In Britain’s referendum on EU membership 52% of voters backed leave. Only 27% of the House of Commons favoured this option. Close to 70% of Conservative constituencies chose to exit the EU. Only 44% of Conservative MPs followed suit. Around 60% of Labour constituencies came down on the side of Brexit. Only 4% of Labour MPs supported this course of action. The Brexit vote revealed a deep chasm between the British people and their representatives.
This divide didn’t emerge overnight. The Brexit vote didn’t suddenly wrench citizens and politicians apart. Commentators have been talking for decades about the growing disconnect between society and the political elite (in the UK and the west more generally). What’s more, the decision to leave the EU hasn’t suddenly healed this division. Indeed, many leave supporters see the British government’s current Brexit deal as a conspiracy to thwart the popular will.
Yet this divide does present something of a puzzle. In a representative democracy like Britain it shouldn’t exist. There should be broad alignment between the governed and the governing. That’s what representative democracy is about. Parliament is meant to mediate political differences and pass laws that are by and large in tune with society. And parties are meant to aggregate the political preferences of different social groups and implement these by winning offices of state. But this isn’t how things have turned out. What has gone wrong with British democracy?
Depoliticization doesn’t stack up
Over the years, one of the main arguments for the disconnect between people and politics has been that it stems from changes within the citizenry. Members of the public, it is alleged, have increasingly switched off from politics and focused instead on individual pursuits. Society has become depoliticized, to use the technical term.[*]
The reasons given for depoliticization vary. Some point to the emergence of mass media – such as television – and then social media as the primary factors leading people to withdraw from politics. The claim is that these technologies make information and entertainment readily available and so encourage us to retreat into our own private universes. The broader impact is a society that is a lot less politically engaged.
Others point to globalisation as the driving force behind depoliticization. In this account, increased economic interdependence and mobility reduces the ability of national politics to make a difference to people’s lives. Though the 2008 financial crash started in the US housing market, its shockwaves couldn’t be stopped at national borders. All governments could do was mitigate its effects (which in any case required global cooperation). Similarly, if the British government wanted to bring in more revenue to spend on the NHS, it could raise corporation tax. The risk, however, is that businesses would relocate to countries with lower rates, taking jobs, investment, and tax revenues with them. In this environment, it makes sense for citizens to turn their backs on politics as it’s less effective.
Still others see depoliticization as resulting from what Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history”. In this view, the end of the Cold War marked liberalism’s outright victory over socialism and brought the era of big ideological fights to a close (fascism having been already defeated in the Second World War). Consequently, politics in the west since the 1990s has been a game of who can best manage the liberal order. As this hardly inflames the political passions, people have tuned out.
Depoliticization is also seen as impacting the behaviour of politicians. According to the late Peter Mair, a political scientist, the public’s retreat from politics has made political elites more self-referential.[†] It has meant they don’t have to follow society so closely and thus has given them more leeway to govern on their own terms. Mair in fact characterised the gulf between citizens and representatives as one of “mutual withdrawal”.
The depoliticization argument therefore says that problems with British democracy stem from factors outside the political system. Whether due to changing media, globalisation, or lack of ideological choice, people’s political apathy has risen. In turn, this has resulted in politicians being less concerned about the views of the people. Hence the disconnect.
But even a cursory glance at Brexit tells us this argument doesn’t stack up. Many who voted leave hadn’t voted for years, even decades. Yet their ability to recognise the referendum as a unique opportunity to have their voices heard shows that their non-voting wasn’t due to political apathy. They weren’t depoliticized but rather felt the political mainstream didn’t represent them.
The reasons given for depoliticization are also flawed. Far from contributing to people’s disengagement, social media was key to mobilising the leave campaign. Hostility to globalisation motivated many Britons to vote leave, suggesting they think national politics can do something about this phenomenon. And there was a clear ideological component to the Brexit vote, both in its rejection of liberal technocracy and embrace of nationalism.
First-past-the-post and the periphery’s revenge
But if depoliticization isn’t the answer, what is? One of the striking things about Brexit is that the leave bloc was made up of segments of society that wouldn’t normally be political allies. As the journalist Mark Easton put it: “The rich Tory shires and the poor post-industrial Labour heartlands found common cause”. This implies that these social sectors more than others have had their voices cut off from politics. How did this happen?
As descriptors, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ have something in common: they both denote extremes. We imagine rich at one end of a spectrum and poor at the other. We also typically imagine this rich-poor spectrum as corresponding to a political spectrum – rich being rightwing and poor being leftwing. So, another way of phrasing our issue is to say that citizens on the right and citizens on the left haven’t been represented by the political mainstream.
