I’ve always been interested in the history of the extension of voting rights in Britain in the 19th/20th century. Problem is a lot of historical accounts use outdated terms or contradict each other. Take this Wikipedia article, which might as well have been written in Coptic. What were the legal requirements to vote in Britain before and after the various Reform Acts, in the simplest language for modern readers?
It is not a simple story of the extension of voting rights. Before the reform acts things varied a lot from one constituency to another. In many there was no voting at all. Some did not even have any inhabitants. In those cases the owner of the land would simply get to appoint who he wanted to parliament (often that might just be the highest bidder). In other constituencies, certain classes of people, such as potwallopers, might have a vote. Essentially a potwalloper was the head of a household who owned his own dwelling (so long as it was not too small). The potwalloper vote was about as democratic as it got back before the reform acts. In most constituencies, if there was voting at all, the franchise was more restrictive, and only relatively wealthy landowners got to vote.
It was not intended to be a democratic system, even a restricted one. Rather, it was what had developed via various (often local) mutations of feudalism. It was intended to be rule by the propertied (land owning) classes. They owned the country, so (so the theory went) they would have its interests at heart. People without property could not be trusted to care about the nation’s interest. After all, the nation wasn’t theirs. In the 18th century, and before, democracy was generally considered to be a very bad thing (and, for more conservative thinkers, this continued to be the case through much of the 19th century too).
Before 1885, you had to be a rich man.
After 1918, you had to be an adult (21 for men, 30 for Women)
In between, there were a relatively large set of different rules for different places.
The useful and interesting information is the effective number of voters, not how they qualified. As the percentage of people voting rose, interests of the Members of Parliment changed.
This was demonstrably important in the history of Education in England. From that perspective, it is the class interests of the voters that is important, not how they individually qualified.
To sum it up, before 1918 the crucial criterion for being allowed to vote in a particular constituency was not residence within the constituency but owning property there. This was the basis for the famous rotten boroughs, the most notorious of which was Old Sarum - an uninhabited hill which was a parliamentary constituency with the right to return two MPs. There were formal elections held for the Old Sarum MPs, but since the hill was privately owned, these elections were only a formality, and in essence the MPs were appointed by whoever owned the place.
The various Reform Acts after 1832 reformed the property requirements but did not entirely abolish the principle that suffrage rested on the holding of property as the crucial criterion. It was not until 1918 that the link between property and suffrage was fully abolished.
And exception to this, and an interesting facet of British constitutional history, were the university constituencies - some universities formed constituencies in their own right and had the right to return MPs. These constituencies were not defined geographically; voters were those who held degrees from the respective universities. This allowed for people to have votes in several constituencies, e.g., at the place where they lived and at their old university where they graduated from. The university constituencies were not abolished until 1950.
It would be helpful if the OP had specific questions in mind!
You might find this explanation of the Great Reform Act easy to digest.
It is a BBC radio programme where the format is for three experts, often distinguished professors, discussing and explaining their subject, co-ordinated by a chairman. It is paints a broad perspective of the great Great Reform Act and what was going in the country at the time.
You wanted them, you got them!
–I’ve heard of the “forty shillings” requirement; that before 1832, you had to own land that either yielded or could yield forty shillings of rent annually. How many places had this requirement? And was this the most common way to get the right to vote or a minor one?
–In cities, “heads of households” were given the right to vote in 1867 (which wouldn’t get extended to rural areas until 1884). Did I get this correct? Did a head of household have to own their house? I’ve occasionally heard of “lodgers” also having the right to vote; what exactly does this mean?
Ironically, the Pitt family owned the property at one point and William Pitt the Elder, one of Britain’s greatest statesman, was sent to Parliament by the worst constituency in Britain.
No. Owning property was merely the main means by which voters qualified for the vote but it was far from being the only one. The university constituencies were not the only exceptions.
Old Sarum is actually an example of an unreformed constituency where the vote was not dependant on owning property. As a burgage constituency, its electorate consisted of the resident tenants of particular plots of land. Now it is true that in the particular case of Old Sarum, no one actually lived there, so the landowner was able to create a fictitious electorate by renting out those plots of land to friends and clients who pretended to be living there. But other burgage constituencies usually had actual residents living as tenants in actual houses.
