Facing up to multi-party politics: How Partisan dealignment and PR voting have fundamentally changed Britain’s party systems

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 58, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 503-532

  Dunleavy, Patrick ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 25144467577     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsi049     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. See B. Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1865-95, Oxford University Press, 1996, Ch. 7.
2. He wrote then, unpresciently as it turns out: 'Why has the two-party system been so resilient? Or to put the question another way, why have electoral systems that favour multi-party situations never found much favour in Britain?' (p. 206). As examples of the same long lags in perception, see also C. Pollit, C. Talbot, J. Caulfield and A. Smullen, Agencies: How Governments Do Things Through Semi-Autonomous Organizations, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004, who argue: 'The United Kingdom is... [a] purely majoritarian [sic] system... In the United Kingdom there has been an effective two-party system for many years ... (p. 97).
3. R. Heffernan, 'Political Parties and the Party System', Ch. 7 in P. Dunleavy, A. Gamble, R. Heffernan and G. Peele (eds), Developments in British Politics 7, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003, p. 121.
4. I take the concept of an electoral studies orthodoxy from Helena Catt's careful and convincing account in Voting Behaviour: A Radical Critique, Leicester University Press, 1996, especially Chs. 1 and 5.
5. Key sources of the orthodoxy are the PSA's Elections, Parties and Public Opinion Specialist Group, and its publications, first the British Parties and Elections Review published as a series of edited books between 1990 and 2004
6. and from 2005 as the Journal of Elections, Parties and Public Opinion.
7. Earlier debates about the orthodoxy and its limits are given in P. Dunleavy, 'Mass Political Behaviour: Is There More to Learn?', 38 Political Studies 3, 1990, pp. 453-69;
8. P. Dunleavy, 'Political Behaviour: Institutional and Experiential Approaches' in R.E. Goodin and H.D. Klingemann (eds), A New Handbook of Political Science, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 276-393;
9. and I. Crewe and P. Norris, 'In Defence of British Electoral Studies' in I. Crewe et al (eds), British Elections and Parties Yearbook 1991, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
10. The position of orthodox voting studies here is rather like the 'great books' tradition in political philosophy, which for so long argued that the classics of political philosophy 'stand outside of time', instead of grounding analysis of what their authors meant their texts to say in their immediate historical context.
11. The same kind of reasoning is apparent in M. O'Neil (ed.), Devolution in British Politics, Longman, 2004, which ignores London government and the distinctive politics of London completely - even though the London mayor Ken Livingstone is perhaps the most powerful and certainly one of the most effective politicians operating below national government level in the UK.
12. My analysis is derived from the Electoral Commission's excellent and comprehensive volume, The 2004 European Parliamentary Elections in the United Kingdom, Electoral Commission, 2004. Previously studying multi-party politics in the UK was made difficult by the absence of reliable and complete election statistics, a deficit that the Commission's detailed publications have at last begun to make good.
13. To derive this estimate I have computed how many more postal votes were received in the four all-postal regions from the mean turnout in the remaining Great Britain regions and removed that number of votes from total turnout.
14. See P. Dunleavy and F. Boucek, 'Constructing the Number of Parties', 9 Party Politics 3, 2003, pp. 291-315.
15. See P. Mair, Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 51: 'A party system clearly involves something more than the sum of its component (party) parts, and incorporates some elements of understanding of the mode of interaction between these parties.'
16. See P. John, H. Margetts and S. Weir, 'The Rise of the BNP and UKIP', Paper to the Elections, Parties and Public Opinion Conference, University of Essex, September 2004.
17. A. Heath with J. Curtice, R. Jowell, G. Evans, J. Field and S. Witherspoon, Understanding Political Change: The British Voter, 1964-87, Pergamon, 1991;
18. A. Heath, R. Jowell and J. Curtice, How Britain Votes, Pergamon, 1985.
19. A. Heath, R. Jowell, J. Curtice, G. Evans, J. Field and S. Witherspoon, Labour's Last Chance? The 1992 Election and Beyond, Dartmouth.
20. D. Denver, Elections and Voters in Britain, Palgrave, 2003, p. 93.
21. A. Heath and S.-K. McDonald, 'The Demise of Party Identification Theory?', 7 Electoral Studies 1, pp. 95-107.
22. J. Brand, D. McLean and W. Miller, The Birth and Death of a Three-Party System: Scotland in the Seventies', 13 British Journal of Political Science 4,1983, pp. 463-88.
23. H.D. Clarke, D. Sanders, M.C. Stewart and P. Whiteley, Political Choice in Britain, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 196-9.
