About

the Eighteenth-Century Political
Participation & Electoral Culture project

Eighteenth-Century Political Participation & Electoral Culture (ECPPEC) is a project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2020–2023 to explore how people participated in parliamentary elections in England in the period from 1695 to the Reform Act of 1832. The eighteenth century was the period when modern democracy was being shaped. Few were entitled to vote. But elections often generated an explosion of print, speeches and songs; processions, assemblies and entertainments; and even new modes of dress, decoration and behaviour. ECPPEC explores how women and men, children and adults, poor and rich, franchised and unenfranchised, all participated in elections.

The project was based at Newcastle University, in partnership with Liverpool University, and with the collaboration of a number of other colleagues and organisations. In particular, the project has benefitted from a close working relationship with History of Parliament. ECPPEC drew its initial inspiration from the London Electoral History project, led by Penelope J. Corfield, Edmund Green and Charles Harvey, also supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (as was).

Copyright and citation

This website is provided as a public resource for non-commercial use, under a CC-BY-NC license. However, users are expected to respect the copyright of the holders of original material included on the site.

We use historical parish boundaries in our visualisations obtained from

Kain, R.J.P., Oliver, R.R. (2001). Historic Parishes of England and Wales : an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata. [data collection]. UK Data Service. SN: 4348, DOI: http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4348-1

In our elections maps we made use of data provided by the Historic County Borders Project. https://www.county-borders.co.uk.

The ECPPEC project has itself endeavoured to obtain all necessary permissions for the material collected and presented here. These materials are reproduced under license from the archives, libraries and museums which hold the originals. If you wish to reproduce any of these images (for instance, from our Artefact Explorer), you will need to obtain permission from the original copyright holder.

If you wish to cite material from this site please give appropriate credit. As a minimum, a citation should include the site’s main URL (ecppec.ncl.ac.uk) and ideally the  the current version (found at the foot of each page) and the date on which you consulted the site. For information taken from individual pages, please cite a more specific URL and, if relevant, an individual author (for instance for our Features).

The data sets created for this project, including the poll book directory, election directory, and polling data for individual elections, have been created by the ECPPEC team and are presented as an Open Access resource for free use. They can be exported and used freely, but not for commercial use.

Funders

We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this work [grant number AH/S01098X/1].

Awards

We are delighted to have been awarded the 2024 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) Prize for the best Digital Resource.