Dissent and Rebellion in the House of Commons: A Social Network Analysis of Brexit-Related Divisions in the 57$^{ th}$ Parliament

TL;DR

This paper introduces a social network analysis methodology to examine MPs' voting behavior, revealing Brexit-related divisions and predicting votes with high accuracy during the 57th UK Parliament.

Contribution

It develops a novel social network approach to analyze parliamentary voting patterns and accurately forecast Brexit-related votes.

Findings

Detected significant eurosceptic behavior differences in Brexit divisions

Predicted MPs' votes on Brexit deals with over 90% accuracy

Identified distinct social network structures for Brexit and non-Brexit groups

Abstract

The British party system is known for its discipline and cohesion, but it remains wedged on one issue: European integration. We offer a methodology using social network analysis that considers the individual interactions of MPs in the voting process. Using public Parliamentary records, we scraped votes of individual MPs in the 57th parliament (June 2017 to April 2019), computed pairwise similarity scores and calculated rebellion metrics based on eigenvector centralities. Comparing the networks of Brexit- and non-Brexit divisions, our methodology was able to detect a significant difference in eurosceptic behaviour for the former, and using a rebellion metric we predicted how MPs would vote in a forthcoming Brexit deal with over 90% accuracy.