Luke Blaxill, Gidon Cohen, Gary Hutchison, Patrick M Kuhn, Nick Vivyan
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article analyses over 19,000 articles from newspapers and parliamentary commission reports to reveal endemic electoral violence in England and Wales between 1832 and 1914. It offers a new understanding of the phenomenon in three main ways. First, the extent of election violence, which regularly featured major riots requiring police and military intervention, disturbances of the peace, and deaths, questions conventional understandings of Britain's comparatively peaceful political development through a century of gradual suffrage expansion, rising literacy and economic development. Second, the trajectory of the electoral violence, which peaked in the period after the Second Reform Act of 1867 rather than after the Great Reform Act of 1832, challenges the linearity of these accounts. Third, despite the recent historiographical emphasis on explaining electoral violence as a ritual expression of discontent, much violence resulted from elites strategizing to win elections. Electoral violence occurred disproportionately when and where it was most useful to candidates and parties, and often involved the previously overlooked figure of the ‘hired rough’: men employed to disrupt elections by force. We thus advance a political, rather than cultural, explanation for electoral violence.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.