An introduction to how many people could, and did, vote in the eighteenth century [5-minute read] The ‘electorate’ is the group of individuals who were entitled to vote in an election. This is different from the number of people who actually cast their votes at a poll, a group which we might call the ‘voterate’. […]
Edmund Green gives the definitive guide to their varieties, formats and contexts [40-minute read] Voting is a means of aggregating individual preferences into collective decisions, and through which the authority to enforce those decisions is legitimated.[1] The point of voting is to have one’s vote counted. This makes the study of historical voting unusual, in […]
One of the most curious and ludic phenomena of 18th-century popular politics [5-minute read] June 1768. Fifes, French horns, drums, and marrow bones can be heard in the streets of Wandsworth, now in south-west London but then still largely rural. A crowd has gathered, lining the high street in the tiny village of Garratt. Men […]
Though excluded from the franchise, women found many ways to influence the vote [20-minute read] Five months before the 1768 general election, Lord Breadalbane complained to his daughter, Marchioness Grey, that the ‘Rage of Electioneering’ had already infected Scotland, and that the ‘epidemical Madness’ of the upcoming elections was more virulent than ever. At the […]
Following an election, collections of printed ephemera were sometimes published [20-minute read] These compendia might contain handbills, songs, visual prints, advertisements and addresses that had been published as part of the campaign. Such volumes have come to be known as ‘squib books’. A ‘squib’ is a short piece of satirical writing, generally taking the form […]
Jon Rosebank argues that very few wanted to replace the unreformed electoral system [15-minute read] It would be easy, from our modern perspective, to imagine that the eighteenth-century electoral system was increasingly dysfunctional. There was, after all, much evidence of growing discontent with it. Indeed, its critics complained about the electoral system under a succession […]
Penelope J. Corfield charts the steps on Britain’s long road to democracy [20-minute read] Democracy is not a flawless form of government. Nor do all democracies survive for all time. Nonetheless, representative democracies uphold the ideal notion of a rational politics, in which all citizens have an equal vote – all exercise their judgment in […]
