The Devolution Gambit: Political Territorialisation as a Threat to Constitutional Order (Springer Series in Electoral Politics) 3030725227, 9783030725228

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Springer Series in Electoral Politics Series Editors: Daniel Stockemer · Daphne Halikiopoulou

Tim Niendorf

The Devolution Gambit Political Territorialisation as a Threat to Constitutional Order

Springer Series in Electoral Politics Series Editors Daniel Stockemer, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Daphne Halikiopoulou, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, UK

This book series offers an outlet for cutting-edge research on voting behaviour and election-related topics, with a global, regional and country specific focus. Electoral Politics welcomes theoretically sound and empirically robust monographs, edited volumes and handbooks from various disciplines and approaches on topics such as electoral turnout, electoral campaigns, political parties, voting behaviour, electoral systems and related fields. Manuscripts can also link elections and political behaviour to broader political concepts, including democracy, the economy and foreign policy. All books published in this series are peer-reviewed.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16216

Tim Niendorf

The Devolution Gambit Political Territorialisation as a Threat to Constitutional Order

Tim Niendorf Department of Political Science Friedrich Schiller University Jena Jena, Germany

ISSN 2524-8103 ISSN 2524-8111 (electronic) Springer Series in Electoral Politics ISBN 978-3-030-72522-8 ISBN 978-3-030-72523-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my family and Wilhelmina

Acknowledgements

As my American friends would say “this one was a bitch”. When I started developing the idea for the project that would become my Ph.D. thesis in late summer 2013 and later culminate in this book, it was supposed to be about the Scottish independence referendum. At that time, the referendum seemed to be the most important political event facing the UK in the twenty-first century. How wrong that expectation proved to be. While I was still brooding over the referendum outcome and its causes, a significant number of my British colleagues as well as almost all pundits and the British polling industry predicted a very close outcome of the upcoming 2015 election and therefore another coalition government either headed by David Cameron or Ed Miliband. But, this prediction also proved wrong, David Cameron seemed as surprised as most political scientists when he secured a small parliamentary but clear electoral majority for his second term. However, this majority was bought at the price of his third referendum, one that would supersede the Scottish independence referendum in both importance and effect. Still, the fact that caught up my mind after this election was not the coming of another referendum, but the question why almost no one had foreseen the clear Conservative victory (in the same fashion most pollster would predict a victory of the Remain campaign a year later), and this question would lead me to two problems that came to dominate my Ph.D. thesis and this book. First, it shifted my focus from critical events, like the “Indyref” or the 2015 election, to long-term structures. If the British polling industry was unable to anticipate the clear Conservative lead among voters in 2015, it was either due to faulty projection procedures they regularly employed or the result of missing out structural developments that could not be captured by usually short-term-oriented polling questions. The study of those long-term electoral developments would then form the major empirical subject of my thesis. The second aspect was the complacency and overconfidence that had become obvious in the way David Cameron had handled the promise of an EU membership referendum, a referendum he never intended, but had no choice to hold after securing a parliamentary majority. The same attitude I had already discovered reading much of the British literature on devolution and its political consequences. It became a main driver of my thesis and is still somewhat of a puzzle for me why British colleagues vii

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Acknowledgements

mostly remain oblivious of how ill-thought through the whole devolution development has been and how it, in combination with Labour’s electoral demise and the SNP’s rise, might potentially unravel the union in the foreseeable future. Finally, the so to say constant movements of the target I was aiming at proved to be a challenge. When I started my work, I expected that after the Indyref and the 2015 election the muddy political waters would clear up and I would be looking at a somewhat more well-defined subject. However, those events were followed by the already mentioned EU membership referendum as well as two more general elections that forced me to constantly reconsider, recalculate and rewrite at least parts of my manuscript. Whenever I got the feeling that electoral politics in the UK had finally settled for a few years, I was greeted by another round of unexpected political turmoil and therefore another round of text revision. Accordingly, the gladder I am now that the work has finally come to an end. Having read a few books based on Ph.D. theses, I will spare everyone a rehearsal of various thesis writing related anecdotes and instead directly move to the acknowledgements so we can start with the actual scientific “stuff”. First of all, I want to thank my parents, my sister and my grandparents, who had been the strongest and most reliable support during the whole period of writing and editing. The only sad thing about it is that most of you will never be able to read a word of it. Special thanks go to my two supervisors Prof. Torsten Oppelland and Prof. Klaus Stolz, to Prof. Oppelland not only for employing me over all the years, but even more for granting me all the necessary freedom I needed to finish this project and giving me the inspiration for the whole thing. I thank Prof. Stolz for both agreeing to supervise my thesis on such short notice and helping me with a number of academic issues that came afterwards. Further gratitude belongs to Prof. Daniel Stockemer and Prof. Daphne Halikiopoulou who gave me the chance to publish my book in their series on electoral politics as well as Niko Chtouris from Springer who handled the whole publication and editing process in an impeccable and always helpful manner. I also thank all my colleagues, namely Andreas, Michael, Jörg, Katrin, Sven, Matthias and Martin and friends, Schorr, Daniel, Marcel, Felix, both Erics, Linse, Alex, Martin, Beibei and Henni, who showed an interest in this, as Hegel would say, “pre-modern” polity of Britain as well as enduring my endless complaints over the five years it took me to finish it. And finally, thanks belong to the number of online friends I met over the last two years, who helped me pushing through this final segment of work, specifically Senpai, Cameron, Ad, Klkan, Dupree, Ezzi, and especially Wilhelmina. Will, you have been my inspiration over these last months, and I am eternally grateful for having met you.

Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

2 The Principles of Majoritarian Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

3 The Structure of Party Competition in the United Kingdom . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Concept of Party Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Structural Limitations of Electoral Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 21 30

4 Devolution as a Challenge to Political Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Devolution—A Systemic Liability? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Reforming an Unfixable System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41 41 48

5 Measuring the Territorial Dimension of Party Competition . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Time Frame and Case Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Operationalisation of “Party Competition” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61 61 64

6 The Development of Regional Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 6.1 Shifting of the Prize—Changes in the Regional Seat Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 6.2 Stable and Changeable? Government Formation and Parliamentary Majorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 6.3 Towards Single-Party Domination—The Territorialisation of Parliament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 6.4 Uneven Decline—The Development of Electoral Support . . . . . . . . 83 6.5 More Volatility, Less Vulnerability—The Problem of Increasing Local Majorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6.6 Structural Limitations—Regional Differences in Voter Mobilisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Still Enough—Competition Under Exceptional Mobilisation . . . . . . 7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal Campaign Performances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

127 127 136 148 ix

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8 Territorialisation as a Threat to Political Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

Abbreviations

AV E EM EVEL FPTP GL HMG HoC LibDems MP MRG NE NHS NI NW S SDP SE SNP SW UKIP W WM YH

Alternative Voting System East of England East Midlands region English Votes for English Laws First-Past-the-Post election system Greater London region Her Majesty’s Government House of Commons Liberal Democrats Member of Parliament Manifesto Research Group North East region National Health Service Northern Ireland North West region Scotland Social Democratic Party South East region Scottish National Party South West region UK Independence Party Wales West Midlands region Yorkshire and the Humber region

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1

Regions of England, 2018. Source Office for National Statistics, Open Geography Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65

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List of Tables

Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6 Table 6.7 Table 6.8 Table 6.9 Table 6.10 Table 6.11 Table 6.12 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 7.6 Table 7.7 Table 7.8

Regional seat development (1950–2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Majority situation in the HoC compared to England . . . . . . . . . Governmental stability situation in the HoC compared to England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labour-held seats by region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conservative-held seats by region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labour support in the UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conservative support in the UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seat safeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Safeness of Conservative seats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Safeness of Labour seats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regional deviations of the Labour vote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regional deviations of the Conservative vote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labour seat returns under a maximum swing against the Conservatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conservative seat returns under a maximum swing against Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labour seat returns under a maximum swing towards Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conservative seat returns under a maximum swing towards the Conservatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labour seat returns under an average swing against the Conservatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conservative seat returns under an average swing against Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labour seat returns under an average swing towards Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conservative seat returns under an average swing towards the Conservatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72 75 75 77 78 87 88 105 107 108 117 118 130 131 133 135 137 141 144 146

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Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is about the so to say “dark sides” of political “regionalisation”, the most obvious process of which is the increasing decentralisation or devolution of political powers to subnational actors and institutions. While such processes have been hailed as either recognition of historical cultural diversity, a way to improve economic efficiency or local democratic empowerment, their potential negative consequences have only received greater academic scrutiny since the 2000s. Although there is now a significant amount of the literature that researches, or at least mentions, these problems (Rodríguez-Pose and Gill 2003; Rodríguez-Pose and Sandal 2008; Goodwin et al. 2005; Kettl 2000; Keating et al. 2003; Keating 1998; Ruano and Profiroiu 2017; Wills 2016; Lachapelle and Oñate 2018; Stein and Turkewitsch 2018; Papadopoulos 2018; Gagnon 2018), some of its dimensions have still not been thoroughly investigated. In general, academic interest in these negative consequences has focussed on two aspects: the ramifications of economic competition between different regions (Rodríguez-Pose and Gill 2003: 344–348; Ruano and Profiroiu 2017: 481; Rodríguez-Pose and Sandal 2008: 68–69) and the potential loss of democratic control and accountability over governance (Papadopolous 2018: 51–55; Gagnon 2018: 78, 83–84; Kettl 2000: 494). While these studies usually employ the concerned regions as units of analysis, the central state and decentralisation’s repercussions on it are far less often the subject of investigation. To some degree, this has to do with the fact, most elaborately pointed out by Keating et al. (2003: 6–11), that most devolution or decentralisation projects carried out until the 1980s/1990s have typically been central state endeavours intended to serve its own interest. According to this interpretation, central states deliberately and selectively employed reform options that only devolved minimal powers or focussed on administrative and policy implementation tasks rather than political decision-making powers (Pasquier 2015: 174–175; Rodríguez-Pose and Gill 2003: 334–336; Burnham 2017: 153). Although this began to change with the advent of the “new regionalism” (Keating 1998) concept, much of the subsequent decentralising reforms were still anchored in economic rationalisation displaying the same essence of reasoning earlier central state attempts, to first centralise and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_1

1

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1 Introduction

later decentralise, had been characterised by. Further, potential repercussions for the central state would only become visible gradually and after longer periods of time (due to the often-limited nature of reforms), while the impact in regions targeted by devolution reforms would be far more direct and therefore easier and earlier to discern. In addition to such work focussed directly on the institutional and procedural as well as economic and social dimensions of decentralisation, there is also a specific subfield of academic research that concentrates on the relationship between political parties and decentralisation or regionalism in general (Hopkin 2009; Chhibber and Kollman 2004; Hepburn 2011; Massetti 2011; Jeffery 2011; Türsan 1998; MüllerRommel 1998; De Winter 1998; Caramani 2004; Lublin 2014; Elias and Tronconi 2011; Massetti and Schakel 2015; Tronconi 2006). Again, we can see a similar issue as with the more general work on devolution. While regionalist and separatist parties1 as well as parties within these newly created regional polities received the vast majority of scientific interest, aspects concerning the consequences for the national political system remained mostly underdeveloped. Therefore, Hopkin’s (2009: 179– 180) 2009 assessment that there is a significant lack of studies on the relationship between statewide parties and decentralising reforms still holds largely true today. This book will try to fill these gaps by connecting devolution reforms’ consequences for the national political system with the development of statewide party competition. More specifically, I will look at how growing territorialisation in government practice and party competition can inhibit the workability of the national political system at large. In order to illuminate this problem, I will first discuss how frictions between devolution and the national political system can come about. Afterwards, I will try to outline the potential interactions between these three aspects of devolution, government system and party competition in some more detail. I will then discuss my case selection before giving a brief overview about the structure of this book. The most basic problem that accompanies both the creation of new forms of regional governance and the reform of already existing regional political structures has already been pointed out by conservative theorist Edmund Burke over two hundred years ago. In his seminal “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, Burke identifies two problems that, as he argues, would ultimately lead to the failure of the French National Convention: the excessive reliance on active “social engineering” and the absolutism of abstract principles. According to him, political institutions 1 There

is a broad discussion on the most adequate term(s) to describe parties primarily advancing the interests of certain regions over the country as a whole (Hepburn 2011; Massetti 2011; Türsan 1998; Müller-Rommel 1998). This discussion has only limited significance for my study since I am usually only talking about a specific subset of parties potentially included in these different definitions. The parties I am primarily concerned with are separatist (including irredentist) ones whose goal is the independence of the territory they represent as well as parties which strive for a form of autonomy in which the balance of the extent of decision-making powers is tilted towards at least their “own” region compared to the central state. Therefore, I will use terms like “autonomist”, “regionalist” or “separatist” parties as interchangeable in the sense outlined above, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

