Wednesday 31 March 2010

Stiffing the politicians?





"...if we no longer trust politicians why should we trust a playwright’s view of politics? "


On 14 April 2010 a new play, Stiffed!, will start a four-week run at the Tabard Theatre in London. Stiffed! has been written by two journalists ‘who have experienced first hand the workings of politics’ and promises to be ‘a riotous satire on the inner workings of parliament, the press and politicians’ which will poke fun at both Cameron’s Conservatives and New Labour. Stiffed! will open in the midst of the general election campaign in which voter mistrust of politicians is at all time high, and presumably the Tabard hopes to tap into that mood.
The play is described as ‘new’. But all the advance publicity suggests it will however revisit territory already made familiar by first Guy Jenkin (A Very Open Prison, Crossing the Floor) and then Alistair Beaton (A Very Social Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair) and Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It) since the middle 1990s.

These political satires all start from the same basic proposition: all politicians are bastards. Politicians are presented as weak and if not necessarily corrupt at least as afflicted by serious moral flaws, and consumed by the desire to promote themselves rather than represent the interests of the people. Some of these satires are motivated by serious anger – Beaton for example writes as someone disappointed by New Labour, especially Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq.

It is arguable that taken together these satires contribute to the populist distaste for politics. Some might think that last year’s expenses scandal vindicates that distaste: if we mistrust politicians as a class it is not because we have seen a few plays and television shows but because they do not deserve our trust. But given the increasing stress amongst academics on how political ideas are constructed – by the media in general - the possible role played by such fictions in shaping how we see politics is something that requires further exploration.

A significant step in that direction was taken last December when Nottingham University's Centre for British Politics held a conference to look into how politics has been represented in fiction. It benefited from the participation of Alistair Beaton, Tony Saint – who wrote the recent BBC4 comedy On Expenses – and other writers such as Maurice Gran and Lawrence Marks who gave the world Alan B’Stard. Interviews, transcripts and paper summaries generated by the conference have now been put on the Centre website and some of the academic papers will also be published in a special edition of Parliamentary Affairs in 2011. At the very least, the conference provoked the question: if we no longer trust politicians why should we trust a playwright’s view of politics?


Prof Steven Fielding

Monday 29 March 2010

Mystic Meg says: hung parliament

‘Prediction is very difficult’, said the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, ‘especially about the future’. But a recent academic conference at the University of Manchester tried to do exactly that with the forthcoming election. The conference was featured on the ever-excellent politicalbetting.com website, and what followed was a shower of abuse from readers of the site, many of whom didn’t like what they were reading. Much of this was ad hominem, much downright abusive, and much of the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) has since been removed from the site. One of the allegations was that the academics were engaged in an exercise in ‘groupthink’.

I’m personally quite sceptical about a lot of election forecasting. With the exception of David Sanders’ work on the economy and voting – which famously got the 1992 election right, when the polls and most commentators got it wrong -- I’m not convinced that it adds much value, beyond what you could get anyway from glancing at the opinion polls, and applying a uniform swing. Too often a massive amount of work goes into developing models that deliver little more than a series of SOTBOs (that is, Statements Of The Blindingly Obvious). And for much of the conference, I felt like a character in a Bateman cartoon: the man who was sceptical about election forecasting.

However, the one charge of which my colleagues are absolutely free is that of group think. The different papers presented at the conference came from a variety of different institutions, all working separately, using completely different methods and approaches, and drawing on different data. Some used measures of party support, others measures of prime ministerial/leaders approval. One paper forecasted using local council by-elections, another looked at the public’s expectations of the election. They then weighted and filtered these data in different ways.

And yet here’s the thing: despite working independently, almost every single paper forecast a hung parliament, one in which no party had an overall majority. They differed over which party would hold most seats (most papers predicted the Conservatives), but they almost all predicted than no party would have an overall majority. That’s not group think. That’s the sort of consensus that should make even those of us who are sceptical sit up and take notice. Of course, they could all be wrong, and we’ll know that in a month and a bit, but if so, they will be independently wrong.

And here’s another thing. As politicalbetting.com recognised a few days later, the betting markets – which are also sometimes used as a form of prediction, for those who believe in the wisdom of crowds – are now heading in the same direction.

