Comments on: Theatre of Citizenship

By: bert

bert — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 02:09:22 +0000

I wrote homogonous.
I meant of course humungous.

By: bert

bert — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 21:07:41 +0000

Yes good point about the eighties.
And my suggestion about Coke and Pepsi doesn’t help that much either: in 1983 the parties were ideologically distinctive, but if you go back to previous periods of consensus - Butskellism for instance - turnout was high.
We might swallow hard and reach for a sociological explanation, one that would also cover the steep falls in the levels of party membership, Church of England congregations, etc. Globalisation, creative destruction of liberalised markets, social dislocation - that kind of thing. I’m sure one could build a case of sorts that would explain low turnout in those terms. But in the end, two elections is kind of a small sample to base solid conclusions on.
Perhaps all we can say is that the electorate does seem to have a fairly homogonous view of politicians. Unpopular and mistrusted.

By: Alan Peakall

Alan Peakall — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:14:05 +0000

Bert,

I think that the historical correlation between the closeness of the result and turnout is (just about) good enough to support an assertion that lack of a credible alternative government was, at least, a significant reason for consistent low turnout in 2001/2005. On the other hand, the average turnout over those two elections was 12 percentage points lower than over the two elections of 1983/1987. This appears to me to mean that we must either posit a marked secular decline in natural turnout, or regard the electorates of 1983/1987 as having been offered a credible alternative government in the form of a Labour/Alliance coalition, or, as I suggested above, look to inhomogeneity of the electorate.

It is quite possible that I have overlooked another alternative, and I am not dogmatic about the exact details. It is possible that traditionally Labour voters were more strongly motivated to vote in 1983 through fear that their party could go extinct, than were Conservatives in 2001/2005, but that is from the same general class of explanations.

By: bert

bert — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:58:11 +0000

Charly, obviously the point about close races boosting turnout works for individual seats in a similar way as at the national level. And parties have become very professional in the way they target campaigning resources at “key marginals”. Presumably this additional campaigning boosts turnout further, by reinforcing Get Out The Vote efforts if nothing else.

Can recent falls in turnout be explained by there being fewer marginal seats, however? I don’t think so.
If you’re interested in the subject, you might want to look at this (pdf). A different reading on 2005 from mine, and no specific answer to your question either, but well worth a read in any case.

By: bert

bert — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:28:52 +0000

It strikes me that we should look a bit more closely at what we’re saying when we say that mass participation is on the decline in Britain. Alongside the high electoral turnouts of the relatively recent past, three years ago Britain’s largest ever peacetime demonstration brought the centre of London to a halt.

But what’s interesting about that is what followed. The government ignored the demonstrators. Then the electorate passed up the opportunity to punish the government at the ballot box.

You’ll probably disagree, Alan, but I think the explanation for this points us to a link between 2001 and 2005: in both elections turnout suffered because there was no credible alternative government. Sentiment about New Labour may well have shifted from complacent wait-and-see to sullen disillusionment between 2001 and 2005, but in neither case was change on the cards. Iain Duncan Smith had been housetrained by Rumsfeld during his time at shadow defence (arguably the highpoint of his entire political career was being invited to the Pentagon by the incoming Bush administration ahead of the serving UK Defence Secretary); as leader he saddled the Tories with an unpopular record on Iraq. An attempt at “dog whistle” techniques actually lost ground over the course of the campaign itself, reminding people why they disliked the party. An Independent article from the 2005 campaign captures unnamed officials trying to spin against this perception (”… it is far from a foregone conclusion that Labour will win. The country could be sleepwalking to a Tory government”) while Alan Milburn, a Blair creature, tells activists “The campaign is about making this a high turn-out election”. The strategy failed because it broke a basic marketing rule: if you make a claim it needs to be believable.

So, two tentative conclusions. Firstly, people are engaged by particular issues, but it’s hard to transfer any enthusiasm out there into national election campaigns when there’s no functioning government-in-waiting. And secondly, there might be some grounds to expect higher turnout if the outcome seems closer next time round. But on that last point I can think of at least one reason for caution. The Tories are currently engaged on a strategy closely modelled on Blair’s rise a decade ago. Media-savvy centrism, rigorously focus-group tested and determinedly non-ideological. There’s a danger that people will feel they’re being asked to choose between Coke and Pepsi, and will stay at home again.

By: Charly

Charly — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:58:02 +0000

How much depends turnout on the difference between safe and contested seats?

By: Alan Peakall

Alan Peakall — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:35:26 +0000

Bert,

Thanks for the pointer to ESRC findings. Your second response caught the intent of my comment more accurately thanks. My point was that in 2001 Blairites claimed the low turnout to be a sign of satisfaction with the status quo, but mostly lacked the chutzpah to make the same claim of a near-identical turnout in the vastly different political conditions of 2005.

I think that an implicit assumption of relative homogeneity of the portion of the electorate that is less interested in politics forms a common weakness in commentary on this issue. Prior to the advent of New Labour, apolitical bourgeois Britain was more strongly motivated to vote (eg John Major’s Conservatives securing 14000000+ votes in 1992), while apolitical proletarian Britain was strongly motivated to vote upto and including 1997 in the hope of a traditional Labour government.

Such a pattern of a large fall in natural turnout taking place over the course of exactly two parliaments centred on New Labour taking power is obviously not the whole story, but I think it needs to be accounted for in order to characterise cross partisan alienation.

By: bert

bert — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:11:30 +0000

But I see I responded above just to the idea that turnout in 2005 was not unusually low. You were also pointing out that the changing patterns of turnout can’t be explained by disenchantment with a particular government. I think you’re right. It’s something else.
The British are finding it harder to believe that political engagement - electoral or otherwise - will affect their lives for the better. Although the French are currently deep in depression, they manage not to display the same damaging cynicism about participation.

By: bert

bert — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:51:51 +0000

Alan, you’re taking as your point of comparison an election where a punchdrunk opposition led by a figure of fun tried to persuade onlookers that they were a serious alternative, and failed. In 2001 turnout was the lowest since WW2, by some distance. By contrast, between 1945 and the millennium turnout had never fallen below 70%.
If you want more evidence, the ESRC’s got some.

By: Alan Peakall

Alan Peakall — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:19:32 +0000

I think some evidence is required for the proposition that the UK electorate registered their dissatisfaction in 2005 by a low general election turnout, when the turnout was marginally up on the previous general election in 2001 (before September 11th, the military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gordon Brown’s 1% point increase in National Insurance to fund increased NHS spending, the worst of the stock market falls triggering worries about pensions etc).