Abstract
There was for long a consensus among scholars to depict the electoral system of the Hanoverian period as corrupted. Most of historians agreed on the fact that the system was not only deficient quantitatively because of the low number of enfranchised people, but also qualitatively because of the patronage and influence exercised on the voters. If only 3,1% of the population could vote before the Reform of 1832, the historian Namier evaluated that “not one voter in twenty could freely exercise his statutory rights” . This influence on voters and the corruption were made easier by the fact that most of them did not really have a political consciousness yet. It is only in 1832 that the first improvements to the system were made, with the Great Reform, increasing the representation and decreasing the extent of corruption. Taking this information into consideration, it is legitimate to wonder if the right of vote had any value in an electoral system which was unreliable and in which many voters were controlled or influenced. However, it seems that the historiographical debate is not settled and that some more recent historians, such as O'Gorman, argue that the corruption has been exaggerated and try to relativize the unreliability of system.
This revisionist historiography tries to emphasize the virtue of the right to vote at the period. Considering both side of the debate, I am going to demonstrate what was the right to vote worth, by looking at its impact at different scales –individually, at local and national level, and for the society as a whole. I think it is important to move from an exclusively political and systemic point of view to a more sociological one, in order to avoid depicting only the systemic failings and to be able to focus on the social worth of the right to vote.
