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).

The establishment of local party associations in most constituencies soon after the second Reform Act nearly doubled the electorate, the affiliation of these associations with national umbrella organizations, and the role these new organizations played in disciplining MPs became the subjects of a series of polemical contemporary examinations. W. E. Forster's well-publicized altercation with the Bradford Liberal Association in the 1870s was painted as an intemperate attack by rabid non-conformists on a moderate statesman. The fancied resemblance of the Birmingham plan of organization to American big-city machines, the vigorous activity of the National Liberal Federation in the 1880s, Randolph Churchill's attempt to use the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations as a vehicle for his ambitions – all these made lively topics in the periodical literature and, later, in books. The culmination of this literature was Mosei Ostrogorski's forceful attack at the end of the century on the new forms of British party organization, which put forth a view of this organization – emphasizing its importance in disciplining MPs – that is still widely influential, especially among political scientists.

This chapter examines Ostrogorski's views. The first section reviews the history of extra-parliamentary party organization from an Ostrogorskian perspective, then turns to more recent and rather different assessments. The second section focuses specifically on what effect, if any, local party associations had on the party loyalty of MPs.

EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY PARTY ORGANIZATION

Election campaigns before the second Reform Act were still organized in an ad hoc fashion.

The preceding chapter has shown quite clearly that party discipline in the House of Commons increased from the 1850s to the 1870s. This chapter asks if an explanation for this increase can be found by examining the prior decline in discipline, from 1836 to the 1850s. This decline is generally attributed to the controversy over the Corn Laws and the resulting break-up of the Conservative party. If this explanation is correct, one might expect that when the split in Conservative ranks had been resolved, discipline would recover. Hence, some portion of the post-1850 increase might be accounted for by a simple recovery or rebound theory. Because Liberal cohesion was almost constant over the 1836–60 period, falling only slightly, notions of recovery are not attractive as an explanation for the increase in Liberal discipline over the 1860–81 period, which appears to be a first-time phenomenon. But trends in Conservative discipline (Tables 3.1–3.2) show a considerable dip from 1836 to 1850 and 1860, and “recovery” may be an apt explanation of the trend from 1860 to 1871. In order to assess this idea, we must first briefly examine what the effects of the split in Conservative ranks were, and when these effects began and ended.

The schism in the Conservative party came in the Parliament of 1841–47 when Sir Robert Peel, then Conservative leader, introduced and passed a bill repealing the Corn Laws (with the aid of the Whigs).

Historians have referred to the period between the first and second Reform Acts as the “golden age of the private MP.” Although this phrase would certainly be a misleading guide to the private member's procedural status, which declined significantly in this period (see Chapter 6), it does convey some idea of the prestige which the private member enjoyed. This prestige was based in part on a conception of the member of Parliament as an independent and significant agent in the “grand inquest of the nation.” Parliamentary independence was in vogue, especially after the Peelites broke off from the Conservatives in 1846: “If there was one attitude that the Peelites popularized and made fashionable, it was that even the most mute backbencher, when it came to a division, had a duty to vote his conscience and his sense of honor” (Jones and Erickson 1972: 222–23). In keeping with this attitude, many MPs emphasized in their election addresses that they would take an “independent” stance in the Commons, or give “independent support to Liberal (or Conservative) principles.” And, in Parliament, party discipline reached its lowest measured levels in the twenty years after the repeal of the Corn Laws.

It is the marked increase in levels of discipline after this mid-century nadir that has attracted the attention of journalists and scholars since the 1870s. Precise measurement of the increase in discipline has lagged behind recognition, however, and is still very incomplete for the period before 1885.

The evidence in Chapter 9 reveals clearly that split voting and nonpartisan plumping declined markedly in the hundred years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Whereas 38.7% of all sampled voters cast nonpartisan votes in the general election of 1818, only 5.8% did so in December 1910. The decline, however, was neither linear nor monotonic. Each Reform Act seems to have introduced a new era in terms of the levels of non-partisan voting registered at general elections, and the downward trend could be interrupted, as shown by the resurgence of nonpartisan voting in the decade following 1847.

These findings raise three questions. First, why was there any longterm decline in non-partisan voting at all? Second, why are the figures periodized by the Reform Acts? Third, what explains the “short-term” or year-to-year fluctuations within reform periods? To answer these questions, which concern the trends over time in national non-partisan voting rates, it will help to examine constituency rates cross-sectionally as well. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses should be grounded in a proper understanding of the causes of split voting and non-partisan plumping at the individual level. To establish such an understanding is the first objective of this chapter.

EXPLAINING NON-PARTISAN VOTING

Both split voting and non-partisan plumping indicated the use by electors of some criteria other than partisan affiliation. In order to explain nonpartisan voting, then, it is necessary to identify what those other criteria were.

Chapter 9 provided clear statistical evidence of the increasing electoral importance of party. We turn now to an investigation of the legislative consequences of this change. Since the analysis focuses on the responses of individual MPs to altered electoral conditions, a necessary preliminary question is whether MPs noticed any change.

