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The Great Reform Act of 1832 and British Democratization

Thomas Ertman Comparative Political Studies 2010 43: 1000 originally published online 12 May 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0010414010370434 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cps.sagepub.com/content/43/8-9/1000

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The Great Reform Act of 1832 and British Democratization

Thomas Ertman1

Comparative Political Studies 43(8/9) 1000 1022 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0010414010370434 http://cps.sagepub.com

Abstract This article focuses on the brief period (1828-1835) of intense political change in the years immediately before and after the Great Reform Act of 1832 as a critical juncture within the process of British democratization. This change was set in motion by a movement to extend the rights of religious minorities, but soon took on a dynamic of its own and led, quite unexpectedly, to a fundamental break in the constitutional order of the United Kingdom. This reform episode deserves to be classified as a critical juncture for three reasons: first, it put an end to executive control of the legislature through pocket boroughs and placemen and ushered in a culture of national political participation; second, it brought forth a new source of order in politics, a two-party system built around religious cleavages; and finally, it acted as both an impetus and a model for future electoral expansions (1867, 1884, 1918). In the second part of the article, the reach of 1832 is explored by examining the relevance of this critical juncture to the triumph and successful defense of democracy in Britain during the interwar period. Keywords democratization, critical junctures, 1832 Reform Act, United Kingdom, religious cleavage

New York University, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author: Thomas Ertman, New York University, Department of Sociology, 295 Lafayette St., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012 Email: Thomas.Ertman@nyu.edu

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In their introduction to this special issue, Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt (2010) have pointed to a recent wave of research on European democratization characterized by a return to history that builds on the older classical texts of Barrington Moore, Gregory Luebbert, and Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens. In this article, I hope to contribute to this new research by examining in some detail the events surrounding the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832 in the United Kingdom. I argue that a critical juncture took place in Britain between 1828 (repeal of portions of the Test and Corporation Acts) and 1835 (passage of the Municipal Corporations Act). By this I mean, following Capoccia and Kelemen (2007), a fundamental, unforeseen transformation of a political regime occurring over a relatively short period of time as a result of decisions by a small number of actors. The expansion of toleration and the alteration of selection procedures for both the House of Commons and local government introduced during these 7 years ushered in national participatory politics, inaugurated a two-party system built principally around religious cleavages, and set off a dynamic of electoral expansion that continued into the 20th century. In the second half of the article, I then investigate the limits of path dependence emanating from this critical juncture by exploring the extent to which the sea changes wrought by 1832 and all that were still relevant between 1918 and 1939, when the United Kingdom finally made the transition to full democracy, and that democracy was able to stand up successfully to the threats posed by economic depression and indigenous fascism. Finally, I attempt to draw some general conclusions about democratization based on the British case.

1832 and the End of Britains Ancien Regime

Britain on the eve of the French Revolution stood out among its European neighbors not only for its economic dynamism and naval firepower but alsoand rightly sofor its nonabsolutist form of government and religious tolerance. The British viewed their political system as balanced, with the ruler the embodiment of the monarchical principle, the Lords that of aristocracy, and the Commons that of democracy. In practice the day-to-day running of the executive was in the hands of a prime minister (formally First Lord of the Treasury) and a few key department heads or cabinet ministers (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Chancellor, two Secretaries of State, First Lord of the Admiralty) whom the king or queen still enjoyed the freedom to appoint. However, by the 1780s it was universally recognized both that a prime minister who had lost the confidence of the Commons had to resign, regardless of the monarchs wishes, and that the cabinet as a whole was bound together by

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collective responsibility, meaning that individual ministers could not be forced from office against the will of their cabinet colleagues. All new legislation and by the 1780s nearly 200 new statutes were passed every yearrequired the approval of a majority in the Commons and Lords and the signature of the ruler. Furthermore, money bills could not be rejected in the face of a majority in the Commons, and it was around this constitutional norm that the supremacy of the lower house and the ministers whom it supported was constructed (Hilton, 2006, p. 48; Langford, 1989, pp. 684-687, 706-709).1 Although England possessed a state church of which the monarch was the titular head, Protestants not belonging to Church of England, such as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, enjoyed freedom of worship thanks to the Act of Toleration of 1689. The established church itself became increasingly divided after 1739 in the wake of John Wesleys Methodist renewal movement, and though many Methodists broke with the Church of England after Wesleys death in 1791, a new revivalist movement centered around the Clapham Sect ensured that the tensions between so-called Evangelicals (or after 1846 Low Churchmen) and their High Church opponents would continue and intensify throughout the 19th century. Although in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 restrictions had been placed on Catholic property rights and freedom of worship through the Popery Act of 1700, in practice such restrictions were rarely enforced and the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1778 removed from the statute books altogether those clauses pertaining to property ownership. Although only about 70,000 Catholics remained in England in the 1760s out of a population of some 7 million, the vast majority of Irelands 4 million inhabitants of course belonged to this faith, and in 1793 those Catholics owning land worth 40 shillings per year gained the vote for county elections to the Irish Parliament, a right they retained for United Kingdom elections after the union of Britain and Ireland in 1801. It is also worth noting that after 1789 Britain granted asylum to about 150,000 (Catholic) refugees from revolutionary France, including some 7,000 priests (Hilton, 2006, pp. 62, 75; Hoppit, 2000, p. 221; Langford, 1989, pp. 243-258, 291-296, 531; Rupp, 1986, pp. 325-490). Yet toleration had its limits, and those limits were drawn most sharply with respect to papists. Although both Protestant Nonconformists and Roman Catholics were barred from taking degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, Dissenters were at least permitted to matriculate at the latter. And though the Corporation (1661) and Test (1673) Acts required all officeholders to swear the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, sign a declaration against transubstantiation, and take Anglican communion, Nonconformistswho in general had few problems with the first three conditionswere often tempted to take

