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This article reassesses the electoral decline of British Liberalism in the 1920s, especially the catastrophic defeat of 1924. A leading explanation for this disaster is that the Liberals were ‘fighting to lose’ by leaving nearly 250 constituencies uncontested. David Lloyd George is widely seen as deliberately seeking to destroy his party by refusing to finance candidates through his infamous ‘fund’, so he could lead what remained after electoral evisceration. His actions are widely credited with stymieing prospects of a Liberal recovery in the next election, 1929, which confirmed the party's permanent replacement by Labour. Through a wide-ranging statistical reanalysis, supported by a study of grassroots constituency campaigns, this article argues that the lack of candidates was a negligible contributor either to Liberal annihilation in 1924, or to Liberal failure to recover in 1929. The sharply deteriorating health of the party was already felt keenly at the grassroots before, not after, the seemingly freak result of 1924 was known. We thus argue that, contrary to the judgement of historians and contemporaries, the 1924 result represented the truer reflection of the party's fundamental interwar strength, with 1923 the exception. The inaction of Lloyd George in 1924 thus can be interpreted as pragmatic rather than Machiavellian.

Using text mining, this chapter digitally analyses 1,619,838 words of candidates’ manifestos from the elections of 1892, 1906, and particularly 1918. It makes numerous interesting findings, in particular that the majority of references to promises and pledges were actually attacks on those offered by opponents. In 1918, it finds that Conservatives moved away from the old language of party and towards a communitarian appeal to nation in framing promises, while the official Liberal Party maintained much the same approach it had in previous elections. This chapter evidences not just the feminisation of political appeals ushered in by women’s suffrage in 1918 but also a broader gendering of electoral language in general. Finally, it explores differences in party appeals to the new female electors, finding (surprisingly) that Asquithian Liberals focussed on women most and Conservatives least.

This chapter evaluates the two principal methodologies adopted in studying elections over the past 200 years. The first prominently features ‘psephological’ analyses of aggregate voting data and social cleavages; the second is the revisionist ‘linguistic’ approach, which emphasizes the careful reconstruction and exploration of electoral languages and discourses, often in a specific locality. This chapter argues that, while both approaches have undoubtedly yielded considerable benefits, what was once a large field of scholarly endeavour has been split in two, with the empirical, quantitative tradition now associated with political science on one side and the now dominant cultural and linguistic approaches on the other. The chapter ends by exploring potential new directions and argues that the advent of the ‘digital turn’ and the vast proliferation of electronic sources in its wake now make possible an approach which could see the gap between electoral historians and political scientists begin to close.

This article takes a fresh look at the long-running debate on whether the Unionist party owed its electoral success between the Third Reform Act and the Great War predominantly to ‘negative’ factors: principally, low turnout; poor Liberal organization; and a reliable and consistent middle-class vote. Taking advantage of recently digitized election datasets, it conducts the most extensive statistical study thus far attempted, to argue that recent revisionist historians have dismissed too readily the traditional ‘negative Unionism’ thesis associated with J. P. Cornford. It conducts an extensive analysis of the relationship between turnout and Unionist support on national, constituency, and regional levels, and finds that the much-disputed traditional interpretation that Conservatives benefited from low polls in the late Victorian period is broadly borne out in England. Additionally, this article also investigates the wider impact of uncontested constituencies in this period, arguing that the large number of seats left unfought by the Liberals was even more electorally grievous than the raw numbers imply. Both these findings suggest that the Unionists benefited from a still more substantial structural advantage in the late Victorian period than historians have previously assumed. While important aspects of Unionist language and strategy were undoubtedly positive, they were nonetheless underpinned by negative electoral foundations.

This article provides the first major analysis of the impact of Joseph Chamberlain's “Unauthorized Programme” on the General Election of 1885 in sixty-five years. Instead of focusing on high politics, it investigates the constituencies. Using quantitative analysis of linguistic data, it contends that historians have underestimated the program's impact on the speaking campaign, especially in the countryside, where its proposals of land reform, church disestablishment, and free education emerged as the dominant issues. That the “Unauthorized Programme” became so important so quickly in rural regions such as East Anglia, where radicalism had historically been weak, owed much to the underestimated importance of the enfranchisement of the agricultural laborer in 1884. Chamberlain's remarkable success in immediately setting the post-reform political agenda and in being seen as the chief threat by Conservative opponents fearful of the recently expanded democracy, arguably placed him in a significantly stronger position in the immediate aftermath of the 1885 election than historians—and perhaps he himself—imagined.

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880– 1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised textmining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.

Historians – influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’ – currently study political language almost exclusively qualitatively, through sharply focused case studies. This approach has many strengths but has limited power to examine national long-term political change over such vast discourses as general election campaigns. This article contends that electronic quantitative text analysis methods (inspired by corpus linguistics) could potentially reshape historians' understanding of the language of British electoral politics by providing a powerful ability holistically to assess the typicality, scope and power of key issues, ideologies, personalities and ideas across huge texts. It presents three supporting case studies – on Irish Home Rule, imperialism and William Gladstone – where a multi-million word ‘corpus’ of election speeches from this period is interrogated by computer.

This article investigates the impact of the 1883�5 electoral reforms on the political culture of elections and electioneering in the constituencies, using the borough of Ipswich as its focus. It argues that historians have underestimated the extent to which the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884�5 transformed political cultures outside the countryside and large cities, and that the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 had a major impact on the modernisation of party organisation. Principally, however, it challenges the prevailing historical consensus that the basis of post-reform constituency politics remained, to a large extent, local in nature, by suggesting that electioneering cultures were placed under considerable �nationalising� influences from the early 1880s on. Rather than resisting these influences, the established Ipswich parties largely embraced them. Moreover, a general decline in corruption, and a general increase in the number of speeches reported in local newspapers from �carpetbagger� candidates and national leaders, created a climate in which it was now more difficult for any constituency, however idiosyncratic, to insulate itself from �national� politics.