THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REGULATION: INTERESTS, IDEOLOGY, VOTERS, AND THE UK REGULATION OF RAILWAYS ACT 1844

Government regulation of the railways in the United Kingdom dates back to the 1840s. Between 1840 and 1844 three regulatory Acts were passed, and a system of government inspection set up which has remained substantially unaltered to the present day. The principal Act, that of 1844, contained controversial powers of rate-capping, state purchase of railways, and detailed price and quantity regulation. It is still frequently held that the Victorian era marked the triumph of laissez-faire and that W. E. Gladstone, the promoter of the 1844 Act, was one of its leading spokesmen. The article therefore explores why regulation occurred at all and why it took the forms it did. Gladstone's actions are evaluated in relation to the standard hypotheses about the origins of regulation. Hypotheses on the motives of MPS voting for and against regulation are tested using the Aydelotte dataset which contains very full personal and ideological data on the Mps of the Parliament of 1841–7.