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communion once as an act of so-called occasional conformity to qualify for office, a step unthinkable for Catholics. In fact, Dissenters dominated municipal government in several commercial towns such as Coventry and Nottingham, whereas Catholics were largely excluded from public positions, though not from the army. In addition, the latter were forced to shoulder the extra fiscal burden of a double land tax assessment (Hilton, 2006, pp. 380381; Hoppit, 2000, pp. 219-221; Langford, 1989, pp. 294-296, 549). To many contemporary observers, Britains political system was also not without its faults. One area of concern, present almost from the birth of the parliamentary monarchy in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, concerned what was known as the influence of the Crown. By this critics meant the ability of the executive in the guise of the prime minister to undermine the independence of Parliament by the offer of lucrative offices, contracts, and other rewards to MPs. Ian Christie has estimated that about 200 of the 585 members of the House of Commons were so-called placemen (in government pay) in 1780, and more recently Boyd Hilton has put the figure at 185 for the period 1784 to 1790 (Christie, 1956, p. 147; Hilton, 2006, p. 53). The issue of influence was closely intertwined with the more general problem of Old Corruption, a polemical term of the early 19th century opposition used to refer to five kinds of rewards enjoyed by those in power: excessive salaries for positions in state administration, the judiciary, and the Church; sinecures or offices requiring no work from the incumbent but carrying a high income; reversions or the ability to pass on an office to a chosen successor; high pensions, often heritable, drawn on the public purse; and grants of government contracts or the lease of crown lands on favorable terms (Harling, 1996, pp. 10, 15-17; Rubinstein, 1983, pp. 55-73). The fiscal burden of such benefits, all financed through a highly regressive tax system, must have been considerable because there existed some 600 sinecures alone in 1780, according to Samuel Finer (1952, 352). With the national debt rising sharply to finance the American war, the criticisms of the opposition Rockingham Whigs that such inefficiency and waste should no longer be tolerated were taken up by a popular movement known as the Association that emerged in late 1779. In response the prime minister, Lord North, established the Commission for Examining the Public Accounts that, based on information collected through an unprecedented level of access to state documents, drew up detailed plans for administrative and financial reform in 15 reports issued between 1780 and 1786. The brief ascent of the Rockingham Whigs to power in 1782 permitted Edmund Burke to convert plans into action through an act that abolished over 130 useless offices (Harling, 1996, pp. 32-38; Hilton, 2006, pp. 119-122). As Philip Harling has

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shown, the assault on Old Corruption continuedthough in a more episodic fashionbetween 1783 and 1827 during the long prime ministry of William Pitt and his principal successor Lord Liverpool, driven forward by the fiscal pressures of the American and French wars and their aftermath, by popular agitation, by the frightening example of the French Revolution, and by a new sense of the impropriety of many government practices inspired by Evangelicalism. By the 1820s the results achieved were substantial, with the number of placemen cut from some 200 in 1780 to 89 in 1822, sinecures reduced from approximately 600 to fewer than 100, and pension costs more than halved. At the same time, the Superannuation Act of 1810 created a system of retirement benefits for officials, thereby reducing the need for sinecures and reversions as a substitute for such benefits (Harling, 1996, pp. 3-4, 7, 14, 21, 24, 29-30, 145; Rubinstein, 1983, pp. 74, 78). This cumulative, stepwise attack on Old Corruption over a period of some four decades stands in contrast to the critical juncture of 1828 to 1835 when change would be sudden and unforeseen and would replace the old political regime altogether rather than simply correcting some of its worst excesses. Although successive governments had combated Old Corruption with varying degrees of application and enthusiasm between 1780 and the 1820s, none had been willing to address a second perceived deficiency of the British constitution, the electoral system. Following the union with Ireland in 1801, the House of Commons of the United Kingdoms Parliament numbered 658 members, of whom 558 sat for English constituencies. Of these 82 represented the 40 English counties (2 members each for 39 of the counties, 4 for Yorkshire). The electorate in the counties consisted of all men owning property worth 40 shillings (2) per annum in rent, a high threshold in 1430 when this requirement was enacted but a relatively low one by the 1820s. Voting took place in the county seat for the entire county and was public. The elector would appear on the designated day or days (15 days where permitted for polling), present his evidence of qualification (no voter registry was kept) and then announce his two votes, which were recorded in a poll book (thereby providing historians with invaluable evidence on voting behavior until the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872; Brock, 1973, pp. 17-34). The problem with the pre-1832 electoral system lay not in the counties, where the electorate was fairly broad and contests, at least in theory, relatively open, but rather in the English boroughs, which sent 403 MPs to the Commons (390 from 195 two-member constituencies, 5 from single-member boroughs, and 4 each from the city of London and Weymouth). No uniform rules existed for the selection of borough representatives, and in fact six different systems were in use (scot and lot, potwalloper, burgage, corporation, freeman,