1 Introduction

3

cannot be consciously created (and operate successfully) because of the limitations of the human mind and the sheer complexity of human society. Instead, institutions have to evolve “naturally”, only changing as a result of historic developments of their “environment”, not by conscious human modifications (Burke 1975: 271–275; also see Bogdanor 2005: 73; Vorländer 2018: 397–398). Burke thereby distinguishes between institutional change that is induced exogenously, stemming from, in the Estonian sense, the institution’s “environment”, and change that is created endogenously, prompted by either the institution’s internal processes or experts overseeing its functioning. The employment of abstract principles on the other hand inadvertently leads to the emergence of divisions between the formal reception of political institutions and their real-world operation (Burke 1975: 270–277). Institutions’ essence has to be defined by their centuries long operation, and accordingly, demands towards them should only be deduced from their output. If political demands are instead driven by abstract concepts, they would become detached from institutions’ capabilities and therefore from reality. This detachment would create the root of populist tyranny because institutions would seldom come close enough to idealistic expectations and thereby create a permanent public perception of systemic failure (Burke 1975: 290– 295), a point strongly reemphasised by Rodríguez-Pose and Sandal (2008: 65–69) for the use of vague language in current public decentralisation discourse. According to Burke, both outlined principles are closely connected because the acceptance of absolute principles will lead to the endorsement of active endogenous engineering in order to bring institutions’ output closer to those absolute demands (Burke 1975: 309–317). Yet, his understanding of institutional development remains flawed because of the differing amounts of human agency over individual institutions’ development. In order to improve consistently and “harmoniously”, individual political institutions need to be influenced by the same extent of endogenous and exogenous factors as all other institutions. Naturally, such a balance would only be realistic, if humans have complete or no control at all over them. While Burke wishes the latter to be true, his railing against the French National Convention (Burke 1975: 284–289) clearly shows that humans have a fairly high degree of agency over the development of certain political institutions. This, however, leads to a critical problem of state development at large. As Fukuyama (2004: 55–57) points out, if individual institutions can be influenced to different degrees by human agency, it becomes possible that the development of one institution “outruns” or falls behind those of others and thereby creates pressure on the system as a whole. In the end, these inconsistencies between institutions might become more dangerous than external pressure and eventually bring down political order. This inconsistency of human agency or influence over political institutions is the general context in which the creation of devolution or its reform takes place. As various authors (Rokkan and Urwin 1983; Keating 1998; De Winter 1998; Keating et al. 2003; Tronconi 2006; Meguid 2008; Jeffery 2011; Taagepera 2003) have pointed out, devolution can be regarded as a masterpiece of social engineering. Its social engineering character becomes clear by looking at how various forms of “regionalisation” were implemented. In general, the respective plans were usually not based on popular

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1 Introduction

involvement, but rather created by ministerial or special planning bureaucracies in order to improve or rationalise administration and economic development (Ruano and Profiroiu 2017: 485; Wills 2016: 2–3; Keating et al. 2003: 6–11; Keating 2006: 144– 156).2 Even if these projects generated some additional democratic mechanisms, these were often effectively “by-products”, primarily aimed at increasing public control over administration efficiency rather than agenda setting or policy-making. It also implicates the second problem outlined by Burke because this rationalist and often technicist approach to devolution would inadvertently lead to different expectations among politicians and the respective populations concerning the outcome and purpose of these reforms. However, while devolution is such a masterpiece of social engineering, politicians do not have the same amount of human agency over other aspects of the political system in which those reforms are embedded in. The most obvious of those is the basic structure of government or democracy in general. The general type of government can usually only be changed when a polity is newly founded (or the existing political order has been overthrown by a revolution or foreign intervention). Once it has taken root and its individual institutions have found a feasible mode of interaction, certain mechanisms of path dependency and institutional conservatism set in that either lead politicians to embrace incremental reforms over large-scale changes or mould the day-to-day operations of new institutions to fit the established system (Pierson 2004: 41–44, 142–153). That does not mean that significant political reform becomes impossible, but, as Fukuyama (2011: 453–457) argues, elites benefitting from the status quo will try to preserve their current influence, irrespective of the seriousness of endogenous and exogenous pressures, and either steer reforms into a more incremental direction or need to be disposed of before drastic change can take place. As already mentioned, it is the combination of these processes of selfpreservation and unintended consequences or faulty designs of socially engineered reforms that can lead to an incongruence between established and newly created institutions potentially ending in institutional failure (Fukuyama 2014: 456–466).

2 It

is important to distinguish the use of the term “regionalisation” by these authors from the one employed here. As long as not explicitly stated, I will use “regionalisation” or alternatively “territorialisation” to describe both, the increasing territorial heterogeneity of electoral support, Caramani’s (2004: 1–9) notion of the term, and the process of expanding decentralisation, the notion employed by the aforementioned scholars of regionalism, but supplemented by all likewise processes not just those driven by the central government. Concerning the content of “territorialisation”, I look at whether a specific political aspect is rather determined by a regional or a uniform statewide logic (Keating 1998: 2–4; Caramani 2003: 434437). Accordingly, I understand it as a process in which a geographically limited logic of decisionmaking becomes more important in determining specific political outputs than nationally uniform and centralised considerations. In electoral terms, for example, we can observe territorialisation when voting results become more disparate between different geographic areas. In policy-making, territorialisation happens when political decisions are taken on the regional, rather than the national level, or when the content of policies begins to change along territorial lines. In terms of governing, it takes places when the central state government has to negotiate with regional subjects in order to secure the nationwide implementation of certain political decisions.

1 Introduction

5

Having briefly outlined the abstract background of my study, it is now time to look at how the three aspects of devolution, party competition and government style are connected to each other. I will limit my thoughts to some general observations here and discuss the most critical connections in greater detail in the following chapters. Before I begin, it should be noted that the influence between all three factors is not unidirectional; instead, they reciprocally impact each other, at least to a certain degree. Also, I want to point out that it is not my goal to establish or even presume a chain of causality between the territorialisation of one institution leading to an acceleration of the same process for another. On the contrary, as my empirical part will show, the processes of electoral regionalisation were mostly independent from the extension of devolution, although it sometimes accelerated existing trends. Instead, I focus on the outcome side of these processes and how their cumulative effect hampers the effectiveness of institutions not taking part in the same process of territorialisation, namely the general mode of government. Most obviously, party competition determines which parties will govern a country and therefore has a major influence on government formation and the style of government in general (Diermeier et al. 2003; Martin and Stevenson 2010; Laver and Schofield 1990; Laver and Shepsle 1990; Laver 1989). Depending on parties’ seat returns, only a limited number of parties or coalitions fulfil the necessary requirements to form a viable government. Meanwhile, party competition also influences the parties’ standings on devolution and how it works out in political reality because of their varying political support in different parts of the country and the need to engage with the devolved governments (Dunleavy 2005; Chaney 2013). Diverging majorities among national and regional governments not only increase the complexity of negotiations and the number of actors with whom the national leadership has to engage, but can also directly impact its ability to run the country if, for example, a second, territorial chamber is dominated by opposition parties. But that is still not the end of it, not only do parties have to actively engage with one another on these different political levels, it also changes parties’ internal dynamics. Instead of an exclusive focus on taking over the national government, certain segments will be more interested in what is best for their regional chapters or local governments rather than giving precedence to the national party’s interests (Bolleyer 2012: 317–321; Hopkin 2003; Hopkin and Bradbury 2006; Laffin et al. 2007: 102–106; Bradbury et al. 2000: 70–72). On the other hand, the requirements of government logic can put strong limitations on both competition and devolution. One obvious example is the handling of separatist or regionalist parties (Elias and Tronconi 2011: 518–520), which are a common phenomenon in strongly decentralised states and usually at least an indirect driver of further devolution within national parliaments. While moderate autonomist or regionalist parties are often considered as potential coalition partners, depending on the radicalism of their demands, openly separatist parties are typically excluded from such considerations since they are seen as a danger to state integrity. Conversely, regionalist parties find themselves in strong cross-pressure situations when faced with the dilemma of potentially joining the national government since their primary focus usually lies on the regional parliaments as well as policy- rather than office-seeking

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1 Introduction

(for these problems, see De Winter 1998: 238–241; Massetti 2011: 37–39; and Elias and Tronconi 2011: 508–513). This can lead to very problematic situations of government formation in systems with highly fractionalised parliaments, like Belgium or the Netherlands, but also in systems that strongly disincentivise coalition governments, like the UK or the USA, whenever the support of such parties becomes crucial in securing parliamentary majorities. But this problem also works the other way around. As long as a certain region largely votes in favour of a nationwide party, its public will be periodically represented in the national government simply as a result of regular changes in the major governing party (Rokkan and Urwin 1983: 151). However, once a separatist party manages to rally the majority of a region’s population, this majority is typically condemned to long-term exclusion from national power because the separatists are treated as “unresponsible opposition” and it is difficult for the nationwide parties to unilaterally implement policies exclusively favouring this region (in order to draw support away from the separatists) without tainting their reputation in the rest of the country (Jeffery 2011: 164). The problem becomes even worse in systems based on a majoritarian logic of government since they demand a higher degree of electoral competitiveness and parliamentary volatility to ensure regular changes of the governing majority in order to preserve effective control against abuse of power and institutional decay (McGann 2004: 70–71). Accordingly, parties in such systems usually align their behaviour towards other parties along the demands of the government system, often reinforcing adverse and polarising tendencies, even in situations that necessitate or favour consensual behaviour which is obviously a far more important requirement in decentralised or federal political systems than in centralised or unitarian polities (Mair 2009: 288–289, 292–295). Although Lijphart (2012: 239– 243) finds no connection between the vertical and horizontal divisions of powers, a different logic on both dimensions irrespectively creates more potential tension and institutional friction than a consistent institutional and procedural logic on both of them. The debate over the influence of the government style on devolution and decentralisation has been particularly pronounced in the UK, Canada and Australia where it focusses on how to bring together the supremacy and sovereignty of parliament with the guaranteed rights of the devolved subjects (Oliver 2018; Jeffery 2009b: 398– 399; Bogdanor 2005: 82–85; Flinders 2004: 138; Mitchell 2002: 253–255). This is, however, only a reflection of a broader and more general debate on decentralisation. This debate revolves around the already mentioned question of democratic accountability as well as equity of state provisions for all citizens. Specifically, the first problem includes the question of how much power is actually transferred and to which degree the endowed institutions are subject to popular accountability (Wills 2016: 15–16). In polities with strong unitarian or centralised traditions, it is far more likely that devolution will reflect these traditions by a greater prominence of appointed expert commissions or “quangos” with questionable democratic legitimacy and popular accountability (Rodríguez-Pose and Gill 2003: 340–343; Jones and MacLeod 2004: 438–439; Jeffery 2009b: 393–394). Also, competence grants will usually be limited to organising administrative tasks rather than actual policy decisions and often come with additional strings attached, the typical of which is

1 Introduction

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linking monetary grants to performance improvements or the fulfilment of benchmark indicators (Burnham 2017: 153; Ruano and Profiroiu 2017: 481–482). This way the central state can uphold its grip on certain aspects of governance without having to take direct responsibility for potential outcome failures or mismanagement. The second aspect of political and social equality has to do with the reversal of what was considered the essence of the modern nation state by Rokkan, Urwin and others (Rokkan and Urwin 1982: 4–11; Rokkan et al. 1987: 17–45; Lipset and Rokkan 1967: 11–21). According to this understanding, a significant part of the state’s legitimacy concerning centralist policy-making and administration was derived from its ability to offer a uniform provision of services and at least a minimum effort of combatting the “postal code lottery” by attempting to create comparable living conditions for all citizens (Hopkin 2009: 184; Wills 2016: 9; Bogdanor 2009: 110–114; Morgan 2006: 201–203; Flinders 2009: 394–395). While decentralisation and devolution do not necessarily revert this in political reality, they, far more importantly, invert the former logic of state action. Instead of seeing the standardising influence of the central state as the means to create progress and prosperity, they are now regarded as a result of regional divergence and competition among localities (Rodríguez-Pose and Sandal 2008: 58–59, 67; Ruano and Profiroiu 2017: 480; Keating et al. 2003: 14–18; Keating 1998: 80–81). Again, in most decentralisation attempts the historical legacy and existing style of government will influence where the central state will consider this influence of competition rather helpful or a hinderance to realising the general goals of public welfare. At last, devolution and decentralisation themselves shape certain aspects of the way government works and how party competition is conducted or structured. In terms of party competition, one effect is quite obvious. Since devolution usually creates an additional layer of political representation, this allows for the establishment of new parties or local shifts in electoral behaviour and party competition that can in the long run spill over to the national level (Hopkin 2009: 182; Massetti 2011: 35– 37; Jeffery 2011: 165–166). Two of the most obvious examples of such rises of third parties through subnational political institutions are the SNP and the Italian Lega Nord. While the SNP had a long history and experienced several electoral ups and downs since its foundation in 1934, it was only able to become a significant national force due to the introduction of British devolution in the 1990s. The establishment of the Scottish parliament gave the SNP a new political arena in which it was not as strongly penalised by the voting system as on the national level and allowed for the development of an alternative mode of party evaluation by the electorate (Hepburn 2011: 12; Carman et al. 2014: 81–84; Curtice et al. 2009: 17). The takeover of the Scottish government and subsequently negotiated independence referendum then facilitated a shift in Scottish voting behaviour on the national level and allowed the SNP to become the dominant force in every aspect of Scottish politics. Accordingly, the use of devolution as a means to contain Scottish nationalism proved to be a double-edged sword (McCrone 2012: 74; Gallagher 2009: 534–536). The Lega on the other hand had no mentionable historic legacy and originated in various independent local parties that were almost entirely focussed in their political activities on their respective north Italian regions. Unified, at first, by no more than their animosity