Professor Philip Cowley

PM unveils election pledges at University of Nottingham


As was widely reported at the weekend, Gordon Brown was in Nottingham at the weekend. More specifically, he was at the University of Nottingham’s jubilee campus. He gave his speech at the Nottingham Geospatial Building, a new £9m research centre devoted to global navigation satellite systems and geospatial sciences, which has only just opened.








The location obviously wasn’t accidental. The campus sits in Nottingham South, which is a Conservative target, and is close to a series of other, even more marginal, Labour seats – such as Broxtowe, Erewash, and Gedling. Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, used the occasion to introduce local Labour candidates.

The speech formally unveiled Labour’s five key pledges ahead of the imminent General Election. But he also reiterated the strategy of acknowledging Labour’s position in the opinion polls, and painting Labour as the underdogs – a phrase he explicitly used.

But I was also struck by the extent to which he stressed the heritage of the Labour Party, all the way back to the founding of the NHS. He didn’t want to talk about just the last 13 years, but about the broader historical context, about what he claims Labour stands for, to try to show a clear distinction between them and the other parties. He was at great pains to emphasise Labour as standing for ‘fairness’, and there was a nice little dig about Labour launching pledges as the Conservatives announced their change of advertising team.

Professor Paul Heywood

Friday 26 March 2010

Selling England by the Pound?

The government is understandably furious about the maladroit claims made to undercover reporters by former transport minister, Stephen Byers, that he was ‘a bit like a sort of cab for hire’, able to influence serving ministers for a small matter of £3,000 to £5,000 per day. Alongside similar claims made by his former ministerial colleagues, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, such suggestions of being able to help shape or sway policy decisions in return for private payments strike at the very heart of the accountability upon which the democratic process depends.
Many commentators have pointed out the UK still lacks effective regulation of political lobbying, despite a series of scandals reaching back over many years – from the ‘cash for questions’ scandal of 1994 (when it was claimed that the lobbyist Ian Greer told Mohamed Al-Fayed that ‘you rent an MP like you rent a taxi’) to the ‘Ecclestone’ affair of 1997 (when, supposedly in return for a £1m donation to the Labour Party, later ignominiously returned, Formula One was exempted from a ban on tobacco advertising) and the ‘cash for honours’ investigations of 2006-07 (which explored the alleged link between political donations and life peerages).

The standard interpretation of such scandals is that they undermine public confidence in politicians and the political process. And they do. Evidence from a recent Eurobarometer survey (2009) shows that that a strikingly high proportion of EU citizens (78 per cent average across the EU27) see corruption as a ‘major problem’ in their country. In just three countries (Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark) did fewer than half the respondents agree. The UK figure stood at 74 per cent, with just 22 per cent disagreeing, compared to 65 per cent and 28 per cent respectively just two years earlier – the fourth highest increase in the EU over that period. Those seen as most likely to be corrupt were politicians at national level, followed by officials awarding public tenders and those issuing building permits, then politicians at regional level. The parliamentary expenses scandals appears to have had a clear impact, with the number believing that there is corruption at national level in the UK jumping from 44 per cent in 2007 to 62 per cent in 2009.

In practice, according to the 2009 survey, just 9 per cent of respondents across the EU27 had themselves been directly exposed to any form of corrupt activity over the previous twelve months, and in the UK that figure was just 3 per cent (the second lowest of any country). But impressions about corruption are garnered from news stories of precisely the kind we have seen over the last few days, and from the righteous outrage they give rise to amongst reporters and political commentators.

So there is a very widespread belief that corruption is rife, and it is to be found in particular amongst politicians. Does this really matter? At one level, it could be argued that concern about corruption and its consequences is generally overplayed. The received wisdom is that reports of corrupt behaviour erodes confidence in political institutions and in the political class, leading to citizen disengagement from politics. And yet there is some counter evidence. In many established democracies, the long term decline in voter turnout at elections witnessed since the early 1960s appears to have either slowed or even reversed since around 2000. And in Italy, where corruption has long been seen as virtually the stock-in-trade of the political process, Silvio Berlusconi still enjoys an approval rating of over 40 per cent in spite of being almost permanently mired in scandal and facing street protests involving tens of thousands of citizens. One explanation may be that most Italian voters have already discounted corruption: they are so used to it that it no longer registers as a significant factor in their assessment of the political class. It seems that the greater the number of scandals over time, the less impact they have. We may simply be getting used to the idea of our politicians being involved in shady business; whether it affects how we vote is another question.