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freeholder). Without delving too deeply into the complex details, suffice it to say that 77 boroughs sending 151 MPs to Westminster possessed fewer than 100 electors, and a further 36 representing 70 seats had between 100 and 300. This meant that electorates small enough to be controlled by a powerful patron selected 221 MPs, and to these must be added nearly all of the Scottish constituencies (45 MPs) and 18 Irish boroughs (18 MPs). Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that a knowledgeable contemporary observer (John Croker) could claim that in the late 1820s single individuals determined the election outcome for 276 seats out of 658 in the unreformed House of Commons. In addition to this subversion of the electoral system by a small number of powerful patrons, the distribution of the borough seats was highly unequal, with 11 southern seaboard counties plus Wiltshire claiming more than half of the English borough seats (40 borough seats in Cornwall alone) and growing cities in the underrepresented industrial north such as Manchester and Leeds possessing no MPs at all (Brock, 1973, pp. 17-34). Many attempts had been undertaken prior to the late 1820s both to reform parliamentary representation and to reduce discrimination against religious minorities. Indeed, in 1785 the prime minister himself, William Pitt, sought unsuccessfully to end the representation of 36 small boroughs, and in 1801 he resigned after the king blocked his plan to remove the political disabilities facing Catholics in the wake of the act of union between Great Britain and Ireland. In 1822, the Whig Lord John Russell introduced a bill that envisaged the redistribution of 100 borough seats to the counties and growing towns, but he was supported by only 164 of his fellow MPs and the issue of parliamentary reform then disappeared completely from the political agenda, with not a single petition on this subject presented to the Commons between 1824 and 1829 (Brock, 1973, pp. 36, 42; Hilton, 2006, pp. 52-53, 96-97, 434-435; Parry, 1993, p. 44). The question, then, is why this issue suddenly reappeared with a vengeance in 1830 and led only 2 years later to one of the greatest turning points in British history. To understand this outcome, we must begin in 1827, when a reform dynamicand with it a critical juncturebegan that proved unstoppable by 1832. It was in February of that year that Lord Liverpool, prime minister since 1812, suffered a stroke and was forced to step down. His successor was the charismatic but controversial liberal George Canning, whose support for Catholic emancipation divided not only his own fellow progovernment (Tory) MPs, but also the opposition Whigs. Having succeeded in constructing a mixed cabinet of both Tories and Whigs, thereby provoking a deep rift within both factions, he unexpectedly died in August 1827, leaving Parliament leaderless at a time of deepening economic distress sparked by the financial

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collapse of December 1825. After a period of some disarray, the Duke of Wellington was able to form a government in January 1828 consisting of Tories and Canningites and led in the House of Commons by Sir Robert Peel. The new administration was immediately confronted by a vigorous public campaign organized by Dissenters in the Commons who hoped to capitalize on the ongoing Evangelical revival both inside and outside the Church of England to demand the repeal of those portions of the Test and Corporation Acts that still discriminated against Nonconformists (though not those most injurious to Catholics). Lord John Russell then took up the cause and introduced legislation in February 1828, which quickly passed both Houses (Brock, 1973, pp. 46-51; Hilton, 2006, pp. 372-383; Parry, 1993, pp. 56, 101). This significant advance in the area of civil liberties only served to emphasize the continuing exclusion of Roman Catholics from the polity, a state of affairs inextricably linked to the sensitive issue of BritishIrish relations. Canning had favored Catholic emancipation, and a bill that would have realized this was defeated by only four votes in 1827. Wellington and Peel, however, both opposed this step as did, in all likelihood, a majority of the British population not only for reasons of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice but also because modern Britains founding momentthe Glorious Revolution of 1688had been directed against the Catholic James IIs attempt to impose absolutism with foreign (French) help. Yet in the wake of a massive popular mobilization launched by Daniel OConnells Catholic Association (founded in 1823), the prime minister and his principal deputy eventually came to realize, as had Pitt nearly three decades earlier, that peace would never come to Ireland, and hence to the entire United Kingdom, unless Catholics were granted full political rights. Defying the countermobilization of Orangemen in Ireland and Britain organized into more than 100 Brunswick clubs and more than 2,000 protest petitions, the government announced its backing for emancipation in February 1829 and, despite opposition from the king, used its influence to push the Catholic Relief Act through Parliament with large majorities (Brock, 1973, pp. 50-55; Hilton, 2006, pp. 384-397; Parry, 1993, pp. 51-55). It seems clear in retrospect that it was Catholic emancipation, in combination with the continuing economic downturn, that placed parliamentary reform back on the political agenda in 1830 after the hiatus of 1824 to 1829. On one hand, conservative or ultra Tories attributed the governments ability to pass legislation unpopular in Britain as a whole to the nomination or rotten borough system, and it was the ultra-Tory Marquess of Blandford who sponsored a motion for reform in February 1830; on the other, some Whigs and liberals sought to capitalize on the double victories of 1828 and 1829 over religious discrimination by championing a new issue, and it was Lord John Russell

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who introduced an actual reform bill several days later (defeated by 188 to 140 in the Commons; Harling, 1996, pp. 192-193). All of this took place against a background of heightened extraparliamentary mobilization around the rights of Dissenters and Catholics, agricultural distress (the Swing riots), and the Evangelical-driven antislavery campaign. Although Wellington and Peel sought to hold on to power, their administration suffered losses in the elections that had to be held in the summer of 1830 following the death of George IV and the ascension of his brother as William IV. At the same time, a revolution overthrew the reactionary Restoration monarchy in France in July and replaced it with the more liberal regime of Louis-Philippe, an event that electrified Europe and contributed to the Belgian uprising against Dutch rule in August. On November 2, Wellington stated bluntly to the new Parliament that he did not believe it needed reforming, and less then 2 weeks later he chose to resign following a defeat in the Commons (233 to 204) on a budget measure (Harling, 1996, pp. 195-196; Hilton, 2006, pp. 412-420). The 15-month long struggle for Reform (Hilton, 2006) that ensued began with the kings choice of the Whig Lord Grey as prime minister to succeed Wellington. The government that he formed was an odd coalition of Whigs, ultra Tories, and Canningites (liberal Tories) and, as has often been pointed out, was the most aristocratic of the 19th century. By March 1, 1831, when Lord John Russell introduced a bill for sweeping reform according to which 107 existing boroughs were to lose 167 seats, more than 1,000 petitions had already been submitted to Parliament. The bill passed its second reading on the 23rd by only one vote, and when an opposition motion was carried by eight votes on April 20, Grey asked for and received a dissolution and new elections in which he won a decisive victory (April-May 1831). The new House of Commons then approved a modified version of the bill by 136 votes in July only to have it rejected by the Lords in October, a step that provoked riots throughout the country. More violence followed in May 1832 after the king reneged on a promise to create new peers to ensure passage in the Lords, and Grey resigned. When Wellington proved unable to form a new government, Grey returned, William IV ended his opposition, and the Representation of the People Act was approved by Parliament and received the royal assent on June 7, 1832. In the act as finally passed, 56 English boroughs lost all of their 111 seats and a further 30 lost 1 of 2, whereas 22 new boroughs were granted 2 MPs each and another 20 were granted 1 MP. In addition, the more politically open English counties gained 62 seats (from 82 to 144), and although England lost 17 representatives (from 489 to 472), Wales gained 4 (24 to 28), Scotland 8 (45 to 53), and Ireland 5 (100 to 105), thus leaving the total unchanged at 658. The county electorate in England increased by about one third because of the

