As part of our series of ‘explainer’ articles, aimed at clarifying the workings of the United Kingdom’s historic political system, Dr Martin Spychal examines how many people could vote in the UK after the 1832 Reform Act. This article draws from a new dataset of voting information for each constituency between 1832 and 1867, which Martin has been developing for the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 project.

How many people could vote in the UK after the 1832 Reform Act? This is one of the most frequent questions that the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 project is asked about nineteenth-century electoral politics. The short answer is, it’s complicated. For the long answer, please read on…

To start with, women and everyone under twenty-one could not vote in parliamentary elections throughout the nineteenth century. That’s around 75% of the entire population (more on how I’ve worked out this figure below).

In terms of the remaining 25% or so of the population (those who were male and aged 21 or over), a plethora of data exists to compile reliable UK enfranchisement statistics for each election between 1832 and 1868 (when the electoral system was reformed again). However, UK-wide average figures mask an extraordinary variation in electorate sizes and rates of adult male enfranchisement from country to country, county to county and constituency to constituency during that time.

For instance, at the 1847 general election a maximum of one in six adult males (16.6%) were registered to vote across the UK. However, this general figure disguises the fact that in England at the same election a maximum of around one in five (20.8%) adult males were registered to vote, while in Ireland the same figure was only around one in thirteen (7.5%).

The variations are even starker when viewed at constituency level. At the same general election, a maximum of 1 in 50 adult males living within the boundaries of the Irish county of Mayo could vote for the county constituency of the same name. 1 in 16 adult males could vote in the Welsh borough of Merthyr Tydfil. 1 in 7 could vote in the Scottish burgh district of Ayr. And over 1 in 2 (58%) adult males were potentially registered to vote in the English borough of Beverley.

Why was this the case? A key factor is that the UK electoral system between 1832 and 1868 was not a democracy. Rather, the electoral reforms of 1832 established a complex, mixed representative system intended to balance the nation’s varied political, economic, social and geographic interests. Some constituencies only had around 300 voters, others had over 20,000. Some constituencies were under one square mile in area, others encompassed entire counties that were over a thousand square miles. Some constituencies returned one MP, some returned four. And some voters could vote in multiple constituencies.

One key means of achieving this mixed representative system was via varied franchise regulations. This led to a distinctive combination of, often unique, voting qualifications in each constituency. These might be forty-shilling freeholders, £10 householders, tenants-at-will, copyholders, freemen, potwallopers, burgage holders or scot and lot voters, all of whom are discussed in this article by my colleague, Philip Salmon.

Significantly, most franchises were property-based. This meant that even if two constituencies shared the same legal voting qualification – such as the £10 borough householder franchise – variations in local property values led to wildly differing rates of enfranchisement from region to region. 

As a result, at the 1847 election there were many fewer properties registered in the East Midlands under the £10 a year annual rent qualification than in London. In the borough of Stoke in 1847 a maximum of 9% of adult males were registered as £10 householders, while in the London borough of Lambeth the same figure was 25%. For reference, a £10 a year rent in 1847 equates to around £13,000 a year, or £260 a week/£1,080 a month in 2025.

The complex system of voter registration after 1832 also contributed to discrepancies in enfranchisement levels from nation to nation and constituency to constituency. In England and Wales the 1s. annual registration fee, the reliability of local parish officials in providing annual tax returns, localised rental practices (such as compounding), the efficiency of local party machinery and the strictness of revising barristers at annual registration courts all played a factor in whether someone made it on to the register in the first place.

The unwieldy voter registration systems established in Ireland and Scotland in 1832 were even more significant in terms of preventing potential voters from registering to vote. Loopholes in the Irish and Scottish systems also encouraged fictitious vote creation, and made revising registers so complex that it became almost impossible to remove dead voters from the electoral roll.

Ireland’s unwieldy system was completely overhauled in 1850. Scotland’s burgh and county systems were overhauled in 1856 and 1861 respectively. After these dates the registration process became (slightly) more straightforward and the registers are a more reliable source for calculating adult male enfranchisement levels.

To make things even more complicated men who owned or rented multiple qualifying properties could vote in multiple constituencies (although they could only qualify once per constituency). This means that the ‘maximum’ national and constituency level percentages of enfranchisement discussed here are likely to overstate how many men had the vote. While data does not exist to adjust enfranchisement rates to a high degree of accuracy, contemporary estimates suggested that around 10% of those on the electoral register could vote in multiple constituencies.

This is one reason why I include the word ‘maximum’ before ‘adult male enfranchisement rate’. While a maximum of 16.6% of adult males were registered to vote in the UK in 1847, it was more likely that closer to 15% of adult males were actually enrolled. Statistically speaking, this means the UK-wide adult male enfranchisement rate for 1847 can also be displayed as 15.1%(±10%).

Such a statistical adjustment also provides some leeway for further complicating factors when calculating enfranchisement rates at a constituency level. These factors include men being registered under two or more qualifications in the same constituency and men registered to vote under ancient franchise qualifications via the seven-mile borough residence rule. In a small group of English constituencies (such as Beverley), both factors mean that enfranchisement rates can only be displayed with a confidence range of ±30%.

With all of these provisos taken into consideration, the good news is that sufficient electoral and demographic data exists to model maximum adult male enfranchisement rates at regular intervals between 1832 and 1868 for every constituency in the UK, including for every general election.

The two key sources that I’ve used to do this are parliamentary returns and the UK census. Parliamentary returns detailing how many voters were registered in each UK constituency were published on an almost annual basis between 1832 and 1868 (Figure 5). Census returns detailing the population within each constituency boundary were published every ten years. The decennial censuses also contained sufficient national and local population data broken down by age and gender to model the national rate of adult males in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland at each general election (Figure 1).

This data can then be broken down, displayed and interpreted in a number of ways. I’ve provided three examples in this article. The first (Figure 4) shows how maximum rates of adult male enfranchisement varied across England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the UK between 1831 and 1868. 1831 was the last general election held under the unreformed electoral system. Data for the period between 1832 and 1865 demonstrates changing enfranchisement rates under the reformed electoral system established in 1832. The increase in enfranchisement displayed in each of the four nations in 1868 reflects the changes to the electoral system implemented via the reform legislation of 1867-8 (commonly referred to as the Second Reform Act).

The second way that I’ve displayed this data is spatially via a map of several constituencies in the Midlands at the 1847 general election (Figure 6). Lighter shadings of green reflect a lower rate of enfranchisement, such as in Dudley, where a maximum of around 9% of adult males could vote under the £10 householder franchise, and the county constituency of Warwickshire North, where around 7% of men were registered under the county franchise. Darker shadings of green reflect higher rates of enfranchisement, such as in the boroughs of Lichfield and Coventry. In both constituencies a maximum of around 50% of adult males were theoretically enfranchised due to the continuation after 1832 of several ‘popular’ voting qualifications from the unreformed electoral system.

The third way that I’ve displayed the data is via a box and whisker plot of maximum adult male enfranchisement rates in every UK constituency at each general election between 1832 and 1865. This chart (Figure 8) which might appear confusing at first, is an incredibly efficient way of representing a lot of data.

The ‘box’ for each election year indicates the median, lower and upper quartile rates of enfranchisement across the UK at each election (50% of UK constituencies fit within these enfranchisement ranges). The ‘whiskers’ stretch to what statistically speaking can be considered the ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ rates of enfranchisement in UK constituencies. The dots reflect outliers. These outliers are constituencies with very high maximum adult male enfranchisement rates, which, as discussed above, need to be read sceptically.

Significantly, Figure 8 shows that while variations in adult male enfranchisement between UK constituencies narrowed markedly in the UK as the period wore on, enfranchisement rates remained persistently under 10% in a considerable number of constituencies and that over 1 in 4 men could vote in an equally large group of constituencies. Variation, rather than uniformity, remained the defining characteristic of the reformed UK electoral system between 1832 and 1868.

MS

Further Reading

M. Spychal, Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act (2024)

P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841 (2002)

N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation 1830-1850 (1953)

K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832-1885 (1984)

M. Dyer, Men of Property and Intelligence: The Scottish Electoral System Prior to 1884 (1996)

M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales 1832-1886 (2004)

D. Beales, ‘The electorate before and after 1832: the right to vote, and the opportunity’, Parliamentary History, xi (1992), 139-50

F. O’Gorman, ‘The electorate before and after 1832: a reply’, Parliamentary History, xii (1993), 171-83

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 25 February 2025, written by Dr Martin Spychal.