MP opinion. This article subjects EDM data from the period 1997--2000 to several statistical analyses. A scaling analyses reveal several interesting features: strong party political structure and some structure related to the region, gender and age of the signing MPs. Both principal components and classification tree methods produced interpretable models that can successfully assign MPs to their political party. Conversely, only weak structures are found amongst the EDMs and no structure organizing MPs into common signing blocs of MPs and issues was discovered. The article aims to be controversial with methods such as time-evolving scaling configuration videos which verify the independence of independent MP Martin Bell, position the leaders of the Liberal Democrats or decide whether Shaun Woodward was likely to defect before he did so.