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addition of two new categories of voters, and a uniform borough franchise (ownership or occupation of a dwelling worth 10 in annual rent) was introduced for the first time, a change that led in part to the expansion of the electorate in Scotland from 4,500 to 64,500. A residency requirement and a voter registry were also instituted, though not the secret ballot (this arrived only in 1872). Overall, the franchise grew by some 45%, though only from 3.2% to 4.7% of the total population. However, and perhaps most significantly, the act reduced the number of nomination seats (controlled by a single individual) from 276 before 1832 to only about 41 in 1840 (Brock, 1973, pp. 19-20, 34, 310-313; Hilton, 2006, pp. 422-424; Parry, 1993, pp. 79-87). In the aftermath of the Great Reform Act, an election was called in December 1832 according to the new rules that gave an overwhelming victory to the government (483 of 658 seats). The high level of political mobilization continued, but this time around the issue of slavery, as the Anti-Slavery Society gained the support of between 140 and 200 MPs and sent more than 5,000 petitions to the new Parliament, which duly abolished slavery throughout the British Empire on August 28, 1833. Over the next two years, the governments of Grey and his successor Melbourne used investigating Royal Commissions to lay the groundwork for far-reaching social legislation such as the Factory Act of 1833 (limitations on working hours of children monitored by a national inspectorate) and the New Poor Law of 1834 (workhouse relief for ablebodied men administered by elected boards of Poor Law guardians). The same procedure was used to prepare the sweeping Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which replaced 178 previously closed borough councils with bodies elected by all adult male rate (local tax) payers, thereby dismantling one of the last foundations of the pre-1832 political system (Harling, 1996, pp. 200-204; Hilton, 2006, pp. 422, 498-499, 589-599; Parry, 1993, pp. 98, 115-117, 125-126). From a theoretical point of view, several features of the struggle for reform culminating in the passage of the Reform Act in 1832 stand out. First, demands for parliamentary reform were present at both the popular and elite level since the mid-18th century, yet the intensity of such demands fluctuated substantially, rising during periods of economic distress and/or budget crisis (early 1780s, 1817-1822, 1829-1832) but falling during times of national emergency or prosperity (1793-1815, 1822-1827), thereby short-circuiting potential critical junctures and rendering them near misses (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007, p. 352). Hence, when reform did come, it was not as a result of a long and continuous build-up of pressure. Rather, and this is a second point, several factors seem to have come together between 1828 to 1832 to bring reform on to the agenda and to push it over the top: mounting economic

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distress for which political change was seen as a remedy, a contagion effect from abroad in the wake of the 1830 revolutions in France and Belgium, and a snowball dynamic in which a series of reforms that broke ever more powerful taboos (repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts after nearly 170 years, abandonment of the Protestant constitutional settlement of 1689 with Catholic emancipation) rendered the idea of a complete reshaping of the previously inviolate House of Commons imaginable and even inevitable. Yet while pointing to these structural factors, it is equally important to underline the central significance of personal choices made by Peel and Wellington. It was above all their decision to abandon a long-standing opposition to full political rights for Catholics and to push through emancipation despite opposition from their followers and from the country as a whole that left them unable to resist in an effective way the skillful maneuvering of Russell and Grey for parliamentary reform. Finally, the act was not the realization of a predefined plan or program, nor was a single political party or single great leader mainly responsible for its passage. The government that introduced the Reform Bill was composed of politicians from opposing factions, and the contents of the bill introduced by a junior minister shocked Parliament in its radicalism yet could be carried (with some modifications in detail) thanks to popular mobilization that came from both ends of the political spectrum. The overall outcome, which no one would have anticipated even five years earlier, thus fits well the definition of a critical juncture because, as I have stressed, it was not the result of a single event but rather of, to use Capoccia and Kelemens (2007) characterization, an accumulation of related events during a relatively compressed period (p. 350). How significant was 1832 for the course and pace of British democratization? In other words, to what extent did it inaugurate a path-dependent pattern of development within British political life? I would argue that one can point to three long-term consequences of the Representation of the People Act which, as we shall see, continued to resonate over a century later. The first of these was the arrival of participatory national politics to Britain, a change that proved to be irreversible. As John Phillips (1992, pp. 10-11, 302-303) has forcefully argued, the extended mobilization for reform between 1830 and 1832, punctuated by two elections, united ordinary people across Britain in debates and lobbying centered on a high political issue that would be settled in Westminster rather than on a matter of principally local concern. Agitation of this kind had occurred in the past, but this time its geographic spread was greater and, most importantly, the structural changes introduced by the act itself (elimination of most nomination boroughs, uniform borough and expanded county franchise), taken together with the measures in favor of Dissenters and

