Petitions, Parliament and the public : an analysis of the changing nature of corruption, 1868-1883

Whitehead, Alan Patrick Vincent (1976) Petitions, Parliament and the public : an analysis of the changing nature of corruption, 1868-1883. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The generally pure British Parliamentary Elections of the twentieth century stand out in stark contrast to the excessive and thoroughly corrupt election campaigns that followed the first Reform Act of 1832. The fifty years in which this change took place is often characterized as a period of continuous attack upon, and the final elimination of, a hard core of venal electors. A glance at the statistics of electoral corruption reveals, however, that this is not the case. Not only did the concentrated programme of electoral legislation between 1867 and 1880 fail to extinguish electoral malpractices, but the 1880 General Election was regarded by many as more corrupt and expensive than any in the preceding thirty years. Such an outcome, after legislation which included the second Reform Act and the Ballot Act is, to say the least, surprising. This thesis attempts to examine the reasons for this state of affairs. It seeks to find out whether corruption merely remained static and unaffected by legislation, or whether the changing circumstances that faced corrupt election managers, whilst not ending venality, forced an adaption of techniques to the changed situation. It approaches the overall problem by examining in detail the effectiveness of the institutional machinery designed to combat corruption, the reaction of the electorate to the new legislation that was said to fight venality, and finally by taking each electoral province and discussing the effects of changing public attitudes upon its operation.The investigation concludes by suggesting that the reduction of corruption in elections was more a result of a change in public attitudes than of any other single factor. The growth of party organizations and the demise of the power of the individual party manager and candidate is attributed to the increasing independence of the urban voter from the sort of dependence upon the local magnates that characterized rural elections both before and during the period examined. it is concluded that public opinion and legislation probably had a reciprocal effect on each other, and that the legislation of 1883 and 1885 which at least tackled corruption in a realistic manner was only successful because of the climate of opinion that for the first time enabled the legislation to be implemented effectively at a local level.

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