Dr Kathryn Rix
Assistant Editor, House of Commons 1832–1945, History of Parliament
An understanding of how Britain’s electoral system operated is crucial in getting to grips with many other aspects of politics during this period, notably the development of political parties and the workings of Parliament. Three major Reform Acts (1832, 1867, and 1884–5), together with numerous other measures, including the abolition of the property qualification for MPs (1858), the secret ballot (1872), and legislation to tackle electoral corruption (1854 and 1883), transformed the conditions within which elections took place. The parliamentary franchise was gradually extended and made uniform across the country, although on the eve of the First World War around 40 per cent of adult men and all women were still excluded. The electoral map was withdrawn, removing anomalies such as ‘rotten boroughs’, giving more seats to the counties and the growing industrial centres of northern England and the Midlands, and, in 1885, moving to a system based largely on single member constituencies.
These landmark reforms to the framework of parliamentary elections ran in parallel with changes in local government, including the establishment of elected boards of guardians to administer the poor law in 1834, a significant overhaul of municipal corporations (town councils) in 1835, and the creation of several new elected local bodies in the second half of the nineteenth century, including school boards, county councils, and parish councils. Alongside the evolution of electoral structures at parliamentary and local level, and the implications which this had for party politics at Westminster and in the constituencies, historians have also taken a keen interest in how the system worked in practice, exploring aspects of electoral culture such as popular participation in politics, methods of political communication, and party organisation. Despite lacking the vote, non-electors – including women – involved themselves in election contests, which could be vibrant and colourful events, and could also use other means such as petitioning to engage with the representative system.
This Routledge Historical Resource offers a wide range of primary sources and secondary literature to assist your studies of electoral politics. An overall introduction to this theme is given in Martin Spychal’s video essay on ‘Electoral politics and the culture of elections’, while recent research on petitioning is explored in Henry Miller’s video essay on ‘Petitioners and popular pressure’. Chris Cook and John Stevenson’s A History of British Elections Since 1689 provides a helpful overview of elections during this period, together with much useful statistical material. There are several works which analyse the major parliamentary reforms of this period, including Robert Saunders’s Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867, which seeks to understand the 1867 Reform Act in its broader political context. In terms of primary sources, two particularly important collections on the electoral system are the four volumes on The Reform Acts: The Struggle for Democracy, edited by Sarah Richardson, and the six-volume set The History of Suffrage, 1760–1867.