Matthew Yglesias talks about the UK party system.
For my part, I’ll say that as I look at the scene emerging it does seem to be the case that what’s plaguing the UK isn’t so much a weird electoral system as it is a weird party system. If you look at John Cleese’s very funny pitch for electoral reform from the eighties you have to remember that he was talking at a very different time in the British party system. At that point, Labour and the Tories seemed determined to debunk the median voter theorem by being shockingly far apart ideologically. That paved the way for a revival (in alliance with some renegade moderate Labourites) of a centrist Liberal Party, a revival that was severely curtailed by the electoral system. Flash forward to 2010 and you have a situation in which Labour has moved to the right and the Tories have moved to the left, and the ideological posture of the Liberal Democrats vis-a-vis the other parties is pretty murky and contestable.
Jack H. Nagel and Christopher Wlezien have a brand new article (paywalled)in the British Journal of Political Science which touches on just this point. They are interested in the two way relationship between ideological polarization and votes for the Liberal Democrats. While one of their two mechanisms appears not to explain what is going on in the current election very well, the other offers some very interesting predictions regarding what might happen afterwards.
First – their argument as to how ideological polarization affects the vote for the Liberal Democrats. Roughly speaking, their claim is similar to Matt’s theory of the modern rebirth of the Lib Dems – that when the two major parties are ideologically polarized for whatever reason, the Liberal Democrats do well. This graph summarizes their results.
As is pretty clear from the graph, the more polarized that the two major parties are, the higher the vote for the Liberals (their blanket term for the various incarnations of the current day Lib Dems). Unfortunately, though, this relationship seems to be breaking down. As they acknowledge, the Lib Dems have done pretty well in the last two elections, even though both Labour and the Conservatives have moved towards the ideological center. Nagel and Wlezien hypothesize that we will see a return to form, and that a more moderate Conservative party will cannibalize much of the Liberal vote in the current election.
The strength of the occupied-centre effect on Conservative positions suggests that David Cameron may encounter substantial resistance within his own party, and that his attempt to lead it back to the centre might not succeed. But if he (or a successor) does prevail, one must expect that a strong, credible Conservative move to the centre will shrink the Liberal Democratic vote and produce a migration of activists that will be conducive to continued Tory centrism.
It would appear, however, that Cameron has succeeded in moving his party towards the center, but that the Liberal Democrat vote has not evaporated (perhaps it will on polling day – but I doubt it). Perhaps this is purely conjunctural (the Liberal Democrats are arguably benefiting from disgust driven by the spending scandal).[1] However, when you get conjunctural effects operating to the Liberals’ benefit three times in a row, you begin to suspect that there may be something deeper happening here.
But even if this mechanism is perhaps fading in strength, the other mechanism that they propose is pretty interesting. They find strong evidence that in elections immediately after elections where the Liberals have done well, the Conservatives tend to veer towards the right. Their (tentative) explanation for this: party activists.
As commentators often note, the Liberals and Conservatives are both middle-class parties…. As commentator David Walker observed in 2000, ‘Lib Dem voters … turn out to be remarkably similar to Tory voters in their middle-classness.’ Because attitudes and loyalties linked to social class are so important in Britain, we would expect that would-be party activists would usually find it easier to transfer their support between Conservatives and Liberals than between Labour and Liberals, because potential defectors from the Tories, unlike many who might consider leaving Labour, do not have to cross ‘tribal’ boundaries linked to social class and trade union membership. … If the Liberal and Conservative parties are alternative political vehicles for the middle (and upper) classes, then one must suppose that the years of Liberal decline resulted in an influx of centrists into Conservative party branches, and the subsequent Liberal rise must have depleted Tory ranks of potential centrist leaders and activists. If this reasoning is correct, then Liberal occupation of the centre caused a vacation of the centre first within the Conservative party and then by the Conservative party, as activists who might otherwise have been a force for moderation turned to the third-party alternative, helping create a vicious cycle.
We do not mean to suggest that these compositional effects resulted primarily from particular individuals moving back and forth between Liberal and Conservative activism, although some no doubt did. Because these processes occurred over many years and, for most people, political activism is a relatively brief phase in one’s life, it is enough to argue that, as the Liberals gained strength, the type of middle-class moderates who would have been comfortable in a Conservative party branch in the 1950s were more likely to have found a political home in Liberal constituency organizations.
This is (as the authors happily admit) speculative. But it leads one to speculate even further on the possible fallout if David Cameron does not form a government as he so obviously hopes to do. Plausibly, many people who might otherwise have become Conservative activists will become Liberal Democratic activists instead, thanks to Nagel and Wlezien’s mechanism. This will be reinforced by other dynamics – there are a lot of unhappy right wing conservatives, who have grudgingly accepted Cameron’s push toward moderation, because they are desperate to get back into power. If Cameron’s centrism doesn’t win the election, then they are likely to try to pull the party back sharply to the right. And they have a very good chance of succeeding. Together, these two mechanisms would have two consequences. First – a Conservative party that is much further to the right and less electable over the short term (and perhaps the long term too). Second – a Liberal Democrat party that positions itself a little to the right of center (and likely makes Nick Clegg a happier leader in the process).
fn1. The authors note one other aberrant case. “Figures 4 and 5 do exhibit one large drop in the Liberal vote that is not well explained by Labour and Conservative manifesto scores. That dip, in 1979, no doubt owed much to a sensational scandal. While the campaign was being fought, Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader during 1967–76 and still an incumbent partliamentary candidate, was awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, who in 1976 claimed a homosexual relationship with Thorpe, a charge that (along with a financial scandal) led to the latter’s standing down as leader.”
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