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Introduction
Voting patterns in the British House of Commons have been much studied over the years (e.g., see Finer et al. , 1961; Berrington, 1973; Norton, 1975, 1980; Cowley, 2002, 2005a). The House of Lords, in contrast, is a far less well-studied institution (exceptions include Morgan, 1975; Shell, 1992; Shell and Beamish, 1993; Norton, 2003). Indeed in British politics, the term 'parliament' is often used synonymously with the House of Commons -- the Lords being considered an unreformed curiosity, which may not be with us for long, and which is not where the important decisions are taken. Government defeats in the House of Commons are rare, and never go unnoticed. House of Lords defeats are also only occasionally brought to public attention. Yet the government is defeated frequently in the House of Lords, and the number and severity of these defeats appears to be on an upward trajectory.
Labour governments have always been defeated more often than Conservative governments in the House of Lords, due to the chamber's peculiar composition. In keeping with this tradition, the Blair government suffered a total of 432 defeats in the Lords in the 10 years from 1 May 1997. However, reform removed the majority of hereditary peers from the chamber at the end of the parliamentary session 1998-1999, and thus ended the Conservative Party's predominance (Shell, 2000). What was left was a chamber where no party could command an overall majority, and most members were life peers.1 The removal of the bulk of hereditaries has given the Lords a greater confidence, and peers' belief that they are now more legitimate is shared by the public and MPs (Russell and Sciara, 2006b). Government defeats in the Lords, therefore, now take place in a very different context. Since the reform in 1999, some significant proposals have been blocked, and the argument between the two chambers over the Prevention of Terrorism Bill in 2005 was the largest since the early 20th century.
This paper sets out to answer the simple question of why the government gets defeated in the House of Lords, in terms of which actors in the chamber contribute to these defeats. The chamber has a reputation for being independent and non-partisan, and in party terms remains most associated...