“A Nation Divided ..”

This blog, which has offered something for everyone, from the anorak to the anarchist, has come in for some criticism for its neglect of the smaller parties. Here’s nearly a last chance to put this right.

The Scottish Jacobite Party stood two candidates in the General Election and mustered a grand total of 290 votes. Following the party’s strategy for government is not entirely straightforward (no pledge card or contract with the voters here) but its proposal to re-draw the boundaries of Scotland to include much of northern England (allowing for the inclusion of four additional clubs in the Scottish Premier League) is surely an interesting and innovative move.

It’s clear following the results across the U.K. that there is a swathe of non-metropolitan England that wishes for ever to be ruled by Tories. The rest of the island would seemingly be happy to be under the governance of almost anyone else. Rather than reform the voting system, why not just re-draw the national boundaries? The few disaffected Scottish Tories can move to Witney or Henley. Marooned Lib Dems and Labour supporters could just head north. The South-land could become Victoria and the north country could become, well, how about Sweden II - or maybe just Utopia.

As they all say, it’s time for a change.

Professor Chris Pierson

Election of losers

This has been an election of losers. David Cameron failed to seal the deal and Gordon Brown has seen Labour lose over 90 seats. The biggest losers however are the LibDems. Yet while the high hopes of Cleggmania have taken a very hard knock, they still have a chance to clutch victory from defeat.


During the campaign Clegg made some very unwise pronouncements – about not dealing with Gordon Brown and how the party that won the most Commons seats and most votes should be given the chance to govern. The logic of what Clegg said means that the LibDems now have apparently no option but to rebuff any overtures from Labour and support the Conservatives who will not deal with Gordon Brown. Maybe Clegg will decide his personal credibility rests on living up to his words. Maybe his fellow MPs will decide otherwise when they meet on Saturday.

For – poorly though they performed on May 6th – the LibDems have a once-in-a-generation chance to get electoral reform – and the only party offering that at the moment is Gordon Brown’s Labour party. As projections stand Labour and the LibDems together still fall short of a Commons majority – but one wonders how the SNP and Plaid look upon a return of the Conservatives to power.

The Daily Mail and the Sun will all scream that Cameron has won. He hasn’t. No-one won the 2010 election. But do the LibDems have the political fortitude to ensure they win the post-election campaign? It will be an interesting meeting on Saturday.

Professor Steven Fielding

Does the level of turnout matter?

"...does it matter for the prospects of the parties how many people will flock to the polls? "

It is generally expected that turnout in the general election will be somewhat higher than in 2005, when it reached 61%. It is unlikely, though, to reach levels in excess of 70% which were common in the 1990s and earlier.

An increase is expected because the feeling that the election will be one of the closest since a long time, and that there is still everything to play for. The expectation that there is much ‘at stake’ possibly in the form of unprecedented political change will also contribute to a likely increase in turnout.

But does it matter for the prospects of the parties how many people will flock to the polls?

If the tendency to abstain is not the same for the potential supporters of the different parties, the level of turnout will affect election results, in terms of vote shares and possibly also in terms of seats. Politicians and political advisors (and journalists too) are fully aware of the possibility of turnout affecting the outcome.

In many elections we see that politicians who did poorly at the polls point to low turnout amongst their supporters to ‘explain’ the disappointing results. It almost seems as if they derive some solace from this interpretation that says that their supporters stayed home, but did not ‘defect’. But do such explanations hold water? Can the level of turnout be blamed for any particular party’s disappointing electoral showing?

Assessing the consequences of abstentions for the overall result is difficult, because it is impossible to ‘rerun’ reality with different numbers of people going to the polls. Researchers have therefore invented a number of different ways to estimate what would have happened if turnout had been lower than it actually was, or higher.

Reviewing a large number of such analyses Lutz and Marsh conclude that “The main finding ... is that turnout does not matter a great deal, no matter what method, dataset or period of time the authors apply”.

In our own research we asked non-voters what their choice had been had they voted after all. We did so in the context of last year’s European Parliament elections, which are a excellent occasion for such studies as turnout was only 34% (in the UK) as compared to 61% in the 2005 general election.

This 27% difference in turnout should give an excellent opportunity to find whatever effects exist on vote shares. If in the European elections of 2009 the same level of turnout would have been obtained as in the general election of 2005, the vote shares of the various parties would hardly have been different, for each less than half of 1 percent.

Obviously, the effects on vote shares would have been smaller yet for smaller differences in turnout. This finding replicates what had been found earlier for other elections in the UK (see, e.g., van der Eijk and van Egmond, 2007), and for other elections in the western world.

Low levels of participation may be bad for all sorts of things –bad for the development of a feeling of citizenship, bad for the inclusiveness of the political system, and bad for the development and strengthening of partisanship.

It does not mean, however, that the composition of Parliament would be different or the colour of the ensuing government, with different policy majorities, if only more citizens would have been motivated to turn out and vote.

Cees van der Eijk and Eliyahu Sapir