Electoral Reforms and their Outcome in the United Kingdom, 1865–1900

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, as now, Parliament consisted of Queen, Lords and Commons. Electoral reforms naturally had repercussions on the inter-relationships of all three, but they only directly affected the Commons. To understand the reforms it is necessary to look briefly at the mid-century electoral system. MPs were chosen on the basis ofa bewildering variety of franchises, whose details were so technical as sometimes even to elude the comprehension of ministers. To simplify, English MPs (there were slight differences in Wales and Scotland, greater ones in Ireland) sat for either boroughs or counties. The basic borough franchise was the ownership or occupation ofpremises worth £10 p.a. rent plus the payment of local property taxes (rates). Boroughs returned some two-thirds of all MPs. But though some rationalisation had been effected by the 1832 Reform Act, the distribution was basically the product of Tudor and Stuart history — with a corresponding bias towards small southern country towns often dominated by the local landed gentry. Virtually all other MPs sat for the more prestigious county constituencies; here the basic franchise was the traditional freehold ownership of land or premises worth forty shillings (£2) a year, to which the 1832 Act had added various other types of owners, and tenants of land or premises rented at £50 p.a. (mostly farmers). Everywhere voting was open, and confined to men; as today, a simple plurality of votes sufficed for election, but most constituencies then returned two members regardless of their enormous disparities in size. In any given constituency each voter had only as many votes as the constituency returned members. But one could vote in all the constituencies in which one had qualifications — Chamberlain had six votes in 1885 — subject to the important constraint that one could not vote in a county for a property that entitled one to a borough vote. Ownership of a borough property worth more than £2 and less than £10 p.a. would, however, confer a county vote; and such urban freeholders assumed considerable salience in discussion of the electoral system.