Paul M Heywood

Thursday 25 March 2010

Spinning the manifesto

Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has been in charge of drafting Labour’s manifesto since 2007. So he has had a long time to get it right. Over the weekend Miliband claimed in a Guardian interview that the manifesto will prove Labour remains best qualified to lead ‘the next phase of national renewal" and that it "will reform both the market and the state" and help “rebuild our politics”. This is good, classic New Labour stuff – ‘renewal’ ‘rebuild’ and ‘reform’ all evoke memories of 1997.
However, the elements Miliband chose to highlight suggest a shift in emphasis since then, with some signals of a change of direction - and one that might embarrass at least one leading member of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. It also poses a key question about the future of one of New Labour’s central policies.

The manifesto will apparently introduce a People’s Bank to help rebuild what Miliband described as the ‘fabric of communities’. The Bank will be linked to the growing number of co-operative credit unions across the country that help the poor borrow money on favourable terms. The Bank will be accessed through Britain’s 12,000 Post Office branches. This marks a decisive change in direction for the Post Office under Labour, giving it a greater public service role than implied by Peter Mandelson’s on-off-on-off attempts to part-privatise it since he became Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in 1998. Indeed during Labour’s time in office at least 4,000 post offices have closed in the face of much public opposition.

Miliband also claims the manifesto will include a ‘radical’ increase in the minimum wage. It currently stands at £5.80 but campaigners like London Citizens want it increased to £7.60. Miliband was coy about quite how high it might go, and he was not pressed on how this marked another change in direction from when the measure was first introduced in 1999. Many employers – and the Conservatives – claimed a minimum wage would bring disastrous economic consequences. Blair of course wanted to appease business but he also wanted to adhere to one of the party’s few pledges that favoured the trade unions. This meant ripping up what had been Labour’s stance under John Smith – a minimum wage set 50% of male median earnings initially, rising to two-thirds over time – and instead establishing an Independent Low Pay Commission, to decide on the rate, which led to complaints that it was set too low. The minister responsible was – maybe you have guessed? - Peter Mandelson. In his Guardian interview, Miliband was not pressed on how Labour will increase the minimum wage, given that it is set not by Government but by the LPC. Is his interview a sign that Labour intends to remove the LPC and allow government directly to set the minimum wage?

The problem for Labour in proposing ‘radical’ change, as Miliband claims the manifesto will do, is that skeptics will ask: why has it taken you till now? Shoring up the ‘traditional’ Labour vote, making sure they turn out come polling day, is one likely explanation of Miliband’s spinning of the manifesto. But there might be another. Miliband employed a number of caveats during the interview: there were lots of ifs, mights and maybes. The manifesto is still in a state of flux: the Prime Minister and Lord Mandelson have yet to approve it. It is more than possible that when they do, caution will reign and some of Miliband’s promised ‘radicalism’ watered down. In talking to the Guardian, Miliband might, then, have been doing two things. Boosting Labour’s message in advance of the imminent election campaign while also sending a signal to what remains of the party’s members. Should Labour lose and Brown fall on his sword, it would be very useful for someone spoken of as a likely leadership candidate – as the BBC’s Michael Crick has done recently to be the man known to have fought for a ‘radical’ manifesto.

Professor Steven Fielding

Wednesday 24 March 2010

Public meetings can be fun

The decline of the public meeting is one of the staples of any discussion about changing electoral tactics. David Butler’s study of the 1951 election found a full 30% of the public claiming to have gone to at least one public meeting; by the 1966 election, an NOP poll found the figure had declined to just 4%. Public meetings organised by the parties have now died out almost completely. Yet cross-party meetings – with the various candidates on display, showing their wares – still occasionally continue, and when they happen they can be both fun and informative.

