Seminario The political impact of ideas: Evidence from 17th century England

Abstract

This research estimates the impact of political ideas on political change in the context of the establishment of parliamentary democracy in England. We develop a method to quantify similarity in political argumentation and use it to show that members of parliament that use ideas about Parliamentary supremacy that originate with John Locke are more likely to vote to support parliamentary primacy. We use our method to expand into other important political philosophers, and quantify which arguments are new. We use these new arguments to isolate the causal effect of ideas on politics, additionally measuring each voting member of parliament's material interests in the vote outcome. We find that ideas have an autonomous impact on politics.