This question was spawned by the larger question about two democracies going to war. In 1812, when the UK and US were at war, was the UK a democracy?
I realize that it's easy to nit-pick about the word "democracy", so I'll clarify: Was the UK roughly as democratic as the US was at the time (fully aware that neither is a "true democracy" even today)? If it wasn't, then what changed between then and now that transformed the UK into democracy?
Obviously, in 1812 the UK had a king and the US didn't. But the UK still has a monarch yet it's now considered a [representative] democracy, so that raises the question: after 1812, have there been any Acts (or other events) that drastically changed the power of the monarch? Or does the answer instead lie in the many reforms to the House of Lords? It could be argued that the UK wasn't a democracy because it didn't have universal suffrage in 1812, but by that standard the US wasn't a democracy at the time either.
I remember this question on the Daily Show when Jon Stewart interviewed Tony Blair. Blair insisted that the UK was not a democracy in 1812. So that's why I'm wondering what changed between then and now?
(standard apologies if this has been asked before; I couldn't find a similar question using Reddit's stellar search function)
First time poster here, I'll try my best.
What you have to remember in 1812, parliament was already far more powerful than the reining monarch, who at the time hadn't refused royal assent for a bill since 1708. Sure George II was more powerful than our queen is today, for example he threatened to stuff the house of lords with hundreds of liberal peers if they refused to pass the great reform act of 1832 which was the first major expansion of suffrage. If you want to call Britain a democracy in 1812, you might as well call it one in 1432 when parliament took on its form with few major changes for four hundred years. Nothing really changed from 1812 to today in parliament but gradual reform; expanding suffrage, eliminating rotten boughs, grinding down the power of the house of lords. It's really a question of how you define democracy. Is it a democracy when 2% of the population can vote? I personally don't think so, which is why I define 1921 as the day Britain became a democracy as suffrage became truly universal the day women got the vote.
The United States was far more democratic in 1812 than the UK and would become increasingly democratic over the next few years as the right to vote was increasingly expanded. By 1812 most Western states (any state not part of the 13 original colonies) had dropped any sort of property requirements for white males to vote. Many original states had opened up the franchise, such as Pennsylvania, or would grant universal white male suffrage in the aftermath of the War of 1812 as in the case of New York and Massachusetts. Because of the cheapness and availability of land in the United States gaining the ability to vote was not insurmountable in many states that retained property requirements, for instance approximately half of white male Virginians could vote prior to the 1829 constitutional convention and maybe two thirds after. This was also an era in which state electors were increasingly not being chosen by the state legislature, governors and judges were becoming popularly elected, along with repeated state constitutional conventions. All of this points to a society that is much more democratic than Great Britain. There is a downside of course to the increasing democratization of American life in that increasingly women and minorities were stripped of their rights to vote in many states outside of New England.