Thursday, February 26, 2015

England's Two-Party Political System Under Unprecedented Pressure


The distance between the front benches in Britain's House of Commons, the PIT, is said to be the distance of two drawn swords.

The pit is the product not just of Parliament's adversarial architecture, but of the electoral system that supports it.  The Members of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons, the elected and more powerful of Parliament's two chambers, are the individuals who won the largest share of the vote in each of 650 constituencies.  This winner-takes-all system, is know as "First Past The Post" (FPTP), took its current form in 1885.  By its nature, FPTP squashes small political parties; the dynamics of what political scientists call "Duverger's Law" doom them to irrelevance or merger, a process that will reliably lead to duopolies on power.

Defenders of FPTP argue that by giving voters two broad parties to choice between, instead of a plethora of more focused ones, it delivers durable single-party governments rather than flimsy coalitions.  This allows governments to do more and lets voters hold parties to account for either doing or not doing in office what they promise to do at elections.

The system's detractors say that disenfranchising people who vote for small parties is a price that outweighs these purported benefits.  And this problem has recently been getting worse.  The general election to be held on May 7th will see some widely popular parties winning very few seats, but it is quite unlikely to produce a strong single-party government.  If increasing costs in fairness offer fewer compensating benefits, both Britain's people and its politicians may decide it is time for a change.

The most two-party election held since FPTP took its modern form was in 1951.  Labour received 49% and Conservatives received 48%.  it was a time when class loyalty trumped almost all other concerns.  A study of Labour supporters found only a third held political views vaguely resembling the party's; the rest voted for it because their families, neighbors and work related friends did.  At the other end of the scale the Conservatives was the only game in town.

Now voters do not feel so constrained.  There is the UK Independence Party (UKIP), left-nationalist Scottish National Party (SNP), and the left-some-what-libertarian Greens.  All told, UKIP, the SNP, and the Greens, got one in 18 voters in the 2010 election.  Some polls put the figure today at 1 in 3 voters.

Party activist are redesigning their canvassing sheets to accommodate newly nuanced voting intentions.  A number of previously safe seats are up for grabs, not because they will be lost to the new parties, but because the new parties will eat into past margins of victories.  Some predict a "lottery election" in which small shifts in the vote will make big differences in the Commons.  The complexity is in part a reaction to Britain's first coalition government in 70 years, which has left its members with, weakened flanks.

The Conservatives have lost right-wing voters to UKIP.  The Lib Dems have lost some more left-wing voters to the Greens and Labour.  Labour, for its part, has seen its support in Scotland plummet after campaigning against independence in last September's referendum.  Stagnant living standards, blamed by each of the major parties on the other, have fueled a "stuff the pair of them" attitude which benefits the minor parties.

A related trend is that voters expect more from politics.  They are more used to "shopping around" in their everyday lives.  But where supermarkets offer wider choices and better value, politics does not.  The differences between parties seem to many be harder to see.  FPTP means that many politicians hardly even need to try and sell themselves.  In 69% of seats the incumbent has a majority of 10 percentage points or more; in those seats only half the voters had any contact with a politician in 2010.  Voters paid no heed and the big parties returned the favor.

The most significant trend is a change in the shape of politics.  A two-party system works best when debates can be collapsed on to a single axis, say from command-and-control economics to free markets.  Such a one-dimensional scheme does ever less justice to how people think.  But class has lost salience, cultural issues have increasingly taken its place as a way to defining people's politics.  This has been helped along by the unusually large gulf in the experiences of younger voters and older ones that has come with the huge expansion of higher education over the past decades.

James Tilley, an Oxford academic, has argued for a while that Britain's political maps are increasingly in need of a libertarian-authoritarian axis to supplement the old left-right economics axis.

Will the three parties make that change possible on May 7, 2015, to elect the 56th Parliament of the United Kingdom?











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