Reform Act Dbq

additionally, the 1867 Reform Act also had a significant impact on the issues that were being addressed by politics. Whereas before, the aristocracy had basically decided what happened in the country, the act meant that issues were being brought to light that had never been discussed properly in public before. This was very important as it not only changed public but it also changed society too. Issues such as the legislation surrounding drinking, education and taxation were now being impacted on by the public actually expressing their feelings about them and this determined that the act had changed entirely how people viewed politics by shifting their focus from the individuals within politics to the actually political interests that they represented. For the first time, the act seemed to allow working-class people to feel indignant at how they were labelled uneducated within society and how they were blamed for society. It could be said that the Reform Act's most important outcome was encouraging people to now speak up for
The two different parties had to go to what they saw as extreme lengths to secure voters' loyalty and to encourage them to vote. This included the setting up of party clubs and trips to places such as the seaside as rewards for people who promised to vote for a certain political party. In a way, it shows how this outcome was significant in advancing political organisation and professionalism yet in other ways it just maintained the old influential schemes that politicians used but at last, they had to actually be clever to use these rather than to blatantly bribe and influence people. They could still influence people, just as they had done with the open ballots, but this time they had to do it with rewards and false promises. To a certain extent, this can still be seen to be happening in our political system