The Scotland of the early 1830s was a Tory nation, although that was about to change, and change dramatically. Before the Reform Act (Scotland) 1832, its parliamentary electorate comprised a few thousand adult males. Following its passage, the number of Scottish MPs increased from 45 to 53 and the franchise grew seventeen-fold to around 64,500 voters out of a population of around 2,300,000.

The historian H. J. Hanham viewed these reforms as the democratic transition from ‘a string of pocket or rotten boroughs and counties’ to restoration of ‘representation to the nation at large’. Scottish voters responded by supporting Whigs or Radicals ‘who had come to be regarded as the champions of the national interest’. D. W. Urwin also saw the 1832 Act as the legal basis of what he called the ‘somewhat unwieldy political alliance known as Scottish Liberalism’. Drawing on a deep anti-Toryism resulting from that party's resistance to reform, Whigs won all but 10 of Scotland's 53 seats at that year's election.

As I. G. C. Hutchison, another historian, has argued, the ‘very comprehensiveness’ of that victory meant only Whigs could subsequently be blamed for any failure to deliver on promised reforms. Indeed, the Whigs subsequently lost ground through poor organisation, something at which the mid-19th century Scottish Conservatives then excelled. There was an attempt to form a Scottish Liberal Association in the mid 1830s but it came to nothing. Scottish Liberals complained that money flowed north from the Carlton Club (to the Scottish Conservatives) but nothing was forthcoming from the Reform Club. The lack of a Scottish Liberal organiser was particularly felt at the 1841 general election.

Nevertheless, the Liberals controlled between 21 and 23 of the 23 Scottish burgh seats between 1832 and the Second Reform Act of 1868, the year a ‘Liberal Party’ was created formally under Gladstone's leadership. Later, they came to dominate county seats too. Between the two Reform Acts, the Liberals never controlled fewer than 31 of Scotland's 53 constituencies.