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Catholics and municipal government reform, greatly expanded the scope for institutionalized participation in national politics. Although the new system of representation was far from perfect, it allowed to a much greater extent than before 1832 the transmission of popular feeling to the House of Commons, and the passage of the act against the opposition of both the monarch and the House of Lords underlined the fact for all to see that the Commons was now indisputably the most important element of the constitution. Second, the three decades following the Reform Act saw the emergence in Britain of a two-party system, however fragile, principally defined by lines of religious cleavage. With the practical elimination of nomination boroughs after 1832, it was now no longer possible for governments to employ them to secure majorities in the Commons. A new form of organization was needed, better suited to the altered electoral rules, and this was provided by parties with a national reach befitting a participatory political culture. By helping to send ever more MPs to Westminster, imposing discipline on them once they arrived, and then using this discipline to pass explicitly partisan legislation (rather than legislation based on ad hoc coalitions as was so often true before 1832), parties created the kind of positive feedback loop that Paul Pierson (2004, p. 21) and others have identified at the heart of path-dependent historical processes. Furthermore, the party landscape would be structured throughout the rest of the 19th century principally around a religious cleavage. Thus, the Conservatives or Tories identified themselves as the staunchest defenders of the established Church and drew 2.5 to 4 times more electoral support from its members than their opponents, the Liberals, who in turn could count on the loyalty of Nonconformists (who voted Liberal by a ratio of between 8 and 12 to 1), Catholics, and freethinkers as well as some anticlerical Anglicans (Parry, 1986, pp. 5, 11, 199; Parry, 1993, pp. 128-149; J. Phillips, 1992, pp. 272-279, 302). Why was this so? On one hand, as mentioned above, the new possibilities for participation opened up by 1832 placed a premium on local level organization, and in a society as religious as the United Kingdom, church congregations provided the most extensive and influential source of such organization. The so-called Religious Census of 1851 found that about 61% of the population of England and Wales attended services on Sunday, March 30, 1851. In that year, 75.4% of all working-class children were enrolled in Sunday schools (Parry, 1986, pp. 6-7). On the other hand, despite the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation, the United Kingdom remained a society with a powerful state church to which a sizeable portion of its citizens did not belong. Thus, in 1851 Dissenters represented 42% of all Protestant worshippers in the south of England, 52% in the north, 69% in Scotland, and 80% in Wales.

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In Ireland, where close to a quarter of the kingdoms citizens lived, 80.9% of the population was Catholic, 8.1% Presbyterian, and only 10.7% Anglican in 1834 (Hilton, 2006, p. 496; Parry, 1986, p. 397). Although the propertied among them may have gained new political rights between 1828 and 1832, members of these religious minorities often felt themselves to be secondclass citizens as a result of continuing discrimination in education and the requirement that they pay tithes to support a Church of England or Ireland to which they did not belong. At the same time, many Anglicans were dissatisfied on either theological grounds or because of discomfort with the power of their churchs hierarchy and its support from the state. Such grievances, together with a belief in the moral dimension of free markets prevalent among many varieties of Dissenters and Evangelicals, provided the glue that held disparate groups within the Liberal party together for decades beginning in the 1840s (Hilton, 1988, 2006, pp. 520-524, 532-534; Parry, 1993, pp. 131-149). Perhaps most importantly for the future, the significance of the religious cleavage meant that both Liberals and Conservatives relied on support from all social classes because all of the principal religious communities drew members from across the social spectrum. Finally, the 1832 act contained within it the seed of the future reforms of 1867, 1884-1885, and 1918 because it still excluded the great majority of the adult population from the vote. Furthermore, the use of a uniform (and arbitrary) property value of 10 as the main electoral qualification in the boroughs in the face of great variations in the level of rents across the country meant that men who were well down the social scale but lived in expensive cities such as London obtained the vote whereas those similarly situated but living elsewhere did not (Hilton, 2006, p. 434). At the same time, the act provided a model for overcoming such inherent tensions and contradictions through a gradual lowering of electoral qualifications that, because they were clearly the result of political deals embodied in the various reform acts, no longer benefited from the legitimacy hallowed by time that the 40 shilling freehold and the diverse borough franchises had enjoyed prior to 1832. This process of the stepwise expansion of participation from the Great Reform Act until the arrival of fully universal and equal suffrage in 1948 is the textbook example of what Dahl (1971, pp. 34-36) long ago identified as the safest route to polyarchy. Indeed, in both 1867 and 1918, as in 1832, electoral reform came about thanks to the collaboration between Conservatives/Tories and Liberals because both thought they would gain from wider participation. The reforms introduced during the critical juncture of 1828 to 1835, then, inaugurated a new pattern of path-dependent political development in Britain that, through positive feedback, reproduced itself successfully until at least

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World War I. But did the influence of the Great Reform Act extend beyond that point? In the following section, I explore the degree to which path dependence with its roots in the first half of the 19th century can throw new light on Britains ability to withstand threats to democracy during the interwar period.

Successful Democratic Consolidation in Interwar Britain and the Legacy of 1832

Less than a century after the events of 1832, a new Representation of the People Act was passed in the midst of World War I (March 1918) that finally brought universalthough not yet equalsuffrage to Britain. The act granted the vote to all men older than 21 but only to women older than 30 who qualified (or whose husbands qualified) for the municipal franchise. Qualifications for men and women would be equalized in 1928, though plural voting would not be eliminated until 1948. Prior to 1918, the total electorate had numbered some 7.7 million. Following the passage of the act, this figure rose to 21.7 million, with men making up roughly 60% of voters and women 40% (Butler, 1963, pp. 7-13; Butler & Sloman, 1975, pp. 199-200; Pugh, 1982, 142-143; Taylor, 1967, pp. 94, 115-116). Despite this substantial expansion of the suffrage, it was the established political right as embodied by the Conservative Party which dominated British politics during the interwar years, just as was true in the seven other cases of democratic survival in interwar Western Europe (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France). Indeed, this dominance was greater in Britain than anywhere else except perhaps in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The Conservative Partys electoral performance between the wars was undoubtedly impressive. In the seven elections held between 1918 and 1935, the Tories won the largest number of popular votes on every single occasion and the largest number of seats all but once; only the peculiarities of Britains first-past-the-post electoral system awarded Labour 28 more seats in 1929, although the Tories gained more than 250,000 more votes (Butler & Sloman, 1975, pp. 182-184). Ross McKibbin (1990) has even argued that the three-way nature of many electoral contests actually hurt the Conservatives more than Labour and has concluded from this that there was throughout the period a large anti-Labour majority in the country (pp. 261-262). What is even more surprising is that such a pro-Conservative majority existed among the working class, with the Tories gaining approximately 50% to 55% of the vote in the 1930s against a maximum of 42% to 48% for Labour (McKibbin, 1990, pp. 287-288; Pugh, 1982, pp. 142-145, 243, 253; Tanner, 1997, pp. 114-116). In keeping with this electoral dominance, the Conservatives

