Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham), Mark Goodwin (Coventry University) and Steve McKay (University of Lincoln) discuss opening up their select committee data archive for open access research.
Over the past few years we have been collecting and then analysing data taken from the House of Commons Sessional Returns and, before 1986-87, the House of Commons Select Committee Returns. The original idea for the project stemmed from Cherry Miller, who mentioned the Returns in discussions about her prize winning thesis.
The purpose of the project was to collect data that we thought would be useful in helping to analyse and judge the effectiveness of both the select committee system and individual committees within that system. We originally thought in 2014 that the Returns would provide us with enough data for three or possible four articles; one each on committee membership, activities and outputs and one which brought the different elements of select committee life together. In actual fact, the Returns have turned out to provide much richer data than expected (or, depending on your viewpoint, we have decided to flog the data to within an inch of its life) and we have not yet finished analysing the membership data and only just started exploring the activities and outputs (in a series of blogs on select committee debates, divisions and responses).
We have now decided to make (most of) the membership data publicly available. This will hopefully be helpful not only to researchers and lecturers but also to students of the UK Parliament and legislatures more generally.
The dataset (available at the moment in both SPSS and excel formats) covers membership of all House of Commons select committees from the 1979-80 to the 2014-15 parliamentary sessions and can be found on the Open Science Framework’s website.
If you use the dataset in your work – whether an article, blog or essay – please can you use the following citation:
Goodwin, M., Holden Bates, S., & McKay, S. (2019) UK House of Commons Select Committee Data Archive. Available from: osf.io/ywgh5
And if you make money from the dataset, please can you email us directly for our bank details.
Stephen Holden Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. Follow him on Twitter: @Stephen_R_Bates
Mark Goodwin is a Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University. Follow him on Twitter: @MarkRGoodwin
Steve McKay is Distinguished Professor in Social Research at University of Lincoln. Follow him on Twitter: @SocialPolicy
Our project, the Select Committee Data Archive (1979-Present) was part funded by the British Academy (SQ140007).