Last night saw the five known candidates for Nottingham South singing for their supper at the University’s conference centre, in a debate organised by the Students Union and the Politics Society. It attracted about 250 students, who enjoyed a good 90 minutes of lively debate between the candidates.

There has been a Nottingham South constituency, in some form, almost continuously since 1885 – and in that time it’s been represented by Liberals, Conservatives, and Labour MPs. Of the three Nottingham seats, it’s by far the most marginal, and boundary changes since the last election have make it slightly more marginal still, as has the decision of the incumbent MP, Alan Simpson, to stand down.

It’s the constituency in which (most of) the University of Nottingham sits, and in which (most of) its students live. It’s appropriate that one of the candidates, standing for the Greens, is a Nottingham student, since one of the things that marks Nottingham South out is its high student population – just under 1 in 4 of the population of the seat are in full-time education, and part of the point of the debate was to raise student awareness of their voting power, as part of the campaign against higher fees.

Students’ rarely exercise as much voting power as they could. Most are 18-21, the group with the lowest turnout in the electorate. And although there are constituencies containing large numbers of students, their votes are often spread between those seats and the constituencies from which they have originally come, and where many remain registered, which diminishes their collective impact. Yet the student vote can still matter, if organised properly, and given the right issues – as Labour MPs at the last election found to their cost in Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff and Sheffield. The Labour candidate in Nottingham South has clearly been paying attention – witness her public pledge, repeated last night, to vote against any rise in student top-up fees, should the government go down that route after the election. Under questioning, similar pledges to support the students’ campaign were made by the Lib Dem and Green candidates, whilst the Conservative said that she’d examine the details of the campaign.

Professor Philip Cowley

Tuesday 23 March 2010

A step backwards with new MPs, says Ken Clarke

Whenever he comes to speak at the University – and as one of our local MPs he’s a frequent visitor – Ken Clarke always packs the room out. Students always turn up in droves to hear him speak, despite the fact that it’s now over a decade since he was in government, when most of them were still at junior school.



In this podcast, recorded just after a recent visit to the University, he talks about the state of Parliament and his hopes for reform. The current parliament, he says, has ‘disgraced itself’; in fact he claims it hasn’t really returned properly since the Christmas break, shell-shocked MPs just staying away and waiting for the election to end their collective suffering.
He’s hopeful about the prospects for reform under an incoming Conservative government, as you’d expect. But he notes two things that might make reform less likely.

The first is all those new MPs. As also previously argued on this blog, Clarke argues that the large influx of new MPs could be ‘somewhat compliant’, more easily controlled by the whips, and those who are keen on reform can ‘get the wrong end of the stick’. He worries they could ‘take us a step backwards’.

He also fears that David Cameron will face ‘all the usual pressures’ to retain executive power. Clarke says that he will stress that a Cameron government will make fewer mistakes if it is properly accountable, and he is hopeful that Cameron will heed his warning.

At this point, those of us who study Parliament experience a bout of déjà vu. For when Labour came to power in 1997, Ann Taylor had made similar pledges about what an incoming government would do to reform the Commons. ‘Awkward though it may appear to a few on our side’, she argued, ‘a more accountable government is a better government’. Yet whilst Labour certainly carried out significant reform of the Commons, it was much harder to identify reforms that had actually strengthened the power of the institution. Too many of the ‘modernisation’ reforms were cosmetic, or for the convenience of government or Members, and significant forces in the government resisted attempts to beef up the Commons. It was only when Robin Cook became leader of the House in 2001 that attention shifted to trying to strengthen the Commons, and even a politician as skilful as Cook often failed to get his way.


Professor Philip Cowley

Monday 22 March 2010

David Owen on hung parliaments

He may, as Ben Brogan argues, have been rather over-selling it, but news that Vince Cable has discussed Lib Dem policies with Treasury civil servants to help them prepare in case he becomes Chancellor in a post-election coalition government has added fuel to the current bonfire of speculation about the likelihood of a hung Parliament. The latest polls suggest that Labour and the Conservatives are currently both short of winning a Commons majority.

Lord Owen knows a thing or two about hung Parliaments and the politics of cobbling together agreements with third, fourth and even fifth parties. Owen was a member of the Cabinet during Jim Callaghan’s 1976-9 Labour government, when Callaghan fought to balance the budget during a severe recession while depending on deals with the Liberals and various Nationalist parties to retain a Commons majority.