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towards Rome’s supposedly overburdening centralism, these parties rose through the various regional councils and only loosely aligned with each other in nationwide elections. In 1991, building on its strength in local politics the movement transformed into a broader regionalist party of the economically more developed north under the largely invented concept of Padanian identity (Giordano 2000: 454–458; Tarchi 1998: 143–146). Under Matteo Salvini’s leadership, the Lega took its final transformation step by turning into a nationwide right-wing populist party that soon became the strongest force of Italian politics. While the Lega did not profit as significantly from increasing federalisation or devolution as the SNP did (the 2001 constitutional reform strengthened decentralisation in Italy, but was far less extensive than British devolution), it mastered the art of exploiting local political problems and transforming them into larger issues that could unify the populations of various regions (Mazzoleni and Ruzza 2018: 981–984). The development of both parties had significant impact on national competition structures. The UK experienced two hung parliaments since the rise of the SNP, and it is reasonable to assume situations in the near future in which a UK government might depend on the votes or toleration of the nationalists. Meanwhile, the Lega started as an independent electoral force that competed as a regional catch-all party against both the centre left and the centre right. After aligning itself with the centre right block under Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership, it replaced Forza Italia as the strongest party of the alliance in 2018, turning itself into the leading force of Italian party competition in less than 30 years. The way devolution and decentralisation directly impact the way the national government works can be best observed in Belgium. Beginning with the initial reform of the country’s constitution in the 1970s, Belgium progressively transformed into perhaps the most elaborate example of a segmented federalism (Deschouwer 2006: 903). Government formation entails not only creating an effective majority in a highly fractionalised parliament but also the inclusion of parties of both major language groups since the constitution requires the government to have no more than 15 ministers as well as an equal number of French and Flemish speakers (Deschouwer 2006: 902–04), in addition to numerous supermajority requirements and minority vetos concerning the legislative process. This arrangement basically superimposes the subnational structure on the national level by formally requiring the government to reflect the division of power on a lower level. Another very obvious example is the government’s interaction with the second chamber in Germany. Quite uncommonly, the Bundesrat is composed of delegates of the state governments, rather than being directly elected or chosen by the state parliaments. The consequence of this selection method is that whenever the government needs the Bundesrat’s approval, which is required in almost 40% of all bills (so-called Zustimmungsgesetze), it has to directly engage with the governments of the Länder, instead of an independent second chamber (Leunig 2010: 92–94). This turns Länder-level coalition negotiations not just into a serious issue for the Bundesrat, but also for the federal government. Since the Länder delegates are required to vote unanimously (and abstain if their respective coalition governments are unable to find a common position), the federal government can usually only rely on the general support of state governments that are either composed of exactly the same coalition or made up

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exclusively of its own coalition members (Pappi et al. 2005: 434–437). The crucial point is that the central government has little to no influence on state-level coalition negotiations even if it is popular among the general electorate. With the increasing fragmentation of the German party system on both levels, the staggered elections of Länder parliaments and the indirect election of state governments, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the national government can rely on stable support in the second chamber (which facilitated the decrease in the number of Zustimmungsgesetze by the 2006 Föderalismusreform) and needs to engage in more extensive negotiations with numerous independent actors. These two examples underline how decentralisation can decrease central government autonomy and discretion by either directly making it subject to rules protecting the interests of subnational entities or indirectly increasing the complexity of inter-institutional negotiations through more difficult consensus requirements. Having discussed a few examples to outline the complex relationships among the nexus of party competition, devolution and the system of government, the final major question that remains for this introduction is how these outlined relationships are best researched. While at first glance a comparative study seems to be the best suited approach, it would also be the most difficult one. As I have already indicated, the quite large discretion of policy-makers in defining both the content and goals of devolution has led to a significant variety of actual reforms since the 1970s (Rodríguez-Pose and Gill 2003: 336–339). These range from full federalisation (Belgium), the reform of an existing federal system (Germany) and the introduction of an asymmetric (quasi)federalisation (UK and Spain) to a strengthening of a preexisting devolution arrangement below actual federalism (Italy) to the introduction of just minimal decentralisation (France). In addition to this, we find the same diversity concerning the political traditions of vertical power division (Lijphart 2012: 178) ranging from centralised and unitarian states (France, Italy, pre-devolution UK), unitary and decentralised (Scandinavian countries), semi-federal (Spain, Belgium (before 1993), Netherlands) over to federal and decentralised states (Germany, USA, Canada). Finally, we also find a wide variety concerning the other two dimensions of my nexus. The party systems and therefore general competition structure of the potential cases range from the classical two-party system of the pre-1980s UK and the two and a half party system of pre-unified Germany, the highly fragmented moderate pluralism of the Netherlands and Belgium to the polarised pluralism of post-war Italy (Sartori 2005: 116–170; Ware 1996: 147–174). Concerning the mode of government, a quick look at Lijphart’s (2012: 239–246) differentiation between majoritarian and consensus democracies reveals the same broad spectrum. Again, it ranges from prototypical majoritarian systems like the UK, Canada and France over mid-range cases like Germany, Austria and Ireland to classical consensus democracies like Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The major problem here is not so much the diversity in the variables themselves, but rather the complexity of interaction I assume. As I have outlined earlier, I will argue that it is specifically the coupling of devolution expansion with party competition change that can become an institutional problem for democracies (if the system of government’s formal operation does not evolve in line with these changes). Accordingly, a comparison would

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require me to align all these factors in very specific combinations to reach results that could still only be generalised to a limited degree. But even then, I would face the methodological problem that classical small-n comparative case studies are largely designed for single factor analyses, not more complex multifactor interactions. As a result, I decided to rather focus on a single case study that might still offer a number of valuable insights which might be employed in other case studies or comparative analyses. The country I have chosen for my case study is the UK because of five major reasons. First, while the UK has never been a completely centralised or unitarian polity, most political scientists would agree that, besides France, the union has been the democratic state that came closest to the ideal type of centralised administration and policy-making (King 2015: 15–16; Flinders 2010: 75–76; Lijphart 2012: 174– 183; Keating et al. 2003: 174). Despite a historic myriad of institutions fulfilling local administrative tasks, the kingdom, with the exception of the Northern Irish Parliament (from 1921 to 1972), hardly knew any meaningful division of governance, above the local level, before the introduction of devolution in the 1990s (Hadfield 2004a; Urwin 1982: 54–65).3 Conversely, while certain parts of the kingdom kept special rights within the union, like Scotland retaining a separate legal system as well as an independent church, these rights were usually guarded by the respective central government secretary (and later the specific government offices) for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales or were considered as apolitical and therefore to be administered by special non-political bodies (Lodge and Mitchell 2006; Russell and Lodge 2006: 76–82; Urwin 1982: 22–31, 56–61; Keating et al. 2003: 142–152). Second, not only was the UK’s starting point one of the most conservative but also has been, besides perhaps the federalisation of Belgium, the state implementing the most comprehensive decentralisation project since the emergence of the “new regionalism” concept (Lijphart 2012: 251–252; Flinders 2010: 305–306; Bogdanor 2003: 240–241). While the specific powers of the different institutional creations of British devolution vary, the strongest of them in terms of range and depth, the Scottish Parliament, holds more policy competences and broader taxation powers than even the subjects in certain strongly federalised systems, like Germany (McEwen and Petersohn 2015: 195–196, see also the comparative numbers by RodríguezPose and Gill 2003: 339). Therefore, Scotland has exclusive control over justice and prisons, police, health care, most of the social services and welfare, food regulations, environment, housing, agriculture and fishing, economic development, culture and 3 It

is important to note that I will only consider the arrangements with the Celtic nations (or comparable settlements) as devolution in the sense of my study, not the various forms of local “devolution” employed in England. The reason is that there are different functional principles (John 2012: 38) behind both types. While devolution in the Celtic fringe was explicitly based on the acceptance and empowerment of historic collectives (expressing a “bündischen” intent of decentralisation, Jeffery 2009b: 385), the devolution deals are simply functionalist concepts that, as John puts it, are not just centralist in their potential effects, but also in their expression of unitarian intentions. Therefore, these concepts are not different sides of the same coin; they are based on competing principles (Keating 2006: 142–144; Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 96–97, 104–105).

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education, universities as well as sports. In terms of taxes, 37% of its current budget is self-generated and effectively controlled by its own parliament. This number will further rise to around 52% once the latest VAT changes of the Scotland Act, 2016, are fully implemented (Auditor General for Scotland 2017: 4). Despite this obvious strength of the devolved parliaments, the British political system still mostly treats devolution as a mere measure of self-administration, vehemently denying any federal character of the arrangement. Third, from a theoretical perspective the UK should be very resilient to potential institutional failures resulting from inconsistencies between newly created institutions and already existing political structures. The kingdom not only is one of the world’s longest existing democracies but also hands almost unlimited power to parliament. Coupled with the fact that devolution is not considered as federalism and therefore not constitutionally protected, parliament or its governing majority should be able to actively counter arising institutional problems without having to seek the agreement of other powerful actors or even the institutions created by devolution (Fukuyama 2014: 134; Bogdanor 2009: 10–15, 111–113; Flinders 2010: 182– 187). Finally, due to the lack of a written constitution parliament is equipped with maximum flexibility concerning its measures of choice in both modifying devolution and addressing any kind of institutional change in general. Fourth, thanks to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system the British party system is far more resilient to general trends of change concerning individual voting behaviour than most other potential cases. Although, as Grofman (2001: 301–302) and Stolz (2018: 279–282) argue, FPTP systems can be more beneficial to regionally concentrated, especially regionalist or separatist, parties than proportional voting systems, this should only materialise in the long run since those parties are still under heavy initial pressures by being forced to overcome all other parties in individual constituencies before receiving any parliamentary representation at all. Conversely, the exaggerating effect of the vote:seat translation should also be more likely to prevent situations of parliamentary blockades resulting from indecisive election outcomes (which has so often been the case in, for example, the Netherlands or Belgium) and therefore not only strengthen the resilience of the party system to change, but also help in stabilising the national government in general (Farrell 1997: 12–13; Nohlen 2009: 428–433). Fifth, as I will outline in some more detail in the next chapter, the majoritarian government system of the UK is fairly undercomplex and simplistic. This not only makes it easier to identify the location and source of procedural and institutional blockades but should also, at least from a theoretical perspective, make it more difficult for such problems to even materialise. As Scharpf et al. (1976: 40–45) pointed out in their seminal work on the German Politikverflechtung, it is the excessive necessity and high complexity of interactions between various levels of governance combined with the concurrence of both formal and informal rules guiding these interactions that make the German system so vulnerable to blockades and institutional failures. A system with only a very limited number of crucial political actors or veto players, a high asymmetry between them and a limited set of interaction rules should

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be flexible and simplistic enough to absorb a significant amount of inter-institutional problems before they turn into agonising systemic difficulties (King 2015: 282–283). Taken together, the UK can be considered as a crucial case of devolution and its political impact because on the one hand it is a case of very wide-ranging reform that had little precedent in the state’s history and political traditions while on the other hand its institutional and procedural setting should be very resilient and therefore be able to absorb a significant amount of unintended institutional incongruencies due its strong concentration of power and, at least theoretically, high degree of governmental discretion. This leads me to the final question of what can potentially be learned from the British case concerning devolution and decentralisation in general. First, the problem described in the beginning of the chapter is a general one that concerns every state conducting decentralisation or reforming its mode of governance. While the older school of academic research has highlighted the strong path dependency or even impossibility of more comprehensive political reforms (Scharpf et al. 1976; Pierson 2004), others like Keating (1998) or Fukuyama (2011, 2014) have pointed to a resurgence of social engineering optimism after the end of the Cold War. No matter how much foresight is employed in developing decentralisation projects and irrespective of how closely they are aligned to institutional and political traditions of the respective country, in general their effect on and compatibility with pre-existing political structures cannot be guaranteed a priori. Therefore, every kind of devolution reform should be developed under consideration of the limits of human agency concerning institutional design. The crucial problem here is not so much the design of devolution itself, which allows a significant degree of independent agency, but rather those institutions and processes which can be affected by it, but display far a lower potential to be actively changed by political actors. Second, the transformation of the old post-World War II party systems, irrespective of whether they are induced, facilitated or completely independent of devolution, has taken place in most Western societies due to the weakening of bonds between voters and individual parties, the shift to post-materialist values and the transformation of traditional “Volksparteien” into so-called catch-all parties (Kriesi et al. 2006; Dalton et al. 2000; Dunleavy 2005; Dunleavy and Margetts 2005: 855–857, 2001: 296–300; Webb 2005: 774–775, 2004). A consequence of these developments is a partial reterritorialisation of party competition since the parties most affected by it are those once dominating national politics due to their widespread and homogenous support across the whole country (Bogdanor and Field 1993: 212–213; Caramani 2004: 7–8, 2005: 317). Accordingly, if most Western societies have experienced comparable developments concerning party competition while also engaging in some process of decentralisation, the institutional effects of the interaction of both factors should be (at least to a certain degree) observable in all concerned polities. Third, while most of the specific incongruencies between devolution and the national political system outlined here are particularly problematic for majoritarian democracies, they are not exclusive to this type of government. Many of the systemic troubles of the British case result from the incoherence between transferring powers

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to subnational subjects and the lack of corresponding changes to institutions and political processes on the national level (Jeffery 2009: 304–305; Petersohn 2015: 350– 351; McEwen and Petersohn 2015: 199–200; Swenden and McEwen 2014: 494–496; Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 109–121). This is again a problem that concerns every political system irrespective of its specific institutional setting. As Lijphart (2012: 239–249) very clearly pointed out, the degree of vertical power diffusion is completely independent from horizontal power distribution or, more abstract, the general nature of democracy. Therefore, there must exist forms of devolution that are more compatible with majoritarian democracies, while other types fit better with consensual democracies. Also, as Scharpf’s et al. (1976) work on Germany and Deschouwer’s (2009) for Belgium illustrate, even polities with extensive traditions of consensual negotiations and institutional power sharing can reach situations in which the vertical distribution of power becomes a hinderance to effective government or the political system reaches a point at which the cooperative culture is no longer able to defuse institutional incoherences. Pointing out the specific conditions under which territorialisation processes or institutional/procedural designs of devolution increase such incongruencies should therefore be of some help in evaluating different forms of decentralisation even though the seriousness of their actual impact might vary depending on the general structure of the political system. Fourth, the major unknown factor of British devolution is the development of identity and acceptance of the current settlement. Even if politicians deliberately or unconsciously sideline the question of regional identity, devolution’s success, at the very least to some degree, hinges on the acceptance of the settlement by the affected populations and their identification with the territorial units created by it (Mitchell 2002: 250; Wills 2016: 204–206; Keating et al. 2003: 35–36). Again, if devolution simply creates another layer of intransparent and undemanded bureaucracy that neither allows citizens to exert a better influence on governance nor helps in addressing their expressive needs, it might either lead to a political backlash or fuel the development of aggrieved identities. In the British case, devolution was, besides other purposes, employed to counter the growing nationalism in the Celtic fringe, an assumption that at least in the Scottish case backfired spectacularly (for the decline of unionist sentiment in Scotland, see McCrone 2012; Keating 2010; and Hassan and Shaw 2012). Conversely, the lack of mentionable devolution in England created at least a limited backlash of English nationalism over the last few years (Jeffery et al. 2016; Henderson et al. 2015; Wyn Jones et al. 2012, 2013; Bryant 2010; Kenny 2015; Mycock and Hayton 2014; Hayton 2016). Both these effects, the electoral strengthening of separatist sentiment and resentment in the regions overlooked by devolution, are a potential challenge for all states engaging in such reforms. Paying close attention to the structure of devolution arrangements that aggravated these sentiments might therefore be useful in avoiding their recreation. Having reached the end of my introduction, I will now briefly outline the structure of the rest of the book. The next chapter will give a closer impression of the major principles of the British political system and try to deduce the essence of the “Westminster-style of government’s” principles that might be at odds with the