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were of course in government, whether alone or in coalition, for 18 of the 21 years between 1918 and the outbreak of the Second World War. As in all other Western countries during this period, democracy in Britain was confronted with a challenge from the far right, in this case in the form of Oswald Mosleys British Union of Fascists (BUF). Mosley, whom Richard Thurlow (1987) has called arguably the finest public speaker in British politics in the twentieth century (caption plate 16), founded the BUF in October 1932 after meetings with Mussolini and Hitler. Drawing heavily on ex-servicemen, the party grew rapidly, reaching a peak of 50,000 members in July 1934. At the time, the BUF enjoyed the financial backing of the press baron Lord Rothermere, but following the Olympia rally in June 1934, Rothermere withdrew his support and membership collapsed to 5,000 in October 1935. The party thereupon adopted anti-Semitism as part of its ideology and in so doing marginalized itself still further. Its membership levels never reached their former heights (Pugh, 1982, pp. 275-278; Ramsden, 1978, p. 347; Thurlow, 1987, pp. 30, 35-36, 92-107, 122-123, 135). There can be little doubt that at least between 1932 and 1934, the BUF had the potential to become a serious political force, possessing as it did several characteristics shared by the successful fascist parties of Italy and Germany: a charismatic leader, a detailed economic plan, several weighty financial backers, sympathetic coverage in the Rothermere press, and a proven appeal among World War I veterans. That it nevertheless remained a marginal phenomenon was in the first instance because of widespread revulsion at the movements violence and brutality, especially at the infamous and highly publicized Olympia meeting. Yet one can also point, I think, to a deeper reason for the failure of fascism in Britain. The political hegemony after 1931, and indeed throughout all of the interwar period, of a Conservative Party capable of working with parties to its left in the national interest yet still containing within its ranks numerous prominent right-wing figures wedded to empire, protection, and the fight against socialism cut much of the ground away from a far-right nationalist movement. This same logic was at work, I would argue, in the seven other cases of democratic survival where the existence of healthy, established conservative parties short-circuited the potential appeal of movements further to the right. How can conservative electoral hegemony under conditions of both mass democracy and socioeconomic crisis in interwar Britain be explained? The literature has pointed to three proximate reasons for this hegemony. First, the electoral redistricting in 1918, the retention of the plural business and university votes, and the disappearance of all Irish seats save those from Ulster (heavily Unionist) from the Westminster Parliament gave the Conservatives

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a structural advantage of perhaps as many as 30 seats compared to Labour during this time (McKibbin, 1990, p. 263; Pugh, 1982, pp. 237-242). Second, and far more significantly, Stanley Baldwin succeeded in shifting the appeal of the Conservatives after 1923 very markedly toward the center of the political spectrum. Unlike an older generation of leaders like Bonar Law or Curzon, he had no trouble acknowledging his commitment to democracy and repeatedly urged his party to pay more attention to the views of ordinary people in general and its own local members in particular. As he stated in 1936, I shall always trust the instincts of our democratic people (Havighurst, 1979, p. 258). Indeed, it was Baldwins failure to detect strong popular support for rearmament after 1933 that held back his pursuit of such a policy. Baldwin also pushed the party away from its focus on the empire, a central feature of Conservative thinking prior to 1914 (Pugh, 1982, pp. 273-275; Pugh, 1985, 184-189; Ramsden, 1978, pp. 208-213). Baldwins views on Labour and the working class were also unexpected. He sympathized with Labours goal of providing greater opportunity for working peopleand indeed urged that they be granted a greater place within his own partybut thought Labours ideas for realizing this goal utopian and impractical. Instead, he supported practical social reforms of the kind introduced by Neville Chamberlain during the late 1920s and 1930s. Baldwins reinvention of conservatism to take account of the more democratic character of the age was only possible, however, because he was able to fall back on the one-nation Toryism of Disraeli as a source of legitimation among his own members and activists (Ball, 1995, pp. 80-82; Pugh, 1982, pp. 270274; Pugh, 1985, pp. 190-192; Ramsden, 1978, pp. 190, 214-215). Many Conservatives were far less positive about the labor movement than their leader, and a drumbeat of antisocialism emanated from the party throughout the interwar years, as McKibbin and others have stressed (Jarvis, 1997, p. 138; McKibbin, 1990; Pugh, 1985, p. 184). A final, crucial factor behind the Tories interwar success was the superiority of the Conservative Party organization built up in the decades prior to World War I and further refined and expanded after 1918. Thus, in the mid1920s party membership stood at about 700,000, compared to 215,000 direct members for Labour in 1928. Although before 1914 the party was built around a dual structure of the constituency associations on one hand and the local habitations (branches) of the 600,000- to 800,000-strong Primrose League on the other, after the war the latter was largely superseded by newly founded and/or reorganized womens, workers and youth associations. The party also made efforts to professionalize the corps of local agents who were responsible for organizing candidates electoral campaigns at the behest of

