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Voting Patterns in the British House of Commons in the 1840s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

William O. Aydelotte
William O. Aydelotte
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa
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Extract

In the 1840s, the time of Sir Robert Peel's great ministry, the British House of Commons debated and voted upon a number of substantial political issues. The Parliament of 1841–47 not only repealed the Corn Laws; it also placed on the statute books important legislation regulating factories, banks, railways and mines. It approved the income tax, reintroduced by Peel in 1842, and the Poor Law, which was renewed in 1842 and again in 1847. It discussed and voted upon, though it was far from approving, proposals for the extension of the franchise, the adoption of the secret ballot and the restriction of the special legal privileges of landowners. There were divisions as well on various aspects of the Irish question, religious questions and the position of the Church of England, army reform, fiscal reform and other matters.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , January 1963 , pp. 134 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1963

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References

1 Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England, London, 1962, pp. 13, 4.Google Scholar

2 W. O. Aydelotte, “Nineteenth Century British Pamphlets at the Newberry Library”, The Newberry Library Bulletin, 2nd ser., no. 6, May 1951, pp. 179–80.

3 See the articles by Louis Guttman in Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. IV, Measurement and Prediction, Princeton, 1950.

4 Frederick Waisanen. I am also indebted, for stimulating conversations on these problems, to David Gold, Martin U. Martel and Duncan MacRae, Jr.

5 Bert F. Green, “Attitude Measurement”, in Gardner Líndzey, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology, Cambridge, Mass., 1954, vol. I, pp. 353–4. There is also a useful general description in Samuel A. Stouffer, “An Over-view of the Contributions to Scaling and Scale Theory”, Measurement and Prediction, pp. 3–45.

6* In none of the divisions analysed did this entire “population” of 815 men take part. Only 658 of them could be in Parliament at any one moment; only 656 after the disfranchisement of Sudbury in 1844. There was also a considerable turnover: of the 658 whom I have counted as elected at the general election of 1841 only 513 were sitting at the time this Parliament was dissolved in 1847; still others entered Parliament at by-elections after the general election and left it before the dissolution. I have also included divisions from earlier and later Parliaments in which a number of the men of the Parliament of 1841–47, the only group whose votes are considered here, did not sit. Nor, of course, did all those in Parliament at a given moment necessarily vote in every division. For these various reasons, none of the divisions used included more than three-fourths of the population of 815, many included less than half, and some so few as one-eighth.

6 I am indebted to John P. Dolch of the Computer Center of the State University of Iowa who arranged for this count to be made and also wrote the program for it.

7 The problem of objectivity has been more fully discussed, in relation to this period, by G. Kitson Clark in the first chapter of The Making of Victorian England and, in more general terms, by myself in a volume of essays on generalizations in history edited by Louis Gottschalk, to be published by the Chicago University Press in 1963.

8 See the account by Duncan MacRae, Jr., in chapter II of his book, Dimensions of Congressional Voting: A Statistical Study of the House of Representatives in the Eighty-first Congress, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958; also his article, “Intraparty Division and Cabinet Coalitions in the Fourth French Republic”, in this issue of CSSH, pp. 164–211.

9 Speech by W. Sharman Crawford on “Reform in the Representation”, 21 April 1842, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, vol. 62, pp. 907–921.

10 W. O. Aydelotte, “The Business Interests of the Gentry in the Parliament of 1841–47”, printed as an appendix in G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England, pp. 290–305.

11 Gleason, John Howes, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain, Cambridge, Mass., 1950, pp. 272–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPennock, J. Roland, “The Political Power of British Agriculture”, Political Studies, vol. VII, no. 3, October 1959, pp. 291–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Clark, G. Kitson, “The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Politics of the Forties”, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, vol. IV, no. 1, 1951, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-century England”, in Briggs, Asa and Saville, Jahn, eds., Essays on Labour History, in Memory of G. D. H. Cole, London, 1960, pp. 43–73. I understand that a student of John Harrison's at the University of Wisconsin is making a further study of this problem.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 This point has been more fully discussed by G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England, p. 20.

14 The fact that the correlations I have found between vote and personal background or constituency are, though substantial, far from complete also suggests the presence of additional variables.

15 MacRae, Dimensions of Congressional Voting, p. 222. It should be added that, while scales cannot apparently be built for the entire U.S. House of Representatives without the sacrifice of a good deal of information, it has proved possible to construct scales for smaller legislative bodies in the United States that do include the whole group. Most of the studies of the U.S. Senate have scaled the parties together, and MacRae was also able to scale the parties together in his study of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. See his article, “Roll Call Votes and Leadership”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. XX, no. 3, Fall 1956, pp. 543–558.Google Scholar

16 Roberts, David, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State, New Haven, 1960.Google Scholar

17 Young, G. M., Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, Oxford and London, 1936, p. 47.Google Scholar

18 Webb, R. K., Harriet Martineau: a Radical Victorian, London, 1960, p. 363.Google Scholar

19 Edward A. Shíls, “Authoritarianism: ‘Right’ and ‘Left’”, in Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality”: Continuities in Social Research, Glencoe, Illinois, 1954, pp. 27–8.