This article argues that pre-nineteenth-century elections at a sub-national level have an important place in the history of ‘modern’ voting practices. It does this through a discussion of unusually well-documented election disputes in eighteenth-century London parishes. Previously neglected records of litigation in the ecclesiastical courts reveal that parish elections in this period generated arguments which did not take place at a parliamentary level until the following century: arguments over votes for women, votes for religious minorities, and the secret ballot. Customary electoral rules came under increasing pressure in the early eighteenth century as London’s population grew and changed in character. In some parishes, this produced a narrowing of the traditional ratepayer franchise, allowing only male Anglican ratepayers a vote in parish elections. Elsewhere, groups or individual residents successfully pushed for a more inclusive franchise which allowed ratepaying women, Dissenters, and Jews a voice in parochial politics. Similarly mixed practices emerged with regard to electoral procedure: residents who feared the overbearing influence of their neighbours pressed for a secret ballot, while others insisted on the merits of an open poll. These cases illustrate the importance of small-scale local institutions as key sites of innovation in the history of electoral reform.

In the late eighteenth century, the British electorate began thinking about politics and statecraft in a new way. Britons challenged the natural rights of the nation's aristocracy to rule, and actively linked the personal behaviour of individual noblemen and women to real or imagined public consequences. Aristocratic gaming provided Britons with a rich vocabulary for voicing such concerns. The noble gamester, perceived as erratic, self-interested, and without honour, personified those aspects of private aristocratic vice most likely to undermine national well-being. The 1784 Westminster election specifies two aspects of this controversy. The political unworthiness of notorious gamester Charles James Fox (a front-runner in the election) was linked early on to his personal financial mismanagement, which intimated, in the public mind, his potential abuse of public funds. Fox further contaminated his suitability for public office by allowing the fifth duchess of Devonshire, herself a gamestress, to canvass for him. Her presence in Westminster not only dramatized Fox's gamester persona, but effeminized it. Pittite propaganda stressed Fox's culpability on both counts, and emphasized a new concern with private virtue as fundamental to the moral prerogative to rule.

Originally published in London in 1774 and subsequently republished in French in 1793 and 1833, Marat's The chains of slavery offers an interesting case study on the exchange of ideas between Britain and France during the late eighteenth century. It is suggested that the key to understanding this hitherto neglected work lies in reading it alongside other publications by Marat from the 1770s and in setting it firmly in the context in which it was published and disseminated in both Britain and France. Prompted by debates surrounding the election of 1774, the work embodies Marat's own particular version of the British commonwealth tradition, and can be linked to the Wilkite movement in both Newcastle and London. Despite its British origins, Marat and his followers were able to utilize the work after 1789 in order to engage in a number of French debates. It thus constitutes one of the means by which English republican ideas made their way across the Channel.

This article establishes the significance of elections held in the annexed departments of the Napoleonic Empire from 1802 to 1813. It thus represents an original, and perhaps surprising, contribution to recent debate on the nature of Napoleonic imperialism, in which attention has shifted from core to periphery, and away from purely military matters. The electoral process under this authoritarian regime has been alternately neglected or derided, especially where the newly created departments of the Low Countries and parts of Germany and Italy are concerned. However, extensive archival research demonstrates that it was taken extremely seriously by both regime and voters, especially outside metropolitan France. These ‘First European Elections', as they may be dubbed, took place in regular fashion right across the Empire and are studied here on a transnational basis, which also involves the metropolitan departments. Though open to all adult males at the primary level, they were not exercises in democracy, but they did create some rare political space which local people were not slow to exploit for their own purposes. Above all, they served as a means of integrating ‘new Frenchmen’, particularly members of indigenous elites, into the Napoleonic system.

