This article analyses over 19,000 articles from newspapers and parliamentary commission reports to reveal endemic electoral violence in England and Wales between 1832 and 1914. It offers a new understanding of the phenomenon in three main ways. First, the extent of election violence, which regularly featured major riots requiring police and military intervention, disturbances of the peace, and deaths, questions conventional understandings of Britain's comparatively peaceful political development through a century of gradual suffrage expansion, rising literacy and economic development. Second, the trajectory of the electoral violence, which peaked in the period after the Second Reform Act of 1867 rather than after the Great Reform Act of 1832, challenges the linearity of these accounts. Third, despite the recent historiographical emphasis on explaining electoral violence as a ritual expression of discontent, much violence resulted from elites strategizing to win elections. Electoral violence occurred disproportionately when and where it was most useful to candidates and parties, and often involved the previously overlooked figure of the ‘hired rough’: men employed to disrupt elections by force. We thus advance a political, rather than cultural, explanation for electoral violence.

中文翻译：

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英格兰和威尔士的选举暴力，1832 年至 1914 年


本文分析了报纸和议会委员会报告中的 19,000 多篇文章，揭示了 1832 年至 1914 年间英格兰和威尔士普遍存在的选举暴力。它从三个主要方面提供了对这一现象的新理解。首先，选举暴力的严重程度，经常表现为需要警察和军事干预的重大骚乱、扰乱和平以及死亡，这对英国在一个世纪的逐步扩大选举权、提高识字率和经济发展过程中相对和平的政治发展的传统理解提出了质疑。其次，选举暴力的轨迹在 1867 年第二次改革法案之后而不是 1832 年大改革法案之后达到顶峰，这对这些描述的线性提出了挑战。第三，尽管最近的史学强调将选举暴力解释为不满情绪的仪式性表达，但许多暴力都是精英们为赢得选举而制定的战略造成的。选举暴力不成比例地发生在对候选人和政党最有利的时间和地点，并且往往涉及以前被忽视的“雇佣粗暴者”：受雇以武力扰乱选举的人。因此，我们对选举暴力提出了政治而非文化的解释。