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the constituency associations (Ball, 1994, pp. 273-280, 297-298; Ball, 1995, p. 78; Pugh, 1982, pp. 246-247; Pugh, 1985, pp. 168, 177-183; Ramsden, 1978, pp. 198, 249-257, 261-262). Finally, the overlapping memberships of its adherents in business, farmer, professional, and civic groups produced what McKibbin (1990) has called the informal Conservative hold on bourgeois associational life (p. 279), which the Liberals were no longer capable of challenging after 1918. In a more general sense, it seems fair to say that the groundwork for Conservative success under conditions of full democracy after 1918 lay in the partys acceptance since 1832 of the vagaries of fair and open electoral competition. Whether because of rational insight or popular pressure or both, the Tories came gradually to abandon attempts to manipulate electoral outcomes and instead to accept, however haltingly, suffrage expansion, redistricting, and limitations on corrupt practices. By the 1860s they seem to have realized that a substantial reservoir of popular conservatism existed in the country at large and that they could benefit from further democratization, as Tory successes at the polls after 1885 indeed confirmed. By creating an ideology of democratic Toryism, by reaching out to newly enfranchised groups, and by building a mass organizational infrastructure, the Conservatives were able to provide their older elite supporters with the mass base that permitted them to continue to make their presence felt even after the advent of mass politics. Thus, positive feedback in the form of electoral successes that followed, at least over the medium term, every extension of the suffrage (1832, 1867, 1884-1885, 1918) kept Britain on the path of ever-expanding participation and provided both conservative elites and conservative masses alike with much evidence that they had little to fear and much to gain from embracing the increasingly democratic system. It is hardly surprising, then, that they remained committed to that system during the crisis-ridden 1920s and 1930s. Yet a hegemonic Conservative Party was not in itself sufficient to ensure that democracy in interwar Britain would remain strong and stable. A credible alternative was also necessary, and it was the relatively new Labour Party that quickly came to supplant the divided and demoralized Liberals as that alternative. Though Labour won the largest number of seats in only one election that of 1929during this period, its achievement was nonetheless remarkable given the partys starting point. As mentioned earlier, Labour gained just 371,772 votes (7.1%) and 42 seats in the last elections before the war (1910), and even that had been possible only because Liberal candidates had by agreement stood down in those constituencies that their junior partner

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contested. The Liberals themselves had received nearly 2.3 million votes (43.9%) and 272 seats in this same contest. Eight years later, Labour was already garnering 22.2% of the vote, and by 1922 this figure had jumped yet again to 29.5% (142 seats), only to reach a temporary apogee of 37.1% (288 seats) in 1929. True, the party suffered a disastrous loss of seats in 1931, falling from 288 to 52, but the popular vote held up fairly well at 30.6%, and by 1935 Labour was able to bounce back and achieve its highest ever share of the vote, 37.9% (142 seats; Butler & Sloman, 1975, pp. 182-183). Recent literature has served to discredit several older explanations for Labours rise. Thus, it has been shown that neither changes in class structure nor the introduction of universal suffrage in 1918 can account for the partys rapid success. The former argument contends that profound socioeconomic changes under way during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, including the decline of religion and a rise in trade unionism and industrial conflict, preordained the eclipse of the Liberals by Labour as the representative of a newly class-conscious, majoritarian working class. Yet reexaminations of the electoral data by Duncan Tanner, Martin Pugh, and others have failed to uncover convincing evidence that Labour was overtaking the Liberals before 1914, as this theory predicts should have happened (Pugh, 1982, pp. 138-141; Tanner, 1997, pp. 107-113). The claim that Labour was bound to profit from the expansion of the suffrage after 1918 has likewise been shown to rest on empirically shaky ground, for it wrongly assumes that most men excluded from the vote under the 1884 Reform Act were working class and that those men would vote for Labour when granted the opportunity to do so. In fact, the franchise restrictions in force prior to the introduction of universal suffrage fell on those who lived at home, rented certain kinds of lodging, and changed their place of residence frequently, and these categories contained men of all classes, from the sons of dukes living on their family estate to students, commercial travelers, and servants. Furthermore, the claim that newly enfranchised workers would naturally support Labour is belied by the fact, mentioned above, that the Conservatives gained a majority of working-class votes throughout the 1930s (Pugh, 1982, pp. 142-145; Tanner, 1997, pp. 114-116). If neither the extension of the franchise nor socioeconomic change before 1914 can account for the Labour Partys success after 1918, what can? The roots of this success do appear to lie in the pre-1914 period, but in the realm of politics more than that of social stratification. Thus, there now exists much evidence that Labour took over as the principal opposition between the wars because it was the rightful inheritor of the Liberal-led progressivism, which

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had been the dominant political force in British politics in the decade before World War I but which was abandoned by the Liberals themselves during the war (G. Phillips, 1992, pp. 65-67; Tanner, 1990, pp. 419-442). The liberalism of 1906 to 1914 was no longer the minimalist state doctrine of the Victorian era but the New Liberalism of Hobson and Hobhouse that stood for state-led social reform financed by progressive taxationembodied in Lloyd Georges peoples budget of 1909 and his National Insurance Act of 1911in addition to the more traditional radical doctrines as free trade and universal suffrage. Although the Labour Party had established itself in 1906 (and the Labour Representation Committee before it in 1900) as an independent political group, it had done so primarily to increase the number of working men in Parliament and to protect trade union rights. In most other respects the party concurred fully with the new liberal program, and indeed nearly all of its leaders and many of its members and voters were past or even current members of the Liberal Party. It was the close ideological and personal ties between Labour and the Liberals that made possible their continuing, though sometimes strained, collaboration in the progressive alliance right down to 1914 (Pugh, 1982, pp. 115-136). World War I changed all this because during its course Liberalism largely abandoned progressivism. Lloyd George, its most prominent representative, moved sharply to the right, and his opponent Asquith was unwilling or unable to uphold the banner of new liberalism in his stead. The result was that the two Liberal groupings that emerged from the war abandoned a vast electoral space on the Center-Left to Labour. This space, which had been occupied for over a century by various currents of British radicalism before new liberalism laid claim to it, had long been the political home of many groups above and beyond the trade union-affiliated working class. The withdrawal of both Liberal leaderships from this space created an opportunity for Labour, especially in the immediate postwar years (G. Phillips, 1992, pp. 35-37; Pugh, 1982, pp. 171-172; Tanner, 1990, pp. 426-435). Labour was able to take advantage of this situation in the first instance because it already possessed the organizational capacity to do so in the form of affiliated trade unions and trade councils, which provided both funds and election workers at the grassroots level. Such affiliated bodies were already active in 143 constituencies in 1913 and 246 more in 1918, and it was their presence that permitted Labour to launch a national campaign when opportunity knocked, fielding 388 candidates in 1918 and 411 in 1922. Yet this campaign could bear fruit only because Labour also remained true to the language and traditions of British radicalism and progressivism rooted in a very long