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increasing territorialisation of the country. After that, I will enter a broader reflection of the concept of “party competition” (Sect. 3.1). Then, I will delve deeper into the connection between the territorialisation of electoral support and party competition as well as the question how the plurality voting system limits or exaggerates the effects of this relationship (Sect. 3.2). My fourth chapter will be devoted to a closer examination of the role of devolution within my outlined nexus. In the first subchapter, I will try to illustrate how general problems in the handling of devolution reform created a growing number of incoherencies with pre-existing political structures which conversely increased the chances of constitutional crises (Sect. 4.1). In a second subchapter, I will take a closer look at how gaps in the current settlement could be addressed and which potential effects these reforms would have on party competition (Sect. 4.2). This is followed by a chapter on the technical and methodological aspects of the study. Here, I will lay out the study’s time frame and some problems concerning the long-term analysis of party competition in plurality voting systems (Sect. 5.1). Second, it will be necessary to operationalise my concept of party competition (Sect. 5.2). The sixth and seventh chapters will be the main empirical part of my study. Here, I will discuss the regional development of the various indicators of party competition. This analysis is divided into two larger parts. In the sixth chapter, my focus lies on researching the historical development of these indicators from 1950 to 2019. In Chap. 7, different mobilisation scenarios will be projected on the actual election results to estimate how the changes in competitiveness have affected the stability of government. In a summarising chapter, I will return to my initial problem of institutional incongruence and try to reflect how the evolution of decentralisation might exacerbate negative developments of party competition and what the British case can tell us about these developments in general.

Chapter 2

The Principles of Majoritarian Government

The first major aspect to take a look at when trying to illuminate the problematic consequences of devolution is fairly obviously the pre-existing political system in which it is introduced. Typically, procedures and institutions of decentralisation or devolution are the result of active social engineering, meaning that they are planned out in some government office or cabinet meetings. This leads to a major problem, the consequences of these reforms are only “assumed” and cannot be ensured after all. No matter how much foresighted investigation and outcome calculation is done, the confrontation of blueprints with political reality can still lead to unintended outcomes. The gravest of these potential problems is that the new institutional layer undermines the already existing political order (which is one of the reasons why many decentralising reforms are very narrowly focussed or devolve administrative more often than decision-making tasks). In order to identify such potential threats, it is therefore necessary to outline the most basic institutional and procedural principles that have to be preserved in order to ensure the general functionality of the system. When trying to capture the general “essence” of a democratic political system, the typological distinction of between “majoritarian” and “consensual” democracies by Lijphart (2012, 1999, 1984) is a good starting point because he regards these two prototypical forms of democracies as expressions of different democratic “virtues” or goals. These goals are either democratic inclusiveness or the preservation of the originality of the people’s will, with the first being emphasised in consensual democracies and the second being embodied in majoritarian systems (Lijphart 2012: 1–2, 1999: 1–2). Even though Lijphart’s distinction between majoritarian and consensual democracies has been challenged empirically and theoretically (Kaiser et al. 2002; Ganghof 2005a, b; Nagel 2000), his typology is not only useful in this case because of its pervasiveness, but also for two reasons related to my specific research subject. First, his differentiation includes all the elements that are central to my study (party competition, government type and the vertical division of power). Second, although Lijphart (2012: 20) admits that the UK underwent a number of constitutional changes that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_2

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moved it away from the majoritarian end of the spectrum the kingdom still remains one of the typical cases of a Westminster democracy. In general, the functional logic of prototypical majoritarian democracies1 relies on the combination of high government stability and sovereignty, traditionally realised through a clear-cut parliamentary majority of a single party, and a strong capability of the electorate to sanction the government by the means of elections (Lijphart 1999: 6–7; Farrell 2011: 23–25; Duverger 1984: 36–39). These two elements can be interpreted as complementary (Lijphart 2012: 2). Westminster democracies lack both, strong (formal and informal) intrainstitutional controls in form of frequent coalition governments, strong parliamentary opposition rights or intraparty power diffusion as well as interinstitutional controls in form of powerful veto players, “checks and balances” or “Gewaltenverschränkung”. As a result, responsiveness, or at least the prevention of the abuse of power, lies in the hands of the electorate, which has the primary responsibility to sanction the government’s actions (King 2015: 81–93). This also means that elections, and thereby party competition, play a significantly different role for the political system than they do in consensual democracies. To employ the terminology of Fukuyama (2014: 24), both types differ in the kind of “accountability” (substantial or procedural) they emphasise. “Substantial accountability” means that the control process is focussed on ensuring the reflection of people’s policy preferences in government policy, while “procedural accountability” rather emphasises the direct personal control of political actors by means of deselection (Kaiser et al. 2002: 314–317). Accordingly, consensual democracies, from the population’s point of view, rely more strongly on substantial than procedural accountability; while majoritarian democracies depend more strongly on the operation of procedural than substantial accountability, or what is defined as “government-centred mandate theory” by McDonald and Budge (2005: 3–4, 11–12). This systemic difference in the role of elections is also empirically supported by Anderson and Guillory (1997) and theoretically shown by Kaiser et al. (2002). While empirically there is no structural difference in the overall democratic satisfaction between the populations of majoritarian and consensual democracies, the satisfaction of “winners” and “losers” in both types is highly unequal. As Anderson and Guillory (1997: 76–78) outline, majoritarian democracies exhibit a major gap in satisfaction depending on whether an individual voted for the incumbent government, while consensus democracies display more homogenous levels. Accordingly, the ability to control the government by means of deselection is not critical to consensus democracies’ long-term survival, since, in terms of the legitimacy perception, it hardly makes a difference whether people supported the governing parties in the elections. In majoritarian systems, however, the population’s evaluation of the political system 1 The

term “majoritarian democracy” is used here because of its high publicity, despite the critique that has been directed towards Lijphart’s operationalisation of the concept (Ganghof 2005a, Giuliani 2016, Taagepera 2003). According to Ganghof (2005a: 417–418) the United Kingdom should rather be termed as a “pluralitäre” (pluralitarian) democracy in order to delineate it from the “real” majoritarian democracies of Scandinavia. Lijphart (2012: 12) later also conceded that it might be “more accurate” to call it a “pluralitarian democracy”. Accordingly, whenever I use the term “majoritarian democracy”, I imply Ganghof’s pluralitarian connotation.

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is much more strongly linked to who is in power, which not only makes it a necessity, from democratic theory’s point of view but also from a democratic practice’s, to have “majority rule cycling” (McGann 2004: 70–71, also see Mair 2009: 288–289; Lijphart 2012: 30–31; Sartori 2005: 165, 170; Stolz 2018: 3). The role of elections in both types can therefore be summarised as following: In consensual democracies, the possibility of government change by elections is enough to create sufficient legitimacy because the diffusion of power ensures that the electoral minority’s interests are adequately represented in policy output. In majoritarian democracies, elections have to result in regular government changes because they are the only way to control and potentially modify the government’s policy output. Empirically, this principle of regularly changing majorities has been a remarkably stable feature of the UK (Sartori 2005: 166). Specifically, from the end of Tory domination during the Napoleonic Wars, with the Wellington-Peel administration in 1830, until the first Thatcher government in 1979, no party has been able to lead the country for more than two full legislative terms, correspondingly ten years, with the exceptions of the two war coalitions2 and the Conservative governments of 1951–1964. While several administrations managed to survive for more than two consecutive elections, they were unable to exploit the right to call early elections to extend their lifetime over this “natural” expiration date. The regular and periodic change of the government has therefore not only been a theoretical requirement of the majoritarian system of government but also the empirical outcome of its realworld operation. However, since the Thatcher government this feature has become less reliable and less frequent. This leads me to two further requirements that determine the operation and functioning of elections in majoritarian democracies, the changeability of government and the necessity of clear-cut majorities (Duverger 1984: 32–34, 37–38). Both aspects are strongly influenced by the voting system. Traditionally, majoritarian democracies employ either majority or plurality voting systems (Lijphart 2012: 130). The important point to note is that majority and plurality voting systems are strongly connected to the internal logic of Westminster democracies because they facilitate clear-cut parliamentary majorities and ease their changeability (Curtice 2015b: 38–39, 2010a: 624–625; Duverger 1984: 33–35). First, the creation of stable majorities is mostly a result of the so-called cube law (Duverger 1964; Rae 1967; Kendall and Stuart 1950; Laakso 1979; Schrodt 1981).3 Empirically, the cube law describes the effect that, under a plurality voting system, parties winning the popular vote tend to win far larger seat than vote majorities (Farrell 1997: 27–28). This effect is practically an extension of the typical disproportionality 2 The

coalitions of both World Wars were special constellations in various aspects (Morgan 1978, Marquand 1978, Taylor 1978): they originated from major crises predating the war, no party held a majority in the HoC at the time of their formation, the leading parties split over the coalition and both coalitions ended under different majorities than they had been initiated under. 3 However, the cube law is also strongly criticised by some scholars, most notably Edward Tufte (1973: 544–546), for its theoretical shortcomings and low predictive value in other cases than the UK.

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of vote:seat ratios between “large” and “small” parties4 and the relationship of the vote distribution between the two largest parties. These differences are the result of the necessity to secure local majorities in order to achieve parliamentary representation in such voting systems. Typically, there are certain regional distributions that favour individual parties (I will discuss this in further detail in Sect. 3.2). For smaller parties, a high vote concentration in a few constituencies will provide it with the highest seat returns (Grofman 2001: 302; Curtice 2010a: 625–629, 2015b: 33–37, 2018: 33–36). Larger parties on the other hand profit more from a homogenous nationwide distribution (Johnston et al. 2001: 32–38). Crudely summarised, the more individual parties’ distributions deviate from this rule of the thumb, the less linear the general vote:seat ratio will end up. But the structural disadvantaging of smaller parties is only one side of the coin, the second critical point lies in the relationship of the largest parties’ vote distribution. As Caramani (2004: 1–9, 2005: 296–297) shows, parties borne out of the functional conflict between capital and labour, tended to “nationalise” over the last century, meaning they increased their “territorial coverage” by contesting constituencies across the whole country and, later on, homogenised their support across all constituencies. As long as the general support of both major contenders reached comparable levels, this process also secured a very high level of electoral competitiveness (Curtice 2010a: 629–633, 2018: 31–33). Since both parties had about the same amount of support in most constituencies, even a small vote swing would lead to significant seat swings. However, the less homogenous this vote distribution and the larger the difference in general support between the two parties is, the lower and less likely the effects of the cube law will be (Duverger 1964: 322–324; Rae 1967: 27–29; Kendall and Stuart 1950; Laakso 1979; Schrodt 1981). The degree of disproportionality of both aspects (vote swing:seat swing ratio for the major parties, vote:seat ratios of smaller and larger parties) finally determines the prevalence of clear-cut majorities and the changeability of existing majorities. Accordingly, the effectiveness and viability of pluralitarian voting systems has to be measured by their ability to hand the winning party a working majority because they are specifically designed to facilitate this effect, especially in cases of close voting results (Farrell 1997: 12–13; Nohlen 2009: 428–433). Not delivering a clearcut majority is therefore not simply an oddity but a sign of systemic failure that questions the legitimacy of the whole voting system (Curtice 2010a: 636, 2015b: 38–40). As Curtice points out, the inherent unfairness of punishing “minor” parties and mostly rewarding the two major parties is only justified by guaranteeing a stable government and presenting voters with a clear-cut and predictable choice between two government alternatives. These advantages are lost once the system regularly fails to deliver such decisive results, deteriorating into simple unfairness without any advantages. But failing to provide regular government turnovers and/or clear-cut majorities not only cripples the effectiveness of the central control mechanism, it also has far 4 When

using the terms of “smaller” and “larger” parties, I will usually refer to the amount of the national vote share they can secure. Deviating use of the terms will be explicitly indicated.

