Representation of the People Act 1884

In the United Kingdom, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (48 & 49 Vict. c. 3, also known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution Act of the following year were laws which further extended the suffrage in Britain after the Derby Government's Reform Act 1867. Taken together, these measures extended the same voting qualifications as existed in the towns to the countryside, and essentially established the modern one member constituency as the normal pattern for Parliamentary representation.

The act extended the 1867 concessions from the boroughs to the countryside. All men paying an annual rental of £10 or all those holding land valued at £10 now had the vote. The British electorate now totalled over 5,500,000. An Act a year later redistributed constituencies, giving more representation to urban areas (especially London).

The 1884 Reform Act did not establish universal suffrage: although the size of the electorate was widened considerably, all women and 40% of adult males were still without the vote at the time. Male suffrage varied throughout the kingdom, too: in England and Wales, 2 in 3 adult males had the vote; in Scotland, 3 in 5 did; and in Ireland, the figure was only 1 in 2.

Reform Act 1867

The Representation of the People Act 1867, 30 & 31 Vict. c. 102 (known informally as the Reform Act of 1867 or the Second Reform Act) was a piece of British legislation that enfranchised part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first time.

Before the Act, only one million of the seven million adult males in England and Wales could vote; the Act immediately doubled that number. Moreover, by the end of 1868 all male heads of household were enfranchised as a result of the end of compounding of rents. However, the Act introduced only a negligible redistribution of seats. The overall intent was to help the Conservative Party, yet it resulted in their loss of the 1868 general election.

Background

For the decades after the Great Reform Act of 1832, cabinets, in that era leading from both Houses, had resisted attempts to push through further reform, and in particular left unfulfilled the six demands of the Chartist movement. After 1848, this movement declined rapidly, and elite opinion began to change . It was thus only 28 years after the initial, quite modest, Great Reform Act that leading politicians thought it prudent to introduce further electoral reform. John Russell attempted this in 1860, but the Prime Minister, a fellow Liberal, Lord Palmerston was against any further electoral reform. When Palmerston died in 1865, however, the floodgates for reform were opened.

Reform Act 1832

The Representation of the People Act 1832 (known informally as the 1832 Reform Act, Great Reform Act or First Reform Act to distinguish it from subsequent Reform Acts) was an Act of Parliament (indexed as 2 & 3 Will. IV c. 45) which introduced wide-ranging changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. According to its preamble, the Act was designed to "take effectual Measures for correcting diverse Abuses that have long prevailed in the Choice of Members to serve in the Commons House of Parliament". Before the reform, most members nominally represented boroughs. The number of electors in a borough varied widely, from a dozen or so up to 12,000. Frequently the selection of MPs was effectively controlled by one powerful patron: for example Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk controlled eleven boroughs. Criteria for qualification for the franchise varied greatly between boroughs, from the requirement to own land, to merely living in a house with a hearth sufficient to boil a pot.

Representation of the People Act 1918

The Representation of the People Act 1918 was an Act of Parliament passed to reform the electoral system in the United Kingdom. It is sometimes known as the Fourth Reform Act. This act was the first to include practically all men in the political system and began the inclusion of women.

Background

Even after the passing of the Third Reform Act in 1884, only 60% of male householders over the age of 21 had the vote. Following the horrors of World War I, millions of returning soldiers would still not have been entitled to vote in the long overdue general election. (The previous election had been in December 1910. The Parliament Act 1911 had set the maximum term of a Parliament at five years, but an amendment to the Act postponed the general election to after the war's conclusion.)

British politicians thus faced a crisis. Quite apart from the evident injustice of withholding the vote from the very men who had fought to preserve the British political system and Empire, the overthrow of the centuries-old Romanov monarchy and the Russian nobility in March of the previous year, and the subsequent revolution of workers and soldiers in November, raised the possibility of a similar socialist revolution in Britain.