Widening the Franchise: The Reform Acts and the Two-Party System

The Great Reform Act of 1832, passed after a prolonged political crisis and massive popular pressure, eliminated the so-called "rotten boroughs" with vanishingly small electorates and redistributed seats toward the new industrial cities. It moderately expanded the electorate through property requirements — standardized around a ten-pound annual property income qualification in the boroughs — that mainly benefited the commercial and professional middle class without extending the vote to the working class, a disappointment that fed the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s. The Second Reform Act of 1867, finally pushed through by Disraeli's Conservative government, roughly doubled the electorate by extending the vote to qualified urban working-class householders; Disraeli himself described his own reform as "a leap in the dark," though it still excluded rural agricultural laborers and most unskilled workers.