2 The Principles of Majoritarian Government

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reaching, negative consequences on how an evaluation of the government’s record is reached because it necessarily dilutes political responsibilities and impedes the public’s ability to judge the accountability of political actors (Sartori 2001: 101; Katz 1980: 3). In general, the publicly perceived chain of responsibility in Westminsterstyle governments is quite short. Typically, the ruling party is solely made responsible for all government actions, because its clear majority, the strict party discipline and the broad powers invested in parliament allow it to address challenges in almost every way it seems fit (King 2015: 82; McDonald and Budge 2005: 213). This becomes considerably more difficult once a governing party has no working majority on its own and either leads a multiparty coalition government or has to rely on changing case-by-case majorities. While minority governments are inherently unstable and therefore hard to reconcile with all of the above discussed pluralitarian mechanisms and functionalities of majoritarian democracies (Lijphart 2012: 123), multiparty governments are technically able to fulfil the requirements of a strong and stable government. Irrespectively, they still create significant problems for the aforementioned aspect of government control. These difficulties are twofold. On the one hand, they make it more difficult to vote the government out of office. Complete turnovers of coalition governments are quite hard to achieve because in order to guarantee them, they require either a concentration of the swing vote in favour of a single opposition party or a devastating collapse of all coalition partners (Lijphart 2012: 6–7; Schofield 1993; Blondel 1968: 194–198). If the electoral result does not deliver a single-party majority, at least one member of the incumbent coalition retains a chance to return to the government benches through negotiations. These negotiations represent another specific problem of coalition governments for majoritarian democracies because they cannot be controlled by the electorate (Powell 2000: 23; Schoen 2005: 597). Even if parties express a clear “Koalitionsaussage” (coalition preference), voters can hardly express whether they support it or not through their voting behaviour (Mattila and Raunio 2004: 282–283). Again, this loss of decisiveness is not just a simple drawback, but rather a crippling liability. The main purpose of procedural control can only be fulfilled as long as the population directly decides whether the incumbent government should continue its work or has to go. Whenever a coalition is needed to determine the final composition of the government, this control is effectively handed back to the politicians, who should rather be held accountable by it (Farrell 2011: 14). In addition, it also conflicts with the principle of predictability of the electoral choice. The general advantage of the strong simplification of preference formation in two-party systems with plurality voting is that it offers a clear choice between two governments in waiting (Kavanagh 1990: 113–115). This predictability is lost once either the content of government policy or the composition of government itself is determined in proverbial smokefilled back rooms (Powell 2000: 23; Farrell 2011: 14; Schoen 2005: 597). On the other hand, coalitions make it much harder to evaluate the government’s actions because they blur and protract the normally very short and simple chain of responsibility (Sartori 2001: 101). This problem is also twofolded. First, it simply makes responsibility more complex by adding multiple actors and potential sources of government policy, while, second, it blunts the traditional tool provided to the

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electorate to evaluate the government. The increase in the level of complexity is quite obvious. As I have already noted, in the UK the government is normally held responsible collectively (Bogdanor 2009: 142–144). The significant power the Prime Minister wields over the cabinet plus the parliamentary party and the strict party discipline foster this perception and lend it reasonable legitimacy. In the case of a coalition, none of these principles can be guaranteed. Secondly, the government’s record is typically judged by how successful and to which degree it implemented its electoral manifesto. In consensus democracies, manifestos provide an indication of the maximum demands a party will raise and outline the “price” it will seek in coalition negotiations (Martin and Stevenson 2010; Laver and Shepsle 1996; Bräuninger and Debus 2008). Hardly any voter or party member ever expects all those demands to be implemented, at least as long as the party is unable to secure an outright majority (Downs 1957a: 146–150). While parties in coalition governments retrospectively tend to emphasise selective policy details that have been realised thanks to their efforts, single-party governments instead have to prove the exhaustiveness of their manifesto’s implementation. Accordingly, in majoritarian systems manifestos are, at least theoretically, worth more than the paper they are written on because all actors take these promises far more seriously, with voters and parliamentary opposition directly comparing them with the results of the government’s work. Once again, situations of unclear parliamentary majorities or multiparty governments annul these mechanisms, putting pressure on the feasibility of the whole political system (Yong 2012: 38–40). Summarising my results so far, we have seen that Westminster-style democracies concentrate power in the hands of the parliamentary majority, even though in political reality it has shifted towards the government controlling the parliamentary majority, invest the responsibility of government control in their electorates, turning elections into the primary tool of control, and that elections are designed to facilitate clear-cut choices and parliamentary mandates. Therefore, the major danger for the political system that might arise from party competition is the inability to either produce those clear majorities or ensure popular control through regular majority cycling. Finally, we have seen that the principle of concentration and slimming down of complexities is universal in ideal majoritarian democracies, at least at this very general level of the political system’s mechanics, as well as that these “simplifications” logically connect various processes and institutions (Bogdanor 2009: 10–21; Flinders 2010: 75–76). Although, as I tried to briefly outline in the introduction, majoritarian systems seemed to be more resilient to institutional blockades from a theoretical perspective, this connectedness bears a more serious danger of institutional incompatibility because majoritarian institutions are less segmented than those of consensual democracies and therefore tend to drag problems occurring in one institution over to those connected to it rather than isolating them at their point of origin.

Chapter 3

The Structure of Party Competition in the United Kingdom

In this chapter, I will discuss three aspects of party competition. First, I will outline some general aspects of the concept by giving a brief overview of the existing literature on the subject, then clarify the different analytical dimensions by which the concept is differentiated in those empirical and theoretical studies and outline which of these understandings I have adapted for my study. In a second part, I will discuss the role of the territorial boundedness of electoral support for party competition. Also, the role of the electoral system will be reviewed in some more detail, and I will specifically outline how it acts as an institutional limitation of party competition.

3.1 The Concept of Party Competition I begin my discussion on the concept of party competition with some general remarks on its scholarly usage. At the first glance, party competition is not a new or “special” concept. We can find dozens of book and articles dealing with the term “party competition” in general (some more recent examples are Elias et al. 2015; Massetti and Schakel 2015; Meyer and Müller 2014; Albright 2010) and even more publications analysing “electoral competition” in the UK (e.g. Johnston et al. 2012b; Johnston and Pattie 2011; Mair 2009; Helms 2006; Dunleavy and Margetts 2005; Dunleavy 2005; Pogorelis et al. 2005; Webb 2004; Sanders 2002; Dearlove and Saunders 2000; Budge 1996; Bogdanor and Field 1993; Johnston 1981; Punnett 1981; Crewe 1976; Robertson 1976). But if we look more closely at the literature on party competition in general and the specific situation in the UK, some serious shortcomings and flaws come to light. For the sheer amount of literature dealing with it, its theoretical concept is gravely underdeveloped. Except for a few works (Bartolini 1999, 2000; Caramani 2004; Adams 2001; McDonald and Budge 2005; Budge 1994; Sartori 2005; Robertson 1976), which try to develop a proper theoretical background of the concept; most writings lack a coherent framework. Instead “party competition” is often used as a catch phrase for everything ranging from aspects like individual © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_3

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voting behaviour over party manifesto issues to conditions of government formation (Bartolini 1999: 435–436, 2002: 84; Strøm 1989: 278). While the term is generally used in a very broad sense, in the context of the UK, it is often understood in a too narrow sense. In general, the focal point of interest or dependent variable of the respective research designs is voting behaviour and its main discussion revolves, at least at some point, around the cardinal question, shaped by Butler and Stokes’ (1970) seminal work “Political Change in Britain”, whether British voting behaviour is primarily determined by rationalist considerations or non-rationalist, affective predispositions (Webb 2004: 21–22; Sanders 2002: 81– 82; Budge 1996: 21; Madgwick 1994: 296–297; Crewe 1976: 34–35). Tied to this question is also the general dispute about the accurate use and interpretation of individual and macro-level data (Dunleavy and Margetts 2005: 869–870; Dunleavy 2005: 500–510). Having outlined some of the very basic features of party competition research, I will take a closer look at what actually constitutes “competition”. Starting with the shared aspects of “party competition”, we are left with a short list. The only undisputed element I could identify and that is relevant to my study is the goal of party competition, the control of the national government (Rossiter et al. 1999: 333– 334; Mair 1996: 90; Laver and Hunt 1992: 2; Bartolini 1999: 445; Klingemann et. al 1994: 23; Callander 2005: 1122; Sartori 2005: 122–123; Katz and Mair 1995: 6–7; Downs 1957a: 96–97; Katz 1980: 4). The list of elements that are disputed or vary considerably from study to study is quite extensive. In the following, I will give a short presentation of these disputed issues that are of importance to my own study. I will try to summarise different individual notions under some broader, defining elements of competition that every scholar employing the concept has to address during his or her research. Specifically, I have pooled them under the aspects of timeframe, the role of parties, dimensionality and the subject of competition: 1.

Timeframe: The critical question here is when or at which phases of the political process “competition” or its most relevant aspects take place? While researchers with a narrow understanding of the concept tend to restrict it to the phase of campaigns and elections (e.g. Sani and Sartori 1983; Meguid 2005; Callander 2005), others (notably Laver and Hunt 1992; Schofield 1993; Laver 1998: 17, 22) practically regard competition as a never-ending circle that stretches over the whole Legislaturperiode (parliamentary term). According to the second understanding, we face multiple phases of competition (elections, coalition negotiations, candidate selections, issue framing) which take part in different arenas, but are unified by the overarching goal of assuming control over the national government at the next election (Laver and Hunt 1992: 2). A second aspect of the timeframe is rather obvious, but often disregarded. As Meguid (2008: 10) points out, competition takes place not over one but several legislative circles. Assuming that parties are rational actors, they should act quite differently depending on whether they have to win just a single or regular elections (Grofman 2004: 38–39; Bartolini 1999: 440). Trying to capture the

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essence of party competition by looking at individual elections is therefore to some degree inadequate because it practically presupposes and limits parties exclusively to tactical behaviour. Subject of Party Competition: A second dividing line concerns the group of people who are the subject or object of party competition. The first approach here is characterised by the idea that only certain segments of the electorate are usually sensitive to parties’ electoral efforts (Strøm 1989: 280–281; Bartolini 1999: 463–466). Adherents of this approach are primarily interested in the numerical extent and strategic “location” of these voters (Bartolini 1999, 2000; Sani and Sartori 1983; Caramani 2003, 2004, 2005; Evans 2002; Mair 1997; Strøm 1989; Broh and Levine 1978). Here, the rest of the electorate is “encapsulated” from normal campaign efforts, either because they will vote for a specific party irrespective of what is offered during the campaign or they process information so selectively that it only reaffirms their already existing political beliefs. Since the majority of the electorate is more or less inclined to prefer a specific party parties should rather focus on “getting out the vote” by mobilising their own supporters, or those close to it, than trying to convince people who would otherwise not vote for them (Sani and Sartori 1983: 330–335). This interpretation is also often associated with theories and concepts of long-term political alignment, like party identification and political socialisation (Laver and Hunt 1992: 9–10; Bartolini and Mair 1990: 194–195). The second approach came to prominence thanks to the work of the Party Manifesto Group or Manifesto Research Group (MRG). The group’s work allowed extensive and international comparative analyses of parties’ policy positions as well as direct comparison with voters’ policy position (Callander 2005; Kollman et al. 1998; Klingemann et al. 1994; Schofield 1993; Robertson 1976). As a result, this group of scholars concludes that competition is not primarily about mobilising voters, but rather about achieving policy congruence between parties’ political programs and voters’ interests (Downs 1957b: 139–142; Callander 2005: 1121–1122; Shepsle 1972: 558; Robertson 1976: 25–31; Adams 2001: 121–124). This leads to a completely different reasoning about party and voter behaviour. If the general impetus of voting behaviour is to maximise preferred policy returns, every person can be won over by simply offering the favoured policy position on every issue deemed relevant by that person (Downs 1957b: 36–45). As a result, the parties’ campaign focus shifts towards the whole population and the critical problem parties have to solve lies not in getting people to vote but in figuring out the optimal policy positions to maximise vote returns (Adams 2001: 129–138; Callander 2005: 1133–1136; Shepsle 1972: 556–561). Role of Parties in Party Competition: The question here is whether or to what extent “party competition” is actually competition between parties, or in other words, whether it is an exogenous or endogenous phenomenon (Bartolini 2000: 35–37, 2002: 96–97; Sani and Sartori 1983: 334; Budge 2006: 431; Laver and Hunt 1992: 8). Historically, since Downs (1957a) and Duverger (1964), electoral competition has been regarded as being exclusively determined by exogenous influences (Laver and Hunt 1992: 8–9), namely voters’ demands and

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institutional features like the electoral system. In these understandings parties act as “just adaptive machines” (Bartolini 2002: 97) and failing to abide by the voters’ will would inevitably result in defeat. Importantly, the mechanisms of electoral competition itself would automatically ensure that parties obey voters’ demands or are pushed to the margins of the political system, either through the appearance of new parties or retrospective evaluation of party behaviour by the electorate (Downs 1957a: 49–50, 113; Grofman 2004: 33–36). The electoral system, on the other hand, directly and indirectly guides parties’ actions by the effects described in Duverger’s Law (Cox 1997; Schoen 2005: 584–600; Nohlen 2009: 441–449). Therefore, established parties in plurality voting systems are further forced to converge around the median voter or limit their own chances of winning enough seats to become part of the government (Budge 1994: 443–447). Conversely, especially Katz and Mair’s (1995: 19–25) “cartel party” concept furthered the understanding of the discrete powers parties obtain once they become part of the “political establishment”. They argue that parties in matured democracies have significant means to manipulate not only the electoral market, but also people’s demands and the salience of political issues. The intensity and content of party competition therefore depends on what individual parties and the party system as a whole make out of it. In addition, the understanding of parties as monolithic actors has been increasingly challenged during the 1990s and 2000s implying that individual party segments could hold interests that vary considerably or even be quite contrary (Bolleyer 2009, 2012; Bolleyer and Ruth-Lovell 2019; Laver 1998: 21–22; Katz and Mair 1993). Based on Katz and Mair’s (1993: 595–600) differentiation of intra-party groups it is argued that only certain actors would primarily seek government office, while others prefer to protect the “purity” of a party’s political programme. In summary, the discussion highlights the problem of parties’ discretionary powers in shaping peoples’ political preferences and opinions. Adherents to the Downsian understanding of electoral politics mostly deny or at least heavily constrict parties’ abilities to autonomously influence competition. Researchers of internal party structures on the other hand tend to underline parties’ discrete capabilities either to steer voters’ policy demands or encapsulate certain segments of the population from competition. The Dimensionality of Party Competition: This aspect, at first glance counterintuitively, revolves around the question of whether there is a maximum point of “competitiveness”. As Bartolini (1999: 437, 2000: 55–61) argues, the answer to this question depends on whether competition is understood as a multidimensional or unidimensional concept. Before discussing the different positions on this issue, it is necessary to first clarify what “dimensionality” actually means. Most works assume “multidimensionality” once the number of relevant issue dimensions determining the final voting decisions exceeds one (Albright 2010; Stoll 2011; Schofield 1993; Lijphart 2009; Budge and Farlie 1978; Kollman et al. 1998).