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period of parliamentarism and party competition prior to 1914. It was the familiarity of Labours positions and rhetoric, rather than their novelty, which led many nonunion workers, women, and members of traditional Liberal groups such as Nonconformists and the Irish as well as first-time voters from Liberal families to switch their allegiance between 1918 and 1929 to Labour from the broken wreck of the Liberal Party, run aground while its captains fought among themselves (Pugh, 1982, pp. 147, 245-246, 257-258, 291-292; Tanner, 1990, pp. 429, 435). As historians have increasingly come to realize, that tradition of 19thcentury progressivism as embodied in the Liberal Partyand indeed the bipolar party landscape of which it was a partitself owed much to the role played by religion in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act in creating crosscutting cleavages that would persist through the interwar period and beyond. Thus, from the 1860s onward the most important component of the Liberal Party were dissenting Protestants from the Midlands and the north who furnished the party with its most fervent activists and reliable voters. Liberal leader W. E. Gladstone then skillfully used a number of issues with a religious componentChurch rates, Irish disestablishment, state support for confessional schoolsto bind this group to the more moderate (and aristocratic) Whig-liberals who shared the Nonconformist wish to limit the privileges of the established church. At the same time, however, the image of the Liberals as dominated culturally by killjoy teetotalers and puritan moralists drove many in the working class to vote for the Tories, who cleverly positioned themselves as the party willing to defend the English working mans traditional pleasures of beer and billiards and held many meetings in public houses (Harrison, 1996, pp. 181-182; Nossiter, 1970, pp. 177-180; Parry, 1986, pp. 5-8, 80-81, 199-204). It was the mixed-class support base of both parties, to a significant degree induced by the religious cleavage, that in turn led Liberals as well as Conservatives to support suffrage extensions in 1867 and 1884-1885. In summary, then, a strong element of continuity links the critical juncture of 1828 to 1835 with the introduction and consolidation of full democracy almost a century later. This element of continuity is to be found above all in the domination within the political system as a whole of two multiclass parties committed to parliamentary procedures and capable of working together for the greater good of the country. On the other hand, the two parties that emerged after 1832 were not the same two parties that successfully defended democracy during the interwar period, a fact that points to the limits of path dependence. Despite the isomorphism between Labour and the Liberals touched on above, the fact remains that the Liberal Party self-destructed

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during World War I, an outcome that no one foresaw prior to 1914 and one that carries more than a whiff of contingency. Had the Liberals been led by someone other than Lloyd George and Asquith, they might well still be a party of government today, as they are in Canada.

Conclusion
What broader conclusions can we draw from the British and the more general western European experience of democratization up through World War II? The evidence seems to suggest that during the period immediately after the advent of full democracy, when older, predemocratic elites may still be powerful and a large reservoir of popular conservatism of whatever type may be present, the existence of strong Right and Center-Right parties that see themselves as standing up well to fair political competition is an important prerequisite for the survival of a democratic system in the face of sustained crises. Yet the creation of such parties at the moment of full democratization is not enoughthey have to have been in place much earlier, thanks to a willingness on the part of predemocratic elites to risk competition in the hope of finding an effective way to safeguard their long-term interests. More specifically, the British case seems to exemplify one of two paths toward successful (i.e., uninterrupted) democratic consolidation and survival found in Western Europe prior to 1945. In this pattern, early state and nation building led to the emergence of two political campsthose of the reformers and their opponentsthat during the 19th century in the wake of some critical event (in Britain the reform episode of 1828-1835) crystallized into a political system centered around two competing parties or party camps. In those cases in which competition between these two forces (in Britain Liberals and Conservatives) remained open and unfettered, they emerged as heterogeneous peoples parties and united supporters from several classes and regions thanks to the role playedas Andrew Gould (1999) as emphasizedby religious differences (in Britain Catholic/Nonconformist/Church of England, in France clerical/anticlerical) as a cross-cutting cleavage. As a result, above all religious cleavages acting during the formative period of 19th century party systems, conservative forces were able to become multiclass mass movements not only in Britain but also in France and Scandinavia, and it was these forces that played a pivotal role in defending democracy from far right challenges during the interwar years. The alternative pattern is found in Kalyvass (1996) Christian Democratic cases, where in my view (Ertman, 2009) late nation building meant that religious differences, rather than being subsumed within a larger, dualistic political

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landscape, brought forth confessional parties that, once again when allowed to compete openly and fairly, would later work together with secular rivals to defend democratic institutions that had permitted them to build extensive, selfcontained religious life worlds (consociationalism). Thus the European past, I would argue, points to four lessons that, despite vast differences in the international economic and institutional environment, might still be relevant for todays democratizers: first, that a strong constitutionalist Right is crucial for successful democratic consolidation; second, that conservative forces best serve the interests of their supporters over the long run by engaging in free political competition rather than employing strategies of manipulation (party proscriptions, vote rigging, legislative emasculation); third, that religious differences and movements can play a positive role in processes of liberalization and democratization; and finally, that there is more than one path to durable democracy. Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Financial Disclosure/Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Note
1. Multiple citations indicate that the claims put forward in the preceding paragraph are based on several sources.

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Bio
Thomas Ertman is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Sociology, New York University and academic adviser of that universitys Berlin program. He is the author, among other works, of Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1997), which was awarded the 1998 Barrington Moore Prize of the American Sociological Association and has recently appeared in China. He is presently working on a successor volume titled Taming the Leviathan: Building Democratic Nation-States in 19th and 20th Century Western Europe. He has also written several articles on opera and edited and contributed to the volume Opera and Society from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (2007) along with Victoria Johnson and Jane Fulcher.

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