You might think neglecting such a large number of people would be electoral suicide for the two main parties. Yet there are features of Britain’s political system that make such an approach a rational one for elites to follow. Most importantly, there’s the country’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system.
Electoral institutions aren’t exactly romantic, but they matter. They matter because they encourage certain outcomes. FPTP typically results in two-party politics, a situation where many parties exist but only two have a realistic chance of holding power. Britain clearly fits this description, as while it has many parties, every government since the Second World War has been formed or led by either the Conservatives or Labour.
Two-party politics prompts a certain logic of electoral competition. In Britain, it would seem that the contest is between the Conservatives and Labour, right and left, rich and poor. But this is true only to a superficial degree. The real battle isn’t between the extremes but over the middle part of the spectrum. That’s because, overall, it’s unlikely that the rich rightwing will vote Labour and the poor leftwing will vote Conservative. Therefore, there’s a big incentive for the two main parties to take the extremes for granted and concentrate on winning the centre; that’s where the swing voters are most likely to be.
This logic predicts that the two main parties will adopt policy agendas that appeal to the centre. That’s exactly what happened in Britain in the two decades or so leading up to the Brexit vote.
Under Tony Blair, Labour focused less on the working class and equality and instead spoke of giving “everyone … the chance to fulfil their potential, whatever their background, age, sex or race”. This change signalled the leadership’s acceptance of Thatcher-era market liberalisation and was undertaken to appeal to the progressive middle class. And it brought success, as the party won three general elections on the bounce. Significantly, Labour embarked on this approach confident that it would retain its traditional supporters. It saw these as having “nowhere else to go”.
Calls for the Conservatives to mimic Labour and shift to the centre were made as early as 1998. But it was only in 2005, when David Cameron was elected party leader, that this repositioning commenced. Cameron stated explicitly that the Conservatives were too focused on “rural” voters in the “south of England”.[‡] To make the party electorally competitive, his leadership distanced itself from this constituency and started appealing to the metropolitan middle class. It did this by adopting a social liberal agenda, which reached its apogee with the 2013 Same Sex Marriage Act. This centrist turn helped the party gain election victories in 2010 and 2015.
Tacking themselves to the centre may be a rational strategy for elites to follow under FPTP. But the economic and social liberalism this led to in Britain alienated many voters. As The Economist recently reported, the “Labour party lost its links to the old working class” and the “Conservative party lost its links with provincial England”. So, the disconnect between politics and these social constituencies can be seen as stemming from Britain’s electoral system. When it comes to political representation, FPTP encourages a core and a periphery. The Brexit vote was the periphery’s revenge.
More policy convergence, more exclusion, more shocks
Of course, it would be wrong to reduce the nature of political representation in Britain to its electoral system. Other factors have contributed to the policy convergence and core-periphery divide witnessed during the Blair-Cameron era. For instance, the decline of class-based and partisan loyalties in the latter half of the twentieth century, resulting from structural changes to the economy and the rise of a less deferential society, increased the share of floating voters. This gave added impetus to FPTP’s centripetal logic, as it made committed rightwing and committed leftwing voters rarer.
Yet, because it’s the mechanism through which power in Westminster is won, FPTP clearly has a decisive impact on the character of representation in British politics. And despite the tumults of the Brexit vote, party competition continues to be shaped by it.
Take the latest budget. Phillip Hammond, the Tory chancellor, announced tax cuts that will cost nearly £3bn and mainly benefit the better-off. Despite his hard left background, Labour’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, pledged not to reverse these cuts. The reason is pure electoral calculation. McDonnell knows that if middle income voters see Labour as a threat, the party’s chances of winning the next general election will go down. Therefore, he would rather commit to Tory cuts and receive criticism from the left than risk losing the centre ground. Yet this augurs another cycle of policy convergence and core-periphery division – and further paroxysms of anger.
To avoid this outcome, the logical response would be to reform Britain’s electoral system to make it more representative. How this should happen is thus an important question. For now, though, it will only be noted that no electoral system is perfect and all involve trade-offs of some kind. Proportional representation, for example, may enhance representativeness but at the cost of reducing clarity of responsibility – that is, our ability to recognise who’s responsible for the policies that are enacted. But such costs may be worth it if they counteract the type of political exclusion that underpinned the Brexit vote.
[*] Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and Fabio Wolkenstein, ‘The crisis of party democracy, cognitive mobilization, and the case for making parties more deliberative’, American Political Science Review, 111:1, 2017, pp. 97-109
[†] Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso, 2013
[‡] Katharine Dommett, ‘The theory and practice of party modernisation: the conservative party under David Cameron, 2005-2015’, British Politics, 10:2, 2015, pp. 249-266