This special issue of Parliamentary History is one product of 'Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture' (ECPPEC) a research project funded from January 2020 to June 2023 by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. ECPPEC was designed to shed new light on participation in parliamentary elections in England in the long 18th century, from about 1695 to the Reform Act of 1832. It was concerned with 'participation' interpreted broadly, both in the sense of voting, and also through other means: for instance, by attending - or being an active part of - the rituals of parliamentary elections, or by consuming - or creating - electoral print, song, dress, or other artefacts. ECPPEC thus had a dual focus on polling data and electoral culture, and an ambition to discover how these two aspects of elections worked together, with electoral culture potentially affecting election results.