In this interview, given at Nottingham’s Centre for British Politics, Lord Owen (now a cross bencher) reveals that this experience has led him to support the creation of Charter2010. This seeks to promote a ‘stable and more representative government capable of dealing with Britain’s economic plight’ should the country fail to give either of the main parties a Commons majority, one which they will need if they are to deal with the deep dark hole into which the recession has thrown government finances.

History never repeats itself, but sometimes it has a damn good try, and historians have already examined this period in detail. If the 1970s have any lessons for our own times, Owen believes one of them is that should there be a hung Parliament then politicians have to work together over a sustained period to reduce the deficit. How likely is this? History cannot predict the future but it suggests we might be in for a bumpy ride.

Professor Steven Fielding

Saturday 20 March 2010

Same old Tories?

Saturday’s Guardian featured a very lavish article on some high-profile Conservative candidates at the election. ConservativeHome – the website for Conservative activists and supporters – wearily labelled it as ‘the Guardian profiles the same Tory candidates that always get profiled’, and it certainly was. In part, this fixation is because of the novelty value of these candidates. Until David Cameron became party leader and prioritised the reform of the party’s candidate selection it was rare to find so many women, ethnic minority or openly gay Conservative candidates in winnable seats, so it’s understandable that the media are getting oh so excited about some of them.

Yet this focus is misleading, for three reasons. First, because despite the Cameron reforms, the bulk of Conservative MPs after the next election will remain white and male, and this will be especially true at the higher levels of the party. Should the Conservatives achieve a majority government, there will (under most realistic scenarios) be between 50 and 60 Conservative women MPs, significantly up from the 17 in 2005, but still less than one in five of the parliamentary party. There will also be around half-a-dozen new Conservative MPs from ethnic minorities, to join the two currently in the Commons. But the rest will look pretty similar to the ones who are there already, and despite David Cameron’s aspiration that by the end of his first term a third of his government will be female, it will almost certainly take more than one term before a sufficient number of women MPs have worked enough of a parliamentary and ministerial apprenticeship for the senior – and most visible – positions to look noticeably different.

Second, in another important way, the parliamentary party will remain very similar to previous groups of Conservative parliamentarians. For all the talk of trying to create a parliamentary party in the image of those represented, the absence of working class MPs on the Conservative side of the House will continue. In 2005, the Conservatives gained 25% of the DE vote and 33% of the C2 vote. Almost no efforts have been made to ensure that this segment of the population – and of the Conservatives’ own supporters – receives representation on the Conservative benches.

And third, it may well not be these much profiled candidates who are the ones who go on to achieve most should they get into Westminster. As I noted in an article in Political Quarterly, back in 2009 (for which a subscription is required, unfortunately):

...much of the media focus will be on the most media-friendly candidates – especially, because of their novelty value, the newly-elected women and ethnic minority candidates – and not necessarily on those who are most likely to go on to achieve high office or be significant players within the party in the future. It is, for example, noticeable that many of the Labour MPs who attracted considerable media coverage in the aftermath of the 1997 result (such as Lorna Fitzsimons and Oona King) did not then go on to achieve high office, whereas those who went largely unnoticed by the national media (such as Jacqui Smith) did rather better.

So some of those currently being so lavishly profiled might do well to enjoy it; it could be the last time they achieve such national prominence.

Professor Philip Cowley

Sunday 14 March 2010

Don't expect much electoral accountability

There was a lively article by Fergal Davis on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site last week, arguing that voters in this election should hold their MPs to account for the way they’ve voted. Davis’s concern was civil liberties – but the argument could hold for a range of other things, from abortion to Trident, from post offices to Heathrow. Do we punish (or reward) MPs for the way they vote?

For some of his article, Davis uses a book I wrote in 2005, which looked at the voting record of MPs, and which showed that far from being the spineless bunch that everyone claimed, they were in fact becoming increasingly rebellious, with the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2001 and 2005 being the most rebellious of the post-war era. But the book also showed that there was no evidence that voters took much notice of this when it came to casting votes at the ballot box.

