Local Politics and Partisanship: the Electoral Impact of Municipal Reform, 1835 *

The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, with its creation ofnew town councils and annual municipal elections, occupies a central place in the development of civic administration and urban government in England and Wales. It also had far reaching political and party implications. These have generally been explored either from the perspective of its parliamentary sponsors and opponents at Westminster,’ or through local case studies charting the dynamics of municipal politics in specific towns.‘ Relatively little comparative work, however, highlighting the structural and technical relationship that existed between the new municipal and parliamentary electoral systems has been done. In particular, the crucial link between the municipal and parliamentary voter regstration process and its stimulus to party organization ofboth council and constituency politics has not received the attention it deserves. This paper explores the nature of this important interconnexion, and re-assesses the impact of municipal reform on electoral organization and party performance at both the local and national political level. Over the past ten years our understanding of electoral behaviour in the first decade of reformed politics has undergone a major change. Using the information contained in borough pollbooks, a number of historians have studied the voting habits of individual electors over time, scrutinizing their behaviour in successive contests. These computer-based ‘longitudinal’ analyses ofvoting have shown that the probability, or ‘hazard rate’, of a party vote being repeated in a subsequent election increased substantially in this period. The pioneering work ofthe late John Phillips, in particular, emphasized the ‘critical, indeed watershed, role of the Great Reform Act’ by demonstrating that after 1832 party-based attachments became far more persistent, and far less changeable. At the same time the likelihood of an elector in a double-member seat ‘splitting’ his two votes between candidates fiom different parties decreased substantially in the boroughs