THE PERCEPTION OF THE ELECTORATE

The perception by nineteenth century MPs of why their constituents voted the way they did is clearly not a subject on which definitive statements can be made. Yet it is necessary, if we are to argue that the change in electoral orientation had any direct effect on legislative behavior, to say something about how MPs perceived the electoral parameters within which they acted. Did Victorian politicians know when electors were voting for parties and when they were voting for men? In particular, did contemporaries in the late 1860s and 1870s know or believe that voters were becoming more party-oriented and less candidate-oriented?

One approach to answering these questions is to look at the trends over time in the number of election contests with only three candidates. In its simplest form, the decision on the part of a prospective candidate to contest a given constituency presumably depended on the value of a seat, the cost of an election campaign, and the probability of victory.

Why did men in the nineteenth century seek to enter Parliament? How many wished to stay once they had entered the “best club in London,” and how many aimed higher, eyeing a position in the ministry? In studying an age before surveys or polls, the answers to these questions must be largely indirect. But the answers are important. If members coveted admittance to the ministry, the Premier, who held the power of appointment, could establish a strong inducement to loyalty by making it clear that those who too frequently dissented would generally not receive office. Since members who sought ministerial positions usually had to acquire a certain amount of parliamentary experience – especially if they aspired to the Cabinet – they must have become at least instrumentally concerned with reelection, and a natural preliminary question concerns the number of members who sought to (and the number who did) stay in Parliament long enough to have a realistic shot at the ministry and especially the Cabinet.

Interest in reelection could stem from sources other than ministerial ambition, however, and the question of how many members were willing to put up with increasingly frequent election contests and the rigors of serving ever-larger popular constituencies is of interest in its own right. In the next section of this chapter, the desire of members to stay in office is reconnoitered. The second section turns to the question of specifically ministerial ambition and its significance for party discipline.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the procedure of the House of Commons was radically transformed. The basic rules and conventions both of public legislation, which dealt chiefly with matters of general or national concern, and of private legislation, which dealt with matters of personal or local concern under a different procedure, were entirely rewritten. In this chapter, the major developments in public legislation are reviewed. The central theme is the origin of the efficient secret (i.e., a Cabinet with not only executive but also legislative predominance) in the decline of the private member. The next section describes the Cabinet's increasing authority over public legislation in the period before 1867, and the corresponding diminishment of the private member – even in the midst of the so-called golden age of the private MP. The second section attempts to explain these changes, and the third looks to their consequences.

THE CENTRALIZATION OF LEGISLATIVE INITIATIVE

In the eighteenth century, the Cabinet was almost purely an executive body. Ministers were responsible primarily for the administration of royal government, and the conception of their legislative duties extended only to the passage of measures (chiefly financial) necessary to the ordinary conduct of government. General measures of public policy, it was thought, “were properly the concern of Parliament as a whole, and should normally be introduced not by the government but by private members” (MacDonagh 1977: 5).

It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of change in nineteenth century Britain. In a country which preened itself on the smoothness of its political adaptation and on its avoidance of the violent revolutions that rocked the Continent, political change was nonetheless massive, and no major institution of the polity escaped the century without fundamental alteration. In a country whose best economists at the beginning of the century believed that large increases in population, given a fixed supply of other factors of production (in particular, land), could only lead to famine, the population nonetheless quadrupled at the same time that the real product per capita also quadrupled (Deane and Cole 1967: 282). In this chapter we sketch the broad outline of political and economic events. The purpose is chiefly to provide some of the general historical background that readers who are not Victorian historians may require. The discussion in the second section also covers some topics – in particular, the expansion of the press and the alteration of the rules of procedure of both private and public legislation – that are important in later chapters.

THE COURSE OF POLITICS

The best-known landmarks of nineteenth century British political history remain the three Reform Acts, which, in the Whig interpretation, punctuated the march from an aristocratic and factional politics, prevalent in the early years of the century, to a democratic and party-based politics at the end of the century. The greatest watershed was perhaps the first Reform Act, passed in 1832.

Part II of this book dealt chiefly with the development of party discipline in the House of Commons in the 1860s and 1870s. No obviously satisfactory explanation of this development has been found. The traditional argument, due to Ostrogorski, that the establishment of local party associations after the second Reform Act led directly to increased discipline does not hold water for the 1870s (Chapter 5). The increasing number and complexity of divisions in which MPs participated probably had only a marginal impact by this decade (Chapter 6). The desire for ministerial position, while no doubt important later in the century, probably affected only a relatively small proportion of MPs in the 1870s, simply because of the paucity of government posts. Moreover, the prospect of the reward of office did not always lead to higher discipline (Chapter 7). The increasing tendency of governments to threaten the House with dissolution, while the most important factor identified thus far, is extremely difficult to assess (Chapter 8).

In this part of the book, attention turns from an exclusive concentration on the voting behavior of MPs to include the voting behavior of ordinary electors. The main focus will fall upon three fairly well defined and narrow questions: (1) When did English voters begin to vote for parties rather than men? (2) Why did they do so? (3) What were the consequences?

In answering these questions, it is necessary first to clarify what is meant by “voting for parties rather than men.”