Backbench roles in the twenty-first century UK House of Commons: a Latent Class Analysis

Parliamentary roles are central to the functioning of legislatures, but the common starting point for their analysis contains methodological and conceptual flaws and is based on now-50-year-old interviews. We seek to update our understanding by using a new method within parliamentary roles scholarship—Latent Class Analysis—and a newly-curated dataset of parliamentary activity of all House of Commons backbenchers (2001–19). We find seven backbench roles, only one of which can be found in previous Commons role arrays. Our approach and results have implications for how we understand UK MPs’ activities and for wider (comparative) research on parliamentary roles.