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However, as Bartolini (1999: 437) points out, this understanding of “multidimensionality” is rather misleading and theoretically irrelevant because it does not change the general mechanism of how competition is determined. The addition of further independent voting determinants only demands that parties pay attention to more than one factor, but it does not change the overall logic of parties’ strategic decision-making processes. Therefore, the crucial problem lies not in the number of relevant issues but in how interdependent they are: We can only speak of multidimensionality when different competition dimensions interact and changes in party behaviour or competition conditions on one level leads to changes in competitiveness on other levels (Bartolini 2000: 55–59). Returning to the initial question, in unidimensional interpretations it is generally possible to define one (or under some very specific configurations multiple) point(s) of maximum competitiveness. Accordingly, it is possible for parties to devise a priori vote maximising strategies and, therefore, act in a prototypically rationalist fashion (Adams 2001: 122). Under Bartolini’s interpretation, the situation will never be this straightforward. As long as the benefits and costs of actively changing the degree of competitiveness do not change linearly between different dimensions, conscious vote maximisation is very difficult. However, the even more problematic point lies in the fact that other parties’ actions also influence the competitiveness of the different levels (Bartolini 2000: 59–60). Bartolini adds another critical point by highlighting that not only might the costs and returns vary between the different dimensions but also the, so to say, “currency” returned to the actors (Bartolini 2000: 55–57). While it is obvious which decision is rational if a party has to choose between the status quo and a policy change that will lose it 5000 actual voters but deliver 10,000 new ones, the situation is much more complicated if the option is to trade the definite loss of 5000 voters to its rival for motivating 50,000 former non-voters to vote without reliably knowing their preference. As I have tried to illustrate, the concept of party competition is far more open to interpretation and comprises of far fewer common features than its wide-spread empirical use would suggest. Accordingly, it is necessary to transparently lay out which of the manifold aspects of competition one is going to analyse or explicitly address and which of the different understandings about voters’ and parties’ behaviours will be used as the basic framework of competition. I will try to do this for the remainder of this chapter by first outlining which interpretation of the four aspects discussed above I have adopted for the concept used in my study. Afterwards, I will illustrate the competition model by Bartolini (1999, 2000) in more detail because it reflects my considerations particularly well. Beginning with the framing question, I have outlined that it strongly revolves around the assumption that the preferences and behaviour of the relevant actors changes between different phases (Budge 2006: 429–430). Since I am interested in the extent of competition rather than how it changes between different political phases, the time framing question is not profusely relevant to my study for two reasons.

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On the one hand, since coalition governments remain political “oddities” in the UK, run against the functional logic of pluralitarian democracies (see Chap. 2), are met with extreme hostility by the British electorate (Walker, 26 Mar 2015) and are procured in a rather clumsy fashion by the political actors (Finn 2015a: 496–498, 518–519) the impact of coalition considerations on competition should be minuscule. Britain’s most prominent constitutional scholar, Vernon Bogdanor (2016: 40), eloquently summarised this hazardous cumulative effect of coalitions on British parties as follows: “The 1918 Lloyd George coalition destroyed the Liberals as a party of government; the 1931 National Government destroyed the Liberals as a party of opposition; the 2010 coalition destroyed the Liberal Democrats as a third party, both in the Commons, where they were superseded by the SNP and in the country, where they were superseded by UKIP.” Trying to actively use coalition politics in order to increase one’s competiveness within the party system thus seems like a highly unrewarding strategy at large. On the other hand, as I have outlined before, majoritarian political systems, especially those with plurality election systems and a two-party system, focus their political conflict on a polarising antagonism between two different government programmes or political visions in general. Therefore, although there might be certain situations of interparty cooperation, the systemic logic of majoritarian democracies demands a high degree of competition and rivalry between the major political actors (Ware 1996: 154–155). Accordingly, active collusion or cooperation should only be political tools for very specific situations of exceptional pressures that can only be overcome by broad political unity (Butler 1978: 116–117). As a result, I think it is appropriate to assess British party competition by narrowly focussing on the electoral phase itself. As I have indicated in the last passage, concerning the second conceptual dimension I will focus on the numerical extent of party competition, instead of its political content. A central reason for this approach lies in the problem that the MRG’s understanding of electoral competition, and the rational choice approach in the Downsian tradition in general, meets several strong limitations (Koleman et al. 1998: 140–143; Rodden 2010; Laver and Hunt 1992: 4–6; Budge 1994: 443–446; Lijphart 1995; Grofman 2004; Stokes 1963; Bafumi and Herron 2010) when applied to pluralitarian voting systems and especially to the UK. While certain problems of the approach have been addressed quite extensively by Robertson (1976) and Adams (2001) both authors still failed to overcome the general problem lying in the alleged mechanism of policy changes as reactions to electoral defeats. Robertson (1976: 38–44) outlines the vote maximising paradigm as a central weakness of Downs’ model and shows how parties are able to rationally deviate from it, but his design of policy issues (from which he draws his empirical conclusions) is highly problematic since he basically disregards the transformative effect of the Beveridge Report. Meanwhile, Adam’s major theoretical assumptions about parties’ policy adaptiveness as a result of electoral outcomes are individually proven by the empirical evidence, but the data far less convincingly supports his overarching, general framework and he disregards potential conflicts between seat and vote maximisation incentives already addressed by Robertson (Adams 2001: 134–135). Therefore, even these major modifications of

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the initial model fail to overcome significant the gaps between the Downsian model’s expectations about pluralitarian voting systems and their real-world operation. Turning to the third dimension of party competition, it should have become clear by now that I agree with Bartolini (1999, 2000, 2002), Katz and Mair (1993, 1995) and other scholars (Bolleyer 2009, 2012; Laver 1998; Budge 1994) assuming a significant degree of discrete agency of political parties in party competition. My major concern with parties’ autonomous agency in plurality voting systems lies in their ability to bridge the gap between their electoral support and the corresponding parliamentary outcome. I think it to be more rational that parties are not primarily concerned with securing a popular majority, but rather with achieving a parliamentary majority (Robertson 1976: 52; Callander 2005: 1122). However, with this goal not being strictly aligned to abiding with the general electorate’s political preferences, parties’ actions should rather be guided by considerations about their own abilities to steer or manipulate competition using means such as selective issue highlighting, regional targeting or demobilisation techniques (Robertson 1976; Callander 2005; Bartolini 2000; Katz and Mair 1995; Rodden 2010). This does not mean that competition is completely, endogenously determined, but at least to a certain degree parties can not only overcome vote maximising strategies, but also influence the actual political demands of the population (Bartolini 2000: 37–51). Therefore, I regard parties’ campaigning abilities or electoral “performance” as a two-sided phenomenon. Concerning the fourth aspect the question of how multidimensionality is constituted is not of particular importance to me since I am not interested in the content of competition, but rather the aspects of its strategic limitations. Still, I share the reservations voiced by adherents of the multidimensionality approach towards the idea of competitiveness maximisation (Bartolini 1999: 437) and generally assume, as briefly outlined in last paragraph, that there exist various “rational” campaign strategies for individual parties. Having finished my discussion on the general aspects of the party competition concept I will now outline how I actually try to empirically and theoretically capture “party competition” in my study. To do this, I will employ the major conceptual dimensions of Bartolini’s (1999, 2000, 2002; Bartolini and Mair 1990) theoretical framework, which I consider the most sophisticated and comprehensive attempt to capture the theoretical essence of the concept. Although Bartolini discusses certain empirical indicators for some of his concept’s dimensions (Bartolini 1999: 467–468, 2000: 53), he does not provide a full operationalisation of it. D’Alimonte and Bartolini (1998) and Bartolini and D’Alimonte (1998) can be regarded as auspicious first efforts to apply the complex concept to empirical research, but are also very specific adaptions to the Italian case and cannot be directly used as a general framework for empirical analysis. Accordingly, I will have to outline how I intend to operationalise his theoretical dimensions in some more detail later (see Sect. 5.2). The basis for Bartolini’s concept is the fairly simple but crucial understanding of parties as autonomous actors (Bartolini 1999: 435–437). In order to understand parties’ discrete influence on competition, it is necessary to split up competition into different dimensions with singular properties instead of handling it as a unified phenomenon, as the Downsian approach does (Bartolini 2000: 55–61). Therefore,

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Bartolini proposes a four-dimensional concept in which individual dimensions can increase or decrease their competitiveness, but diametric interaction between the dimensions can lead to changes of competitiveness on the others (Bartolini 2000: 59– 60). As a result, overall party competition in a political system can not be maximised or minimised, but only change its character. Electoral contestability: This concept mostly comprises the classical Duvergian effects of voting systems and the general rules on electoral participation. Besides legislative regulations it involves the practical conditions of victory (how are seats distributed, what is required to form the government) and the “psychological effects” (incumbency bonus, vote wasting effect) produced by the actual party and voting system (Bartolini 1999: 457–460). This factor is decisive for party competition because it allows established parties to “cartelise” competition in the sense of Katz and Mair (1995, also Benoit 2007: 369), thereby enabling them to deviate from votemaximising strategies and instead concentrate on securing the support of critical voter groups, rather than the general electorate (Bartolini 1999: 458). While it is mostly a factor that limits the competition between “insiders” (established parties) and “outsiders” (new parties, parties without parliamentary representation), I would add that it can be become crucial for competition between “insiders” under plurality voting systems. Since the plurality system’s discriminatory effects depend on the territorial distribution of parties’ support, it can also unilaterally penalise certain established parties instead of just third parties (Rodden 2010: 328; Curtice 2017: 17–18; Johnston 2015: 15–19, 2002: 14–25). Electoral availability: This concept describes “what is at stake in the rivalry” (Bartolini 1999: 461). “Availability” is thereby defined as the portion of voters, that is “available to change partisan preference should a better offer be made to [them]” (Bartolini 2002: 93; Strøm 1989: 280–281; Grofman 2004: 34–35; Elkins 1974: 686– 689). As I have already outlined, the Downsian paradigm assumes that, in general, the whole electorate is sensitive, which Bartolini refutes through two contradictory assumptions of the rational choice approach. The first problem is the difference between the decisions whether to vote and for whom to vote. Spatial theories presume that both aspects depend on the same factor, the policy differentials between parties and individual voters (Grofman 2004: 33–36). Therefore, the Downsian paradigm predicts that competition “maximises” the closer both parties’ positions converge around the median voter’s. Bartolini, however, argues that abstentionism should rise to its height in this case, while the decision for whom to vote practically becomes a gamble because the parties’ offers are hardly distinguishable (Bartolini 2000: 33–35, 37). The second problem is how voting decisions are actually formed, or, more specifically whether they are the result of prospective considerations or retrospective evaluation (Budge 1994: 445; McDonald and Budge 2005: 91–110). The Downsian approach gives precedence to reflective evaluation over prospective expectation, but Bartolini points out that its general assumption of parties adjusting their policies in order to reflect voters’ wishes rather implies prospective decision-making (Bartolini 1999: 463–465). Accordingly, if voters primarily act on retrospective evaluation, parties would have no incentive to actively adjust their political programme but rather

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concentrate on implementing and upholding their previous pledges. Instead, Bartolini proposes that both mechanisms of decision-making are theoretically possible and empirically occurring, thereby forcing parties into the problematic situation of balancing the requirements of both. The major empirical problem resulting from this ambiguity is the adequate measurement of the available electorate. Bartolini (1999: 467–468) suggests this has to be done on the individual level and through the individual act of voting for a specific party (Dunleavy 2005: 511–515). Since this is not possible in my study for several reasons (Caramani 2004: 38–42)1 I will adapt an alternative approach. Instead of trying to establish the available electorate directly, I will focus on the campaign performances of parties meaning the vote changes they secured. While Bartolini (1999: 467) says that actual vote shifts do not indicate “availability”, they do show how much the parties can make out of the existing “availability”. I argued earlier that majoritarian democracies not so much depend on the potential of government change, but rather on its actual occurrence, and taking this into account conversely means that the essence of party competition in these democracies is determined, and availability therefore adequately measureable, by what parties actually achieve rather than by what could be achieved. Incumbent vulnerability: Bartolini (2002: 102) defines it as “the possibility for an incumbent government to be ousted and replaced or otherwise modified in its composition as a result of changes in voters’ partisan preferences”. As I have already pointed out, this is the crucial aspect of party competition in majoritarian democracies because competition’s purpose is to ensure the people’s ability to control the government by voting it out of office (Elkins 1974: 682–684). In a perfect majoritarian two-party democracy, vulnerability should be very high because of the clear-cut role allocation of government and opposition and the disproportional translation of small vote swings into major seat swings by the electoral system (Taagepera and Shugart 1989: 158–167). However, the degree of polarisation and long-term alignment conversely lower the probability of vote changes and the extent of the “available” electorate (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 205–206). Empirically, vulnerability can be captured as Bartolini (2000: 53) puts it, by “a ratio between some objective element of closeness of the race at a given moment and some objective element indicating the past competitive performance of the system”. He then proposes a clear measurement method for incumbent vulnerability by relating the distance of the majority threshold to the average aggregate volatility of previous elections (Bartolini 2000: 53). This is, unfortunately, not easily implemented in plurality voting system since the redistricting of electoral constituencies makes it impossible to calculate aggregate volatilities for individual constituencies over longer periods of time (Bogdanor and Field 1993: 220–221). Accordingly, I decided to modify Bartolini’s approach for my 1 The

most obvious problem is the data availability (Caramani 2004: 39). Questions about the probability of voting have only been included in election polls since the 1980s, making it technically impossible to analyse this factor for earlier elections. In addition, even if this data was abundantly available, the fact that electoral competition in plurality voting systems is inherently regional renders data that is only collected at a national level or along national sociodemographic characteristics mostly useless for a meaningful analysis of party competition.

