It is well known that parties are at the centre of British politics and that the governing party controls virtually all aspects of the legislative process (e.g., Cox 1987; Norton 2005). In spite of their importance in standard accounts of the Westminster model, the strategies of Government and Opposition parties remains surprisingly under-theorized. What is it that parties need to do to gain or to retain power and to get re-elected? To address this question, we develop a novel theoretical claim that government chooses policies to put on the agenda in an manner analogous to that by which an investment fund manager selects stocks and assets for a client’s portfolio. The institutions of parliamentary politics—debates, speeches from the throne, ministerial accountability to parliament, the enacting of laws, the making of budgets, and so forth—create opportunities for the governing party to present differing combinations of policy information to the electorate, gaining returns from their investments in the form of supportive public opinion, media attention, and ultimately votes. They also create strategies for the Opposition. Such information enters party assessments of risk and return. Of course, governments, like fund managers, can make errors and lose elections – and knowing why governments fail is of critical interest to students of British politics. We provide a novel account of such events. To test our claims, we use data from the UK policy agendas project (www.policyagendas.org.uk), which codes official documents according to a comparable standard. We analyze data from 1971-2007 with time-series methods. We estimate the level of investment, which is used to predict electoral outcomes.