The last election provided almost the perfect conditions to test this. There were plenty of high-profile issues which led to substantial rebellions in the House of Commons and attracted public interest. In other words, there was plenty for voters to get their teeth into, if they wanted to. And there were plenty of organisations and websites designed to encourage exactly this sort of targeted voting, such as www.sonowwhodowevotefor.net (now defunct) or www.vote4peace.org.uk (whose url has now been taken over by an online casino).

Yet a detailed study I carried out into the 2005 election found that both rebels and loyalists performed roughly equally at the polls, with no statistically significant difference between them. The only substantive exception to this was the subject of university top-up fees – where rebels did appear to have performed marginally better at the polls than those who did not defy the whips – but the difference was worth less than one percentage point, and probably helped determine the outcome in just six constituencies. For the most part, it looked as if British voters made their judgment about the government as a whole – not about the behaviour of individual MPs. Where they do vote on the basis of the candidates, it was more on the basis of their constituency service – how much they work the parish pump, responding to queries about Mrs Miggins’s drainpipes – than about how MPs behave in the division lobbies.

Since then, there have been a couple of other, even more detailed, attempts to locate an electoral link. One, by Arthur Spirling of Harvard, claims to identify a difference between the type of issues on which MPs rebel, arguing that government-party voters demand unity on votes that are key parts of the government's programmatic agenda, but welcome more rebellious behaviour on less important issues. The second, by Nick Vivyan of the LSE and his colleague Markus Wagner of Vienna (and to be presented at the forthcoming PSA conference), has looked at the behaviour of individual voters, and claims to have found an effect once you control for the predispositions of voters (in particular, those who were already hostile to the government were more likely to reward dissenting behaviour).

Yet Spirling’s distinction between important and unimportant votes looks too much like a post hoc rationalisation, and there doesn’t appear – to me, anyway – to be much logical distinction between the votes which the electorate seem to identify as important and those they do not. And the problem with the Vivyan and Wagner paper is that if such an effect is identifiable at the individual level, why does it not also show up at the constituency level? Even they acknowledge that the effect is ‘relatively weak and general rather than issue-specific’ (that is, rebellious MPs benefit, regardless of what they rebel on), which is hardly an advert for great electoral accountability.

Perhaps more importantly, 2005 was such a perfect test case for holding MPs to account for the way that they voted that if that is the best that we can find, then we shouldn’t expect much better this time round. Davis was, of course, issuing a call to arms – and good luck to him. The problem is that if you didn’t find much evidence of voters punishing MPs for their voting in 2005, it is unlikely you’ll find it in 2010, when conditions are much less favourable. And, perhaps sadly, certainly not on issues of civil liberties.

Professor Philip Cowley

Friday 12 March 2010

Managing welfare

What was most notable about the recent Gove-Balls clash over the access of children from poorer households to Oxbridge was not that Gove got his numbers right. Would it really make much difference if 145 rather than 45 of those receiving free school meals had found their way to the pinnacle of our university system? Neither wanted to engage with the real issue of limited social mobility, perhaps because neither of them have any idea of how this issue could be addressed. More likely they do know (for just the most recent survey of what’s wrong and what needs to be done, see the Marmot Report) but they are also aware that there’s no political will to see the problem addressed.

Where once parties argued over the ownership of industry or the status of trade union rights or the appropriate forms and levels of taxation, increasingly the argument has been one about who can best manage the nation’s publicly-provided welfare. And where once this argument was about differing forms of welfare (state versus market, public versus private), it is now increasingly one about who can best manage the sorts of institutions about which the two (or three) main political parties are largely agreed. Conservatives don’t want to abolish the NHS. Labour will not attack private schools. If there is some sort of political consensus here (temporally, at least, a post-Thatcherite consensus), it does not look much like the agreement that some suppose to have held in the ‘Golden Age of Welfare’ (from the end of the war until the early 1970s). The newer consensus is a rather downbeat affair which seeks to squeeze the maximum output from a very finite pot of resources in the face of escalating social needs (above all, though not exclusively, those generated by an ageing society). The claim to govern is a claim to manage the welfare state efficiently. Both major parties insist upon an interest in excellence, choice and social mobility but both know that probably the best they can hope for is that levels of service should be ‘adequate’ and that the least advantaged should share in some way in the privileges that continue to accumulate for those above them.