This article argues for the central role of publicity and propaganda in the Labour party's 1945 landslide election victory. While the ‘swing to the left’ in the first years of the war provided an opportunity for Labour, popular radicalism did not automatically translate into support for the party. The following discussion shows how the national party leadership made use of the BBC, print media, and visual propaganda to associate itself in the popular mind with the successes of the coalition government and the promises of the Beveridge report. While the Conservatives' propaganda machinery fell into abeyance during the war, Labour deftly exploited new means of mass communication which had grown up during the interwar period to build a broad national constituency in favour of its return to power. In order properly to understand the link between ‘high politics’ and popular opinion, political historians need to consider not only the languages through which elite policies were translated and communicated to the public, but also the media of communication. This article argues that, contrary to common perceptions, Labour was successful in 1945 in part because of its ability to embrace and exploit the new mass media to its political advantage.

At the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin overtook the Irish Parliamentary Party as the dominant political force within nationalist Ireland, a process that has its origins in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. This article argues that to understand better this shift in public opinion, from an initially hostile reaction to the Dublin rebellion to a more advanced nationalist position,1 it is important to recognize the decisive role played by a political welfare organization, the Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependents' Fund. The activities of the INAAVDF significantly shaped the popular memory of the Rising, but also provided a focus around which the republican movement could re-organize itself. In foregrounding the contribution of the INAAVDF to the radicalization of political life in Ireland between 1916 and 1918, the article argues that this understudied but important organization offers a useful way of charting popular responses to the Rising and its aftermath, as well as laying the foundations for a reinvigorated political and military campaign after 1917.

Henry Valois (1551–89) was elected king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573 and arrived in Poland in January 1574. After five months, Henry fled Poland–Lithuania upon inheriting the French throne from his brother, Charles IX. As Henry III of France, he was branded a violent tyrant, who allowed his mignons to run the kingdom and isolated himself from his subjects. Historians have done much to rehabilitate Henry's reputation, but his first experience of kingship in the Commonwealth has been neglected in these reassessments. This article uses the previously unstudied treasury accounts of Henry's Polish court to re-examine his experience of the Polish–Lithuanian elective, parliamentary monarchy as crucial to the development of his characteristic style of kingship and court. Some of these practices were a response to the challenges posed by the Polish political system to a newly elected king. This allows us to recover a lost political connection between Poland and France. Secondly, the article demonstrates Henry's active engagement in the Polish–Lithuanian politics, challenging the narrative that he was a passive king anticipating his return to Paris. Instead, Henry planned to cement his rule in Poland by mounting his own faction and pursuing a bold diplomatic agenda.

This article examines the major role that newspapers played in Colombia, as central components of its political system, between 1830 and 1930. After some introductory remarks, the first section offers a general characterization of the Colombian press during the period, underlining its volatile existence, its national significance despite limited readership levels, and its overwhelming political nature in the hands of partisan editors. The second section analyses the political role of the press, by focusing on the crucial electoral functions performed by newspapers in launching candidates and providing them with platforms, serving as party organs, and measuring the amount of public support for candidates and parties. The article also explores the extent to which the press played a wider democratic role in supporting the suffrage, in instructing voters about rights and duties, and, by doing so, in forming an enduring sense of citizenship.

In the face of considerable scepticism from some British commentators, elections by secret ballot and adult suffrage emerged as central features of the end of British rule in Africa. This article considers the trajectories of electoral politics in three territories – Ghana (Gold Coast), Kenya, and Uganda. It shows that in each of these, the ballot box came to provide a point of convergence for the disparate ambitions of nationalist politicians, colonial policy-makers, and a hopeful, restive public: performing order, asserting maturity and equality, and staking a claim to prosperity. Late-colonial elections, we argue, constrained political possibility even as they offered citizenship, presenting the developmentalist state as the only possible future and ensuring substantial continuities from late colonialism to independence. They also established a linkage between nationhood, adulthood, and the ballot that was to have enduring political force. Yet at the same time, they established elections as a space for a local politics of clientelism, and for kinds of claims-making and accountability that were to complicate post-independence projects of nation-building.