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study and will analyse three factors closely related to his suggestions: the general degree of seat safeness as well as the regional majority and minority vote shares of the parties. Electoral decidability: I have put the fourth dimension at the end of my discussion since it is strongly based on Bartolini’s arguments outlined earlier. Its major implication is that parties’ political offers have to be decidable, and thereby different from each other to a certain degree. As I have said, Bartolini (2000: 34–35) argues that, at the alleged point of maximum competition, the spatial model denies itself because the parties’ offers become indistinguishable and therefore electoral choice turns into a gamble.2 This dimension of Bartolini’s competition concept is the most difficult to implement in long-term analyses since it requires extensive knowledge about the issues and manifestos specific to each campaign. While the MRG has addressed this specific aspect its general approach is, as I have discussed intensively, highly problematic when applied to majoritarian voting systems. Since this dimension is much harder to implement and connect with the data for the previous three dimensions, I will not specifically address it in my study. I should, however, mention that the performance scenarios I calculate in the second part of my empirical analysis will reflect how decisive the factor of decidability is for the competitiveness of the British party system. If the electoral system is able to produce clear-cut majorities in the HoC regardless of how large the swing votes are, then we can assume that the decidability of political offers is fairly unimportant (Curtice 2010a: 629–631, 2018: 31–32). If, however, the distortive effects of the FPTP system are small or becoming smaller, decidability becomes an increasingly important factor because it is required to balance the smaller turnover effect of the voting system (Curtice 2017: 16–19). The reasoning behind this should be clear. The larger the effect of the voting system is, which is conversely determined by the parties’ general structure of support, the less important competition factors arising from the parties’ autonomous handling of the campaign are since the parties do not have to be particularly diligent or active in securing new votes in order to win a majority.

3.2 Structural Limitations of Electoral Competition As I have laid out in the second chapter, the major democratic essence of majoritarian systems is to ensure regular and periodic turnovers of power and provide the ruling party with a clear-cut parliamentary majority. How well this purpose is fulfilled ultimately depends on how equal the stakes of individual parties in the party system as a whole are distributed (Sartori 2005: 170). Normally, these stakes are determined by a party’s popular support, the “available” electorate that would at least consider voting 2 Downs

(1957b: 142) actually includes the necessity of some “product differentiation” but is not explicit about the relationship between differentiation and programmatic convergence around the median voter.

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for the party and the party’s campaign capabilities, meaning the ability to translate the available electorate into actual vote swings (Sani and Sartori 1983: 334–335). However, parties’ stakes in any given electoral system are not directly translated into parliamentary power one-to-one. Instead, the electoral system acts as a transmission mechanism to create parliamentary power out of the aggregate of the parties’ stakes (Schoen 2005: 584–587). What can be seen here at a very general level is that we are faced with a two-level problem, the distinction between electoral outcomes or support on the constituency level and their transformation to the parliamentary level through the plurality voting system. How the voting system translates support into parliamentary seats and why the territorial characteristics of electoral support have such a significant influence on it will be the subject of the following passages. I will, however, limit my observations to the general consequences of a territorialisation of party support on the workability of the electoral system since I will discuss the effects of specific trends of electoral support distribution in greater detail in the empirical part of the study. Since the electoral system basically fulfils a reactive function within this relationship I will start by looking at the implications of different territorial support structures for party competition itself before analysing their theoretical consequences for the operation of the voting system. An answer to the first aspect can be found in Caramani’s (2004, 2005, 2003) comprehensive analysis of western European elections since the early nineteenth century. Looking at the development of politics in democratic societies, Caramani (2004: 1) argues that the overall trend of the twentieth century has been the homogenisation of voting behaviour, leading to the establishment of nationalised politics and a nationalised party system. According to his research, this trend was caused by the replacement of “older”, non-functionalist cleavages by the functionalist capital-labour cleavage over the course of the first half of the twentieth century (Caramani 2004: 28–32). Since this was a development shared, at least to some degree, by all western nations, today’s differences between countries in terms of party systems and electoral support result from the survival of older conflicts and modes of alignment. Accordingly, the degree to which electoral competition, in a broad sense, is nationally homogenous or “territorialised” indicates the significance of the functionalist and pre-modern cleavages, with large degrees of homogeneity pointing to a “modern” conflict structure and high territorialisation indicating the prevalence of premodern modes of alignment (Caramani 2005: 296–297). Caramani (2004: 15–32) argues that older cleavages are tied to certain regions and cannot be transferred to other geographic areas since the territory itself holds the sociodemographic reason responsible for the existence of the political conflict. The capital-labour cleavage, however, is not tied to a specific territory since it is largely based on the occupational or, more broadly, economic status of an individual and moves with the individual rather than being bound to a specific territory. Therefore, initially it made no sense for parties to run or heavily invest in regions not displaying the sociodemographic characteristics they were targeting, practically limiting party competition (Caramani 2003: 434–435). Only the erosion of social barriers and territorial resistance through industrialisation, active centralist state-building, the extension of the franchise and the

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appearance of modern challenger parties transformed the basic conditions of party competition in a way that forced the established parties to modify their electoral appeal and behaviour. To measure the degree of “territorialisation”, Caramani uses two main indicators: the coverage of constituencies a party contests (Caramani 2003: 415–417) and the territorial homogeneity of electoral support received by it throughout all constituencies of the country (Caramani 2005: 297–300). Parties solely built around older cleavages should only show a low-to-medium degree of coverage, depending on the size and electoral population of the concerned territory, and high to very high territorial disparities in voter support on the national level (Caramani 2004: 111–153).3 The degree of coverage is only of limited interest in my case since I am primarily looking at “national” parties that contest almost all constituencies. Caramani’s (2004: 61–63, 2005: 299–300) second indicator is the degree of territorial homogeneity which describes how uniform a party’s vote is distributed among the different electoral districts of the country. The basic assumption and major result of his study is that countries which are dominated by the functional capital-labour cleavage should display a homogenous distribution of support for parties originating from this cleavage. Conversely, parties based on platforms of older pre-modern cleavages should display large disparities in voting results across different electoral districts (Caramani 2004: 1–8). The reason for this is the aforementioned problem of the inherently territorial nature of these older conflicts. While the core support groups of parties that campaign on non-functionalist cleavages (farmers, religious or ethnic minorities) might migrate in larger numbers to other electoral districts as a result of broader social or economic developments, it is unlikely that this would lead to a geographic expansion of the concerned parties’ support bases. After examining his indicators for the territorialisation of western European democracies, Caramani (2004: 310) concludes that “for Belgium and Switzerland, in particular (but also for Britain), there is no inconsistency between the degree of territorial coverage and the measures of homogeneity both indicating territorial cleavages. It is the main parties themselves that are regionalised (emphasis by the author)”. Therefore, even among the 17 states researched in his study, Caramani finds the UK to be one of the three most territorialised societies in terms of electoral support, specifically because of the major parties’ heterogeneity of support. This should be extremely surprising for a country that is dominated by two major parties and, according to the traditional interpretations of British electoral politics (Pulzer 1968; Butler and Stokes 1970; Sartori 2005; Sani and Sartori 1983; Lijphart 1999), representative of a single-issue or single-cleavage society. This should become even more puzzling if we compare the UK with the two most highly territorialised countries. Looking at their results in Lijphart’s (1999: 76–77) comparative study, we can see that Switzerland scores an effective number of parties between 4.71 and 6.7 (mean of 5.24) and Belgium between 2.45 and 6.51 (mean of 4.32), compared to the UK’s 3 It

is important to note that this requires considering constituencies the party is not contesting. Looking only at those contested by it, geographic disparities should be just mediocre to low (see the respective discussion for Spain and Switzerland, Caramani 2004: 112–117).

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1.99–2.27 (mean of 2.11). This is also broadly mirrored by the conflict dimension results. Both Switzerland and Belgium reach three points (Lijphart 1999: 80–81), compared to 1.5 for the kingdom. Obviously, Belgian and Swiss territorialisation of electoral support results from a highly segmented political conflict structure with only minimal geographic overlap between the different parties’ electoral support (Sani and Sartori 1983: 333–334; Caramani 2004: 116–117, 121–123). In the UK, however, this should be highly unusual if we assume that its major, and supposedly only, conflict line is the functionalistic capital-labour cleavage, and the main parties tend to compete across the whole country instead of proactively limiting the areas they contest. This aspect of electoral territorialisation is sometimes explained through the growing political divide between the south-east and the north-west of the country. In electoral terms, the Labour Party controls the whole of the northwest, including Wales and (until 2015) Scotland, while the Conservatives rely on strong support from southern England and East Anglia (Bogdanor and Field 1993; Johnston et al. 2005; Dearlove and Saunders 2000: 174–182; Rokkan et al. 1987: 177–189; Butler and Stokes 1970: 135–139). The only areas in which hard fought competition takes place are the Midlands and to some extent Yorkshire and the Humber. In addition, this contrast is not only observable in electoral terms, but also in a number of other political issues such as attitudes, political trust and identity (see, e.g., Jennings and Stoker 2016; Allen and Cutts 2018; Jewell 1994). The major problem with this explanation lies in its theoretical substantiation. According to Keating (1998: 12–15), the challenge is to define under which circumstances a territorial unit can be regarded as a distinct political or social community which is a precondition to act as an orientation point for conscious or even unconscious political alignment (Türsan 1998: 5–6; Hepburn 2011: 6–8). The reasoning behind this is that, although people in a certain territory might tend to vote internally homogeneous but highly disparate compared to other territories, it does not necessarily imply a common consciousness or identity (Flora et al. 1999: 191–208; Rokkan and Urwin 1983: 135–140; Keating et al. 2003: 19–29). To avoid definitional pitfalls, most social scientists only ascribe such a status to regions underpinned by “hard” and “objective” social differences, like a distinct language, ethnicity or history of independence, that delineate them from the rest of a country. Therefore, Keating (1998: 5) effectively argues that the existence of a broader north–south conflict in the UK is normally rejected. Accordingly, while there is an “objective” cultural difference between the Celtic nations and England, there is no comparable “hard” difference between the north and the south of England, and “weaker” evidence would not just separate the north from the south but also the different northern and southern communities from each other.4 Hence, underpinning the existence of distinct and politically self-conscious “northern” and “southern” communities has so far been the Achilles’ heel of this explanation.

4 For

the role of local attachment and identity see the respective discussion by Cox and Jeffery (2014) and Wyn Jones et al. (2012) and for the ambiguous role of different economic development also see Johnston et al. (2005) and Butler and Stokes (1970: 135–150).

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However, there are some arguments in favour of those who support the existence of such a demarcation line of political conflict in the UK. The general idea explaining its advent is that the deindustrialisation and emergence of the third sector in the UK caused massive social restructuring preceded only by the developments during the industrialisation. The most important result of this is a double lop-sidedness of the UK’s late twentieth and early twenty-first century economic structure (Urwin 1982: 35–40; Morgan 2002: 798–800; Dearlove and Saunders 2000: 179–180; Webb 2004: 35–37; Budge 1996: 21). On the one side, the growth of the third sector and decline of industrial employment fuelled the increasing importance of the financial industry, which accounts to between 6.5 and 9% of the UK’s GDP but only employs between 3 and 4% of the workforce and is almost exclusively centred in London, which accounts for around 50% of the kingdom’s financial service output (Rhodes 2018: 5, 7, 9). On the other side is a reversal of the geographical direction of economic development since the early nineteenth century that is leading to a strong concentration of businesses in the south-eastern regions with London and the South East of England accounting for just about 25% of the population, but 38% of the UK’s GDP (Harari 2016: 5). The critical point here is not the relative economic strength of the southern regions in themselves but the concurrent economic dismantling of the northern and western regions. Since the Second Industrial Revolution the powerhouses of the British economy lay in the mining areas of Wales, Scotland, the North East and the Midlands, especially in fast growing industrial cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds (Urwin 1982: 31–35; Rokkan et al. 1987: 163–166). Even then London held a dominant and coordinating position within the British economy, but economic development was still diverted into some of the former peripheries thanks to their geographic advantages (Keating 1998: 23), leading to a relatively even spread of industry over the whole country. The rough economic restructuring employed under the Thatcher governments, however, left many of these formerly prosperous regions in desperate conditions. STICERD research on poverty and social exclusion, for example, documented the clear concentration of social deprivation in former strongly industrialised regions during the 1990s (Glennerster et al. 1999: 15–22). Of the (working) poorest 468 wards in England and Wales, 58.8% lay in the western and north western periphery (North East, North West and Wales), which represent roughly one-fifth of the UK’s population, while only 12.6% were located in the south-eastern regions (East Anglia, South West, South East and Greater London). If London is excluded, this number shrinks to just 4.3%. As we have seen, the major arguments underpinning the political north–south divide are mostly based on economic and the resulting social inequalities, while it is hard to find a corresponding distinction in cultural terms. Accordingly, some proponents of the dominance of the capital–labour cleavage in the UK argue that the divide just reflects the geographic modifications of this cleavage rather than being the manifestation of an independent conflict (Johnston et al. 2005: 799–800; Butler and Stokes 1970: 135–150). Conversely, there are also counterarguments underlining why the divide is not simply a reflection of the capital–labour cleavage. It is argued, as for example by Bogdanor and Field (1993: 209) and Steed (1986: S96–S99), that

