@unpublished{praninskas2026enfranchisement,
  author = {Praninskas, Gailius and Munroe, Ellen},
  title = {Did Enfranchisement Lead to Representation?},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Job Market Paper}
}

Did enfranchisement make Parliament more representative of the population? If so, was it because politicians from poorer families were elected, or because politicians of every background responded to poor voter demand? We study Britain's democratisation, from a plutocracy to universal suffrage, combining biographical records of MPs with over 17 million probate records to place politicians, their fathers and enfranchised voters on a single wealth scale from 1858 to 1990. As the vote reached the poor, Parliament drew on politicians from poorer backgrounds: the share of MPs whose fathers fell outside the wealthiest 1 percent rose from one in ten to three in four. Using variation across birth cohorts in the franchise at the start of a typical political career, we attribute around half of this change to enfranchisement. Across constituencies, where an Act enfranchised the poor, voters rewarded the party that claimed to represent them, the Liberals in 1885 and Labour after 1918. Descriptive representation led to substantive representation: members from poorer backgrounds advocated more for what poorer voters wanted, while members already in office did not respond when the vote reached the poor in their own seats. The poor entered Parliament a generation after they could vote, and at scale only once the trade unions and the Labour party paid for their candidacies. Enfranchisement moved Britain from a plutocracy toward a common-interest state mostly by changing who sat in Parliament, and who sat changed only once the poor could afford to stand.

• 2026: Linnaeus Inequality Summit; KIZ Political Economy Workshop; HYRCE Liège; 2nd Warwick–LSE Political Economy PhD Conference; LSE SPEECH
• 2025: Royal Economic Society Annual Conference; Danish Historical Political Economy Workshop; 14th Annual Lithuanian Conference on Economic Research; Warwick–LSE Political Economy PhD Conference; Oxford University Political Economy Work in Progress; LSE Political Science Political Economy Work in Progress; LSE SPEECH
• 2024: LSE Workshop on Institutions and Political Economy; LSE SPEECH

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