Whoever wins the election, there will be tough choices to face in social policy. Welfare needs have a built-in ratchet effect - a powerful combination of ageing populations, new medical technologies and more unstable patterns of family formation. This challenge is exacerbated by those changes that bring on less secure economic lives, with interrupted working careers and a declining social wage (and pension entitlements). Meeting this challenge in a context of increased public indebtedness plus high levels of household debt and growing social needs is not easy. Perhaps (as those who face the prospect of defeat are sometimes heard consolingly to say), it’s a good election to lose.

Professor Chris Pierson

Tuesday 9 March 2010

Why the environment is an electoral non-issue

Ask people if they think the environment is an important issue, and they will tell you that it certainly is. A ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of concern about global warming is reported by 67% of the British public respondents in the UK, and 84% of car drivers are ‘very’, or ‘fairly’, concerned about the effect of transport on climate change (indeed drivers show a higher level of concern for the effect of transport on climate change than non-drivers).

But ask people if they are willing to pay for environmental improvements and that support tends to disappear. Whilst 84% of those car drivers were concerned, only 18% were willing to pay higher taxes on their car for the sake of the environment. In another recent survey, of those airline passengers who were ‘concerned’ about the environmental impact of flying, only 14% held passengers mainly responsible for its effects. As Iain McLean of Oxford University has put it, the ‘feeling that something must be done is disconnected from feeling in favour of doing anything.’

This disconnection is a problem for politicians in democracies. If the electorate report high levels of concern, then this is an issue about which ‘something must be done’. But if there is no desire on the part of the electorate to actually do anything about it themselves (which there isn’t), and if this is understood by politicians (which it is), then we can expect this high-flown rhetoric to be accompanied by policies that make long-term promises but which leave the status quo intact in the short-term.

This disconnection has also led some to suggest that the environment is now an arena for political ‘simulation’, where electorates ‘demand’ environmental action, but where such demands are not intended to be taken seriously, being a mere performance or simulation of ‘real’ politics. Woe betide any politician who takes such demands seriously and seeks to act upon them. In policy terms, this means that it’s acceptable to promise carbon cuts in fifty years time, but not to apply the fuel duty escalator today. One way to explain this simulation is that environmental politics is particularly prone to what Bryan Caplan, an American economist, has called ‘rational irrationality’. Individuals can make no difference to the outcomes of environmental problems, and so have no reason to get good information about them (they are rationally ignorant). Furthermore they can believe what they prefer to believe without any cost. One can be a global warming alarmist or a climate change denier, on the basis of no good reason whatsoever; it costs you nothing as an individual and so you can just believe whatever you prefer (that’s rational irrationality). When, however, you are faced with the prospect of altering your travel habits or paying more tax, the potential costs of your preferred beliefs are revealed to you and you may sing a different tune.

So despite general agreement on how important it is, don’t expect the environment to figure as a key issue in this general election. This is not just because the party leaderships agree on the importance of environmental matters – they also agree on the benefits of economic growth, but they will fight like ferrets in a sack over who can deliver it best. It is also because of the intractability of both (a) satisfying the demand that ‘something must be done’ and (b) satisfying that demand in a way that appears to cost nothing to anyone right now. It is much better to make a few vague long-term commitments and go back to education, education, education.

For more on this, see here

Dr Mathew Humphrey

Tuesday 2 March 2010

How the internet is changing politics

One of the dullest statements about the forthcoming election is that it's going to be the election in which the internet comes into its own as a campaigning tool.

For one thing, it's not the first time we've heard it -- people said it in 2005, 2001, and even in 1997. But more importantly, as Mark Pack shows in this fascinating talk, the reason it's a boring thing to say is because the reality is much more complicated, more nuanced than this.

Mark, who was in charge of the Liberal Democrats internet campaigns in both 2001 and 2005, gave this talk as part of Nottingham's Distinguished Practitioner series, which provides our postgraduate students with an invaluable opportunity to interact with distinguished names from the 'real world' of politics and international relations.

Professor Philip Cowley