 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
A property qualification is a clause or rule by which those without property (land), or those without property of a set appraised value, or those without income of a set value, are not enfranchised to vote in elections, to stand for election, to hold office or from other activities.
A property qualification originally barred most commoners from voting or standing for election to the House of Commons of England and Wales (after 1707, of the Kingdom of Great Britain and, after 1801, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland). The Great Reform Bill of 1832 widened the franchise (immediately before this, only a few thousand men, and a handful of women, could vote), although it would be 1918 before all men could vote (although women would wait until 1928, and women in Northern Ireland would wait until the 1970s; British nationals from the British Overseas Territories technically have the right to vote or stand for election but cannot do so unless they move residence to the United Kingdom, as no House of Commons electoral district has been created for any British Overseas Territory).
The 18th-century Militia of England and Wales did not sell commissions in the way that the British Army did at the time, but it instead restricted them to property owners and those with income of a set minimum value.
In jurisdictions where the political and economic spheres are dominated by one ethnic, religious or racial group, property qualifications have been used as a way to exclude members of other ethnic, religious or racial groups that may disproportionately lack the required resources. This was the case in Northern Ireland, where a property requirement was used to exclude indigenous Irish Catholics from voting in elections for seats in the Stormont Parliament until 1969. [1] Prior to the 1921 Partition of Ireland, the Protestant Ascendancy had similarly barred most of the native Irish Catholics from voting for Irish seats in the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland once the last bar to Catholics voting in the United Kingdom had been lifted by the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. The property qualification remained in place for mainland United Kingdom elections until the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918.
In the 18th-century Thirteen Colonies, suffrage was restricted to males with the following property qualifications: [2]
The Representation of the People Act 1832 was an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced major changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. It reapportioned constituencies to address the unequal distribution of seats and expanded franchise by broadening and standardising the property qualifications to vote. Only qualifying men were able to vote; the Act introduced the first explicit statutory bar to women voting by defining a voter as a male person.
Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise is the right to vote in public, political elections and referendums. In some languages, and occasionally in English, the right to vote is called active suffrage, as distinct from passive suffrage, which is the right to stand for election. The combination of active and passive suffrage is sometimes called full suffrage.
A timocracy in Aristotle's Politics is a state where only property owners may participate in government. More advanced forms of timocracy, where power derives entirely from wealth with no regard for social or civic responsibility, may shift in their form and become a plutocracy where the wealthy rule.
Voting rights, specifically enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of different groups, has been a moral and political issue throughout United States history.
Armagh or County Armagh is a former county constituency in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. It was a two-member constituency in Ireland from 1801 to 1885 and a single-member constituency in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1950. It was replaced in boundary changes in 1983.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 was an Act of Parliament passed to reform the electoral system in Great Britain and Ireland. It is sometimes known as the Fourth Reform Act. The Act extended the franchise in parliamentary elections, also known as the right to vote, to men aged over 21, whether or not they owned property, and to women aged over 30 who resided in the constituency whilst occupying land or premises with a rateable value above £5, or whose husbands did. At the same time, it extended the local government franchise to include women aged over 30 on the same terms as men. It came into effect at the 1918 general election.
Inverness-shire was a county constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain from 1708 to 1801 and of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801 until 1918.
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, removed the sacramental tests that barred Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom from Parliament and from higher offices of the judiciary and state. It was the culmination of a fifty-year process of Catholic emancipation which had offered Catholics successive measures of "relief" from the civil and political disabilities imposed by Penal Laws in both Great Britain and in Ireland in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries.
"Unreformed House of Commons" is a name given to the House of Commons of Great Britain before it was reformed by the Reform Act 1832, the Irish Reform Act 1832, and the Scottish Reform Act 1832.
Plural voting is the practice whereby one person might be able to vote multiple times in an election. It is not to be confused with a plurality voting system which does not necessarily involve plural voting. Weighted voting is a generalisation of plural voting.
Elections in Southern Rhodesia were used from 1899 to 1923 to elect part of the Legislative Council and from 1924 to elect the whole of the Legislative Assembly which governed the colony. Since the granting of self-government in 1923, Southern Rhodesia used the Westminster parliamentary system as its basis of government. The Political party that had most of the seats in the Legislative Assembly became the government. The person in charge of this bloc was the Premier, later renamed Prime Minister, who then chose his cabinet from his elected colleagues.
Forty-shilling freeholders were those who had the parliamentary franchise to vote by virtue of possessing freehold property, or lands held directly of the king, of an annual rent of at least forty shillings, clear of all charges.
Bedfordshire was a United Kingdom Parliamentary constituency, which elected two Members of Parliament to the House of Commons of England from 1295 until 1707, then the House of Commons of Great Britain until 1801 and the House of Commons of the United Kingdom until 1885 when it was divided into two constituencies under the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885.
In Ireland, the penal laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries on the kingdom's Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant "Dissenters". Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy. The Oath acknowledged the British monarch as the "supreme governor" of matters both spiritual and temporal, and abjured "all foreign jurisdictions [and] powers"—by implication both the Pope in Rome and the Stuart "Pretender" in the court of the King of France.
The total registered electorate in the United Kingdom grew from 5.7 million in 1885 to over 21 million in 1918. Much of the growth was result of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which expanded franchise by abolishing property qualifications for men and introduced female suffrage for some women over the age of 30.
The Representation of the People (Ireland) Act 1832, commonly called the Irish Reform Act 1832, was an Act of Parliament that introduced wide-ranging changes to the election laws of Ireland. The act was passed at approximately the same time as the Reform Act 1832, which applied to England and Wales.
The history of taxation in the United Kingdom includes the history of all collections by governments under law, in money or in kind, including collections by monarchs and lesser feudal lords, levied on persons or property subject to the government, with the primary purpose of raising revenue.
The two-volume Return of Owners of Land, 1873 is a survey of land ownership in the United Kingdom. It was the first complete picture of the distribution of land ownership in Great Britain since the Domesday Book of 1086, thus the 1873 Return is sometimes called the "Modern Domesday", and in Ireland since the Down Survey of 1655-1656. It arose from the desire of the Victorian governing landed classes, many of whom sat in the House of Lords, to counter rising public clamour about what was considered the monopoly of land.
Charles Carroll MacTavish, sometimes known as Carroll MacTavish, was an American landowner who briefly served as an Irish Repeal Association politician in the United Kingdom.
