Historians differ widely on the importance of national issues in parliamentary elections during the nineteenth century. At least two strands of opinion tend to discount their importance. First, there is the view that elections were largely controlled by the influence of local elites, so that the meaningful expression of electoral opinion was confined to differences among the upper crust. Second, there is the view that parliamentary elections “were much more a drama enacted about the life of the town … than a means of expressing individual opinions about the matters of the day … the real issue was not the parliamentary representation of the borough, but the relative positions of the electors within the town” (Vincent 1966: xv). Clearly, to the extent that elections did turn chiefly on rivalries of the purely local kind suggested, their use in communicating the policy preferences of voters – even elite voters – was lessened.

In contrast both to the emphasis on influence and to that on localism, there is a strand of opinion which affirms the importance of national issues in elections. R. W. Davis has said of the counties, for example, that “the importance of landed influence has been vastly over-rated” and that “county politics rested on more than the decisions of cosy little caucuses of country gentlemen” (Davis 1972: 37, 98).