Uncontested Seats in British General Elections, 1852–1910

Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War the number of seats contested at general elections in the United Kingdom rose sharply though not altogether steadily. This note contains tables of uncontested seats and constituencies for the fifteen elections from 1852 to December 1910; earlier elections have already been tabulated, in a slightly less detailed form, by Professor Gash in Appendix E of his Politics in the Age of Peel, and after 1918 uncontested seats no longer made up a significant part of the total. (It is true that over a hundred seats went uncontested in the Coupon Election of 1918, because the parties in opposition were not prepared for the struggle. But this has little to do with the lack of contests in earlier elections.)