24. D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain, Macmillan, 1974, p. 36.
25. A. Heath et al, Labour's Last Chance?
26. H. Clarke et al, Political Choice in Britain, passim.
27. H. Catt, Voting Behaviour: A Radical Critique, pp. 111-20.
28. Source here is the 2004 State of the Nation survey conducted by H. Margetts and S. Weir for the Rowntree Reform Trust. A national sample of 1000 respondents were interviewed by ICM Research.
29. Heath et al, Understanding Political Change, p. 52.
30. See R. Cook and R.t Maclennan, Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Cook-Maclennan Agreement Eight Years On, New Politics Network, 2005.
31. D. Huang, 'Theorizing Anti-Government Tactical Voting: Some Evidence from the 1987, 1992 and 1997 British General Elections' in J. Tonge et al (eds), 11 British Elections and Parties Review, 2001.
32. J.A. Evans, Voters and Voting: An Introduction, Sage, 2004.
33. Evans does provide (on pp. 157-8) a brief, mainly conjectural discussion of how electoral systems might perhaps influence turnout, especially in foreign countries under 'PR systems'. The best (but rather difficult) analysis still remains R. Taagepera and M. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems, Yale University Press, 1989.
34. C. Rallings and M. Thrasher, 'Split Ticket Voting at the 1997 British General and Local Elections: An Aggregate Analysis' in D. Denver, J. Fisher, P. Cowley and C. Pattie (eds), British Elections and Parties Review: Volume 8, The 1997 General Election, Frank Cass, 1998.
35. See P. Dunleavy, H. Margetts and S. Bastow, 'Freed from Constraint: Political Alignments in the 2000 London Elections', Paper to the 2001 Political Studies Association Conference, University of Manchester, April 2001.
36. P. Dunleavy, H. Margetts and J. van Heerde, 'Political Alignments in the 2004 London Elections', Paper to the 2004 Elections, Parties and Public Opinion Conference, Oxford University, September 2004.
37. The DV concept is well explained in Taagepera and Shugart, Seats and Votes, Ch. 10. Its continued absence from UK textbooks or even more 'advanced' analyses is hard to explain. David Denver's introductory volume, Elections and Voting in Britain does not mention the concept but does at least devote four pages to Britain's PR systems, albeit mainly in terms of debates about electoral reform. Evans' book Voters and Voting ignores electoral systems completely, not even giving an explanation of what 'PR systems' are.
38. P. Dunleavy and H. Margetts, 'How Proportional are the British AMS Systems?', 40 Representation 4, 2004, pp. 317-29.
39. See A. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
40. Unfortunately this aspect seems to have escaped Pippa Norris in her otherwise useful book, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behaviour, Cambridge University Press, 2004. On pages 88-93 she revives the earlier thoroughly discredited Rose Index, originally conceived by Richard Rose as 100-DV. Norris asserts incorrectly that this is somehow a 'standardised form' of the DV index and then presents extensive country data in this completely misleading format. In fact the Rose index is nonsensical since (in the inverse of the DV score itself) it can only reach zero when all seats are given to a party with no votes at all - which obviously has nothing to do with any liberal democracy, nor indeed any working polity that has ever existed.
41. See P. Dunleavy and H. Margetts, 'How Proportional are the British AMS Systems?', 40 Representation 4, 2004, for further explanation of the DV and ADV concepts.
42. A score above 100% is feasible in several ways, for example if all or most of the seats are won by the second largest party.
43. See P. Dunleavy and H. Margetts, Proportional Representation for Local Government: An Analysis, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1999.
44. See P. Dunleavy and H. Margetts, 'From Majoritarian to Pluralist Democracy: Electoral Reform in Britain Since 1997', 13 Journal of Theoretical Politics 3, 2001, pp. 295-319.
45. M. Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, Wiley, 1954.
46. A. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
47. Cox, Making Votes Count, p. 271.
48. J. Colomer, 'It's Parties that Choose Electoral Systems (or, Duverger's Laws Upside Down)', 53 Political Studies 1, 2005, pp. 1-21.
49. See J. Moenius and Y. Kasuya, 'Measuring Party Linkages Across Districts: Some Party System Inflation Indices and their Properties', 10 Party Politics 8, 2004, pp. 543-64.
50. Moenius and Kasuya, 'Measuring Party Linkages Across Districts'.
51. For instance, an 'Australian' solution, favoured by Peter Hain and sometimes linked also to Gordon Brown, would see the introduction of the supplementary vote or the alternative vote for Commons elections combating the problem that more than half of all MPs cannot claim local majority support, combined with a PR-elected House of Lords.