Fiscality, Regulation, and Policy Choice: Evidence from Declassified British Cabinet Minutes 1981–1997

Abstract

This article uses a novel dataset, compiled from declassified records of British cabinet meetings between 1981 and 1997, to examine the motivations associated with adoption and rejection in more than one thousand policy decisions. A wide variety of motivations for policy options were considered, including those related to political calculation, institutional constraints, economic and non-economic policy objectives, and interest group input. Dimensionality reduction and random forest models show that a narrow set of motivations related to fiscality, economic regulation, and public perceptions, were the most important predictors of the adoption outcome. Fiscal constraints and regulatory objectives were the most important predictors of adoption, and interest group demands related to fiscality and regulation the most important predictors of rejection. These findings provide support for the central role of these two core economic functions in policy adoption in a recent and influential case.

Quantifying economic policy: Unsupervised learning on archival evidence from the United Kingdom, 1983–2021

“…At the time of writing, minutes of cabinet meetings up to December 1997 are publicly available. The 30–40 cabinet meetings taking place each year are an opportunity for cabinet ministers to come together, be informed of important policy decisions, report on departmental business and participate in debates (Cabinet Manual, 2011, 4.12–4.30, Popa, 2022, Seldon & Meakin, 2016). The meetings provide crucial evidence on the executive's policy approaches, as they present the arguments and logic that went into policy decisions, together with the affected parties in a manner that would rarely be heard in public and they provide a picture of the government's private agenda as seen by the ministers (Cabinet Manual, 2011, 4.30).…”