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the divide represents a classical centre-periphery cleavage in the sense of Lipset and Rokkan (1967). Following this line of argument, territorial units do not necessarily have to be underpinned by such common, “objective” sociodemographic indicators in order to follow a distinct process of political preference building. As Rokkan et al. (1987: 25–50), Rokkan (Flora et al. 1999: 108–121) and Rokkan and Urwin (1983: 134–140) outline, the centre-periphery cleavage has two, somehow independent, dimensions. While it is often solely associated with cultural differences between the nation state’s majority population and cultural or ethnic minorities, it is also an expression of economic and political inequality. Accordingly, a centre-periphery cleavage can be observed in cases where territories are detached from the centres of political power, disconnected from domestic and international markets or hardly integrated into the national economy. The deindustrialisation of the 1980s and return to a largely London-centred economy could indicate such a peripheralisation of larger parts of the country. In summary, the question of whether the capital–labour cleavage or an economically induced centre-periphery cleavage currently prevails would depend on whether voting behaviour is more determined by an individual’s social class or by the territory they live in through the so-called neighbourhood effect (Butler and Stokes 1970: 144–150; Rodden 2010: 330–332). Having outlined the basic features of different territorial support distributions, it is now time to look closer at how the electoral system transforms these support structures into parliamentary outcomes and how they might impinge on the political system’s workability. But to do so it is necessary to first clarify some more basic conditions of party competition in plurality voting systems. The starting point for almost all electoral studies of plurality systems is the already discussed economic theory of democracy by Anthony Downs. Downs assumes that, in democracies, all decisions by elites, political actors and voters can be predicted by the paradigm of “utility maximisation” (Downs 1957a: 37–50). In reference to party competition, this means that parties basically try to maximise their number of votes in order to acquire power, expressed by forming the national government (Downs 1957b: 137–138). To achieve this, they always seek to reach a political position identical to the median voter in order to maximise their number of votes and prevent other parties from achieving such a majority themselves, as long as the peak of the voter distribution converges in the centre (Downs 1957b: 143–144). The critical point is that this only works under at least two crucial preconditions5 : the voting system has to have a single voting district and the political conflict has to be described by a single (left–right) dimension (Grofman 2004: 30–31; Robertson 1976: 49–54; Laver and Hunt 1992: 11–22; Budge 2006: 424–425). Even at this point I can say that the first condition is never meet in reality since none of the existing plurality or majority voting systems has only a single voting district. If, however, there is more than a single voting district, the median voter orientation of parties does not work as it is assumed in the simplified way presented 5 Grofman

(2004: 26–27) points out that Downs’ assumptions presuppose at least 15 conditions to operate smoothly. At this point I concentrate on the two preconditions absolutely necessary for my line of argument.

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above. The crucial point is not that it is impossible to define a median voter in a multiple voting district system, but rather that the geographical distribution of voters and thereby the translation of votes into seats becomes more important than achieving an overall majority of votes (Austen-Smith and Banks 1988: 406; Robertson 1976: 52). However, for Downs’ concept to work, there needs to be a one-to-one translation between the voting district and parliamentary level, with the winner of the majority of votes on the micro-level automatically receiving a parliamentary majority on the macro-level (Ansolabehere et al. 2012; Leblanc 2007; Owen and Grofman 2006). Only then will the party that is positioned closest to the median voter automatically win a majority of seats because no other party can accumulate more votes and there is no possibility to win without the majority of the vote (Cox 1997: 69–80; Grofman 2004: 30–31; Robertson 1976: 49–54; Powell and Vanberg 2000: 392). Without such a one-to-one translation, rational parties should be more interested in winning the vote in individual regional constituencies rather than winning the majority of the vote at the national level. Despite this obvious problem Powell and Vanberg’s (2000: 411) observation that the aspect of how the regional distribution of electoral support influences parties’ strategic standing and their campaign behaviour lacks adequate research is still largely valid even today. The reason that the use of the median vote as a general fixture of parties’ interests is at least problematic or even irrational, compared to a purely seat winning oriented strategy, is twofold. First, the median voter position on the macro-level practically conceals certain amounts of extremism on the micro-level or deviation from the national distribution in general (Rodden 2010: 325–328; Robertson 1976: 50; Powell and Vanberg 2000: 397–398). Accordingly, an extremely polarised constituency, being evenly split into left- and right-wing extremists, would yield the same median vote position as a totally bipartisan one in which all voters occupy the median. Therefore, it is impossible to tell whether the median results from a Gaussian or a U-shaped distribution, and actually matches the national one, without detailed knowledge about the polarisation in individual constituencies. Depending on the specific geographic distribution, it is also possible that the marginal seats, in which the important part of party competition normally takes place, are considerably off the national left–right placement (Rodden 2010: 328). The second problem is created by the fact that an elected MP typically only represents the electorate of his/her own constituency and is only responsible to it because it exclusively decides his/her re-election (Robertson 1976: 52–54). In case that MPs are not chosen by the electorate as a whole different and independent subsets of the whole electorate will be represented in parliament rather than the national electorate’s “average” opinion (Rodden 2010: 332–335). This means that not only the micro-level distribution but also the resulting macro-level representation of political opinions can deviate from the national median orientation. Accordingly, individual members of the parliamentary parties should not be overwhelmingly interested in implementing or considering “median” interests since their primary concern is to get re-elected, which, however, is decided by a small, highly localised population segment rather than the whole electorate.

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The Downsian paradigm, however, assumes that these problems are of a theoretical rather than empirical nature. Following it, marginal seats should largely reflect the national distribution on the left–right spectrum and safe seats should typically be more skewed towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum (Robertson 1976: 36–37). Practically, this means that parties are nonetheless forced to follow the national median since it reflects the situation in the marginal seats and makes any special consideration of battleground constituencies unnecessary. However, as Rodden (2010: 325–328) outlines, it is perfectly possible that the median position in the competitive districts deviates from the median position of the electorate as a whole. The major question resulting from these arguments is which phenomenon is empirically more prevalent today: a rather homogenous regional distribution of the electorate’s preferences or a skewed one. As I have already discussed earlier in this chapter, the general empirical evidence for the UK suggests a skewed rather than a more homogenous distribution. This leaves the question of how a greater heterogeneity influences the workings of the electoral system. Obviously, the larger the deviations in individual constituencies’ political orientations are, the more likely are differences in the general support levels of the parties in these constituencies, at least once the possibilities of third-party entries and/or electoral abstention are introduced (Rodden 2010: 330–331; Callander 2005: 1116–1121; Powell and Vanberg 2000: 394). It also changes the likelihood of different parties gaining new support, which finally leads to the problem that the vote-to-seat translation will increasingly deviate from the assumed optimum of a plurality system since vote swings and existing majorities will become less uniform among the constituencies. In general, although the plurality system typically helps the party receiving most of the votes by translating them in a way that gives it far more seats than a proportional system would, this no longer has to be the case under very diverse vote distributions since this “bonus” does not depend on winning more votes, but on the geographic support distribution (Curtice 2018: 31–33, 2015c: 629–632). In the worst case, the number of marginal seats drops to a very low level while the rest of the constituencies display huge majorities and a highly asymmetric competition structure, meaning that the dominant party has a large number of loyalists while its competitors depend on swing voters. Under such a support distribution, the electoral system would display almost no elasticity irrespective of the overall number of swing voters, since they would be overwhelmingly located in very safe seats (Curtice 2018: 31–33, 2015c: 629–632). The systemic consequences of such a distribution should be obvious. Due to the low elasticity of the electoral system, the parliamentary composition would mostly stay the same. Without the possibility of large seat swings, unless the volatility of the vote increases significantly, regular government turnovers will become less likely and the parties’ chances of securing a working parliamentary majority will decline (Curtice 2017: 15–19). Accordingly, at least to a certain degree, the smooth operation of the electoral system presupposes the existence of the basic conditions of the Downsian model of electoral competition. Only as long as the geographic distribution of electoral support is fairly homogenous and centre-peaked should the electoral system’s functionality be ensured (Nohlen 2009: 428–438). Conversely, the more heterogeneous the voter support distribution, the

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more likely the electoral system will fail to produce the desired outcomes (Johnston et al. 2001: 37–40). However, the territorialisation of major parties’ support might even further damage the functionality of the electoral system because it favours the rise of third parties which conversely can lead to the “freezing” of competition between the major parties. The critical point of Downs’ and Duverger’s argument concerning third-party entry is that they only look at party competition at the constituency level and then assume that these results translate to the national level which leads them to largely discount their danger to established parties (Schoen 2005: 588–590; Nohlen 2009: 441–449). Accordingly, they conclude that third parties only emerge once a large enough gap between the parties’ and the electorate’s policy positions arises and a third party has some chance of winning on the national level. But as Rodden (2010: 328) and Callander (2005) discuss, third parties’ decision to contest elections is not based on the probability of “winning” on the macro-level (becoming part of the government), but on the micro-level (majority of votes in a single constituency). This theoretical argument is empirically supported by Caramani (2005: 303–308), who shows that almost all parties in Western democracies started with a very low territorial “coverage” and highly concentrated electoral support in these contested constituency (Caramani 2003: 434–437). Therefore, the “psychological threshold”, to use Duverger’s terms, for the emergence of third parties is not the threshold of exclusion, the worst possible conditions a party has to meet in order to win at least one seat, but the threshold of inclusion, the easiest condition to win parliamentary representation (Boix 1999: 614; Lijphart 1994: 26–27). Practically spoken, the establishment of third parties in plurality voting systems should be fairly easy and relatively common as long as some constituencies’ preferences are highly skewed compared to the national median vote (Curtice 2010a: 625–629, 2015b: 33–37, 2018: 33–36). The influence of third parties on the functionality of the Westminster-type of government should be pretty clear by now. Every seat won by a third party lowers the two major parties’ chances of securing a parliamentary majority (Curtice 2018: 43, 2015b: 37–40) while it increases the likelihood of an atypical government situation (minority governments, multiparty coalitions). Since third parties typically draw more support from a single major party rather than equal amounts from both (Adams 2001: 130–138) it also shifts competition in favour of the party losing less support to the new contender. While eventual problems resulting from plurality voting systems’ translation mechanisms can be, as pointed out by Powell (2000: 36), easily overcome by creating an additional seat bonus granted to the party winning the popular vote, like it was introduced in Italy and Greece in the 2000s, such a move seems extremely unlikely in the UK. The main reason is obviously the disastrous 2011 Alternative Voting System referendum. A change of the electoral system was one of the main demands of the Liberal Democrats, who are highly disadvantaged by the current FPTP system (Johnston and Pattie 2011; Johnston et al. 2012b; Borisyuk et al. 2010a), for joining a coalition government in 2010 (Loughlin and Viney 2015: 62). However, the LibDems

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had strongly miscalculated and the respective referendum ended even more decisive than the Common Market referendum of 1975, with 67.9% voting against the introduction of an AV system. What has become clear in the last section is that although parliament (theoretically) holds almost unlimited discretion about the design of the voting system, it is very unlikely that MPs or the government will actually employ it in the near future should the electoral system run into difficulties fulfilling its systemic purpose. The 2011 referendum was so decisive and politically disastrous for the LibDems that electoral reform, at least as long as it concerns the direct change of the voting system, has to be regarded as a toxic issue (Whiteley et al. 2012: 319–320). In addition, eventual changes to the voting system would be foremost beneficial to the political system as a whole or the “smaller” parties, rather than one of the major parties. Accordingly, there is no real incentive for them to change the system even if it becomes a systemic liability. Summarising our observations so far, we have seen that the re-territorialisation of electoral support is not a random phenomenon but the result of social trends. Since all parties are, to some degree, products of social developments they also tend to be affected by such developments to different degrees (Bogdanor and Field 1993: 212). Accordingly, it is fairly unlikely that the effects of these trends for each party will cancel each other out. But even if these changes would be numerically comparable on a general level, the plurality voting system would not automatically translate them into the same effects on the parliamentary level (Johnstion et al. 2001: 20–48). Instead, the specific geographic distribution of modifications in voting behaviour can lead to considerably different parliamentary results. In the end, this combination of unequal affectedness by the underlying social drivers of electoral change and its institutional translation unilaterally threatens the party with the more unfavourable geographic support structure, which, as I will try to show in the empirical part, is the Labour Party (Curtice 2017, 2015a). Labour’s current “competiveness” heavily depends on the so to say “superstructure” of competition (by which I mean limiting structural factors largely beyond the party’s direct control, like the availability of floating voters, constituency boundaries and the vote-to-seat translation; Johnston et al. 2012b, 2009; Borisyuk et al. 2010a, b; Rallings et al. 2008; Johnston 2002), not its own ability to command enough core support or mobilise critical amounts of swing voters. This is further aggravated by a second aspect of political territorialisation, the growing significance of the federal question (McEwen and Petersohn 2015: 198–200; Jeffery et al. 2016; Jeffery 2015; Flinder 2010: 187–194; Hazell and Sandford 2015). The consolidation of devolution not only gives territory a greater prominence as an independent factor determining politics, but also places certain geographic demands on parties’ voting results. In a strongly centralist country, the territorial distribution of political support is (at least theoretically) meaningless to the legitimacy of political decisions and the formulation of policies. The major promise or “vision” behind a centralist form of government is to ensure a uniform and equal treatment of citizens and provision of state services across the whole country (Bogdanor 2009: 110–111, House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution 2015: 17–22). Its justification

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accrues specifically from mitigating economic and administrative differences that would arise from a laissez faire state or a decentralised form of government with large degrees of local autonomy. The critical problem is that once a state reaches a certain level of governance territorialisation, it has to explicitly recognise the territorial nature of its political decisions through corresponding institutional arrangements. The reason for this should be fairly clear: the more a centralist state allows regional economic and administrative diversity or autonomous self-governance to grow, the less it obviously fulfils its central political promise (Bogdanor 2009: 110–111). To prevent this deviation from becoming a liability to the system’s legitimacy reception, it is necessary to have a clearly outlined vision of what unites these disparate territories and a clear separation of powers and responsibilities between the central state and the territorial subjects (Jeffery 2009a: 305–311; House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution 2015: 28–30). Herein lies the UK’s major problem. Neither practically exists and political actors are thus far largely reluctant to openly recognise the territorialised nature of the political system. While this is a general problem of political legitimacy it becomes even more challenging if the different parties can only legitimately claim to represent certain parts of the country because of their geographic distribