Reform Act 1832

The Reform Act 1832, formally the Representation of the People Act 1832, was legislation of the British Parliament that overhauled the electoral system of England and Wales. Championed by the Whig prime minister Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, it received royal assent on 7 June 1832. It standardized property qualifications for voting and extended the franchise to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers and other householders paying at least ten pounds a year in rent, while abolishing many of the rotten boroughs, tiny constituencies effectively controlled by a single wealthy patron, and reapportioning seats to reflect population more fairly. The Act expanded England's electorate from about 400,000 to 650,000 voters, though it explicitly restricted the vote to male persons and still excluded the working class; historians continue to debate whether it marked genuine democratic progress or a calculated concession that preserved elite control while shifting power from aristocratic patronage toward the propertied middle class, but it set the pattern for the further extensions of the franchise that followed later in the nineteenth century.