Before 1832 borough constituencies used a wide variety of franchises, only some of which directly involved the ownership of property. The right to vote in England might depend on being a householder, a freeman of the borough corporation, a member of that corporation or liable for local taxes.
None of the Reform Acts abolished those franchises. Anyone thus qualified before 1832 retained the right to vote during their lifetime. Moreover, in those constituencies with freemen franchises, most new freemen also had the vote. All this however became irrelevant later as such voters usually had the vote anyway under the subsequent extensions of the franchise. It should also be noted that there was a general move in each of the Reform Acts to introduce residency requirements.
The forty shilling freehold was the traditional franchise for the county constituencies. Every county elected two MPs, so this applied everywhere. And by 1832 most men who had a vote had it for the county elections. Of course, most MPs were elected for borough constituencies, so this created one of the more obvious imbalances in the unreformed system.
The 1867 Act created qualifications based on rental properties. This meant that the more prosperous tenants, who rented rather than owned their house, gained the right to vote. This originally applied only to the borough constituencies, but was extended to the county constituencies in 1884. This was a de facto heads of households franchises, as it would usually be the head of the household who was renting the property. But some lodgers also qualified in this way.
This is true, but to reside on a particular burgage you either had to own the burgage, or be the tenant of the landlord who owned the burgage, so ultimately the franchise in burgage-based constituencies was based on the holding of real property.
These ancient forms of franchise entitlement made little sense in the context of the huge migrations from the countryside to work in the factories in the cities at the heart of the industrial revolution.
The Reform Act was an attempt to rebalance the political representation from one based around landownership which had its roots in the feudal system from a time when most of the population lived on the land, to the needs of a rapidly urbanising population and huge migrations to new towns and cities. The feudal system had a localised balance of rights and responsibilities which made no sense in the context of big cities and concentrations of population and capital.
This new environment encouraged the growth of large political movements to emerge seeking to push the franchise issue forward (for example The Chartists). It went in fits are starts. The Great Reform Act was a milestone on the path to creating an industrial democracy, a new form of nation state, and the Reform Act (as far as it went) represented a change in mindset. No country had gone through this process before and the dangers of violent revolution, such as those that had taken place on the The Continent, were very real.
Given that China is going through the same sort of rapid urbanisation process today, it will be interesting to see how they adapt their political system to deal with this change.
The 1832 Reform Act was pretty much dealing with the changes that were imposed during the restoration.
The Cromwell administration changed many of the constituency boundaries, but this was all reversed by the monarchy. Its likely that the Cromwell changes were seen as republican.
Before the Reform Act the only people who were allowed to vote in my home town of Coventry were Freemen of the borough. To become a freeman you had to have served an indentured apprenticeship within the bounds of the city. So, unusually for the nineteenth century, the only men who could vote were skilled artisans, and not the landed gentry or nobility.
It wasn’t fully abolished for local elections or for women. In addition to having to be 30 or older women either had to meet a property qualification or be a graduate from a British university. Married women could vote on the basis of their husbands’ property qualification. Women couldn’t vote on the same basis as men until 1928. Oddly women were given the ability to stand for office on the same basis as men in 1918 so for a decade it was possible for a woman to be elected to Parliament, but not allowed to case a vote for herself. Women weren’t allowed in the House of Lords until 1958.
The voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1969.
To bring the story completely up to date, the Scotland independence vote in September next year will extend the franchise to voters at age 16.
The Labour party look as if they will include this policy of voting at 16 in their manifesto for the UK as a whole if they win the next election.
Voter registration is automatic in the UK as long as the local government have you on their electoral list, which is usually done by canvassing each household.
The other development is a requirement by the EU to pass a law to allow prisoners to vote. Obviously the Euro-sceptics are not at all happy about that.
The extending of the franchise is a story that runs and runs.
Very minor nitpick: This is actually not an EU requirement, but a requirement stemming from the European Convention on Human Rights. This Convention, which is a legally binding treaty with the UK being a party to it, is enforced and interpreted by a special international court, the European Court of Human Rights, but this system operates outside of, and independently from, the EU.
Quite right!
The distinction between the European Union and the European Convention often escapes many in the UK. They tend to get to lumped together and resented as a general threat to national sovereignty coming from Europe. They are quite separate treaties.