Elections in 18th‐Century England: Polling, Politics and Participation

Introduction

This special issue of Parliamentary History is one product of ‘Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture’ (ECPPEC), a research project funded from January 2020 to June 2023 by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council.1 ECPPEC was designed to shed new light on participation in parliamentary elections in England in the long 18th century, from about 1695 to the Reform Act of 1832. It was concerned with ‘participation’ interpreted broadly, both in the sense of voting, and also through other means: for instance, by attending – or being an active part of – the rituals of parliamentary elections, or by consuming – or creating – electoral print, song, dress, or other artefacts. ECPPEC thus had a dual focus on polling data and electoral culture, and an ambition to discover how these two aspects of elections worked together, with electoral culture potentially affecting election results.

The principal output of the project is its sophisticated website, which is available online at https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/. This is a vast resource. It includes a directory of all surviving poll books from the period; new information on how many parliamentary elections took place between 1695 and 1832 (the count at the time of writing this being 11,676, of which 3,312 were contested); and a record of voting behaviour at parliamentary elections in twenty case-study constituencies, carefully selected to be as representative as possible of different kinds of constituencies in different parts of England. This case-study constituency data comprises 483,060 individuals, casting 797,105 votes. The data is presented in ways designed to be visually appealing and accessible. It also aims to enable new kinds of analysis and understanding of 18th-century elections: for instance, it will allow researchers to explore poll book data in detail, to look at voting patterns across the duration of a multi-day election, to map voters geographically, and to reveal their voting tactics. In addition to this data, the website includes a wide selection of electoral print and artefacts, which have been found, collected and photographed. These range from ceramics to cockades, fans to furniture, weapons to watercolours. Electoral songs have been arranged and recorded, engravings have been analysed, and several online ‘exhibitions’ of electoral material have been curated. All of this material is accompanied by contextualising text for each constituency and each election, and by many ‘Feature’ essays (currently 36) explaining different aspects of electoral history, as well as election processes, practices and behaviours. These Features are informative and purposefully accessible, aimed at different kinds of audiences, from those coming to the site with close to no knowledge of 18th-century elections to experts in the field. Some are interactive, allowing readers to manipulate data, learn about who could vote in a fun way, or investigate an image in great depth to see, for example, how it tells the story of a particular election. Many of the elements of the website are discussed in more detail below. But our aim in this introduction has been to show how the ECPPEC project, with its new data and new means of accessing that data, can encourage and facilitate new kinds of research.

During its 42-month lifespan, the ECPPEC project convened a number of events to explore aspects of 18th-century electoral history, although the Covid-19 pandemic had a very limiting effect on initial plans. A workshop on election songs, for example, brought together political historians, print specialists, musicologists and practising folk singers to consider the composition, motivation, traditions, contexts, practicalities and likely effects of election ballads, as well as their textual and musical formats and contents. It resulted in experimental (and rather wonderful) recordings by celebrated folk musicians, now available on the ECPPEC site. The project's main conference, held at Newcastle upon Tyne in July 2022, invited papers considering any aspect of political participation and electoral culture in the long 18th century in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland. Over forty scholars presented their work, giving a good indication of the vibrancy of the field. Many papers presented at the conference examined visual, aural, print and material culture relating to elections, and a selection of these are being prepared for publication elsewhere. A number of other presentations focused on polling data, voting behaviour and electoral practice, and it is a selection of these papers that has been collected for this special issue of Parliamentary History. They stretch across the long 18th century and encompass different kinds of electoral activity, from the activities of the Scottish Privy Council in the late 17th century to the reading habits of voters in early 19th-century Bristol, and from the politics of the often-neglected English university constituencies to the relationships between stockholders and elections in the East India Company's Court of Proprietors. Together, these essays give a good idea of the use that historians can make of polling data when it survives. The rest of this introductory essay follows that lead, considering what the data collected by the ECPPEC project – as opposed to the electoral culture – is able to tell us.