Between 1832 and 1918, a set of gradual reforms broadened the franchise in Great Britain from less than 5% of all adult males before 1832 to universal male suffrage in 1918. Why did the political class in Britain willingly cede power to the masses rather than seeking to preserve the status quo? We revisit this question by studying how elite preferences regarding the scope of democracy changed over the course of this period. We use roll call votes on franchise reform in the House of Commons between 1830 and 1928 to estimate the preferences of MPs regarding the size of the franchise. We follow Bateman et al. (2017) in using an adapted ideal point estimation procedure which uses information on the policy content of key votes to improve the intertemporal comparability of our estimates. Our preliminary results imply three main conclusions. First, the process of democratisation in Britain was partisan rather than consensual: although the median MP generally came to support a more generous franchise with time, conservative MPs were almost united throughout in opposing almost any suffrage extension. Second, the pace of electoral reform was governed by two factors: the gradual leftward drift of Liberal MPs, which accelerated from the mid-19th century onwards, and the conservatism of early Liberal leaders. Our initial analyses suggest that the process of social and economic modernisation in Britain may explain much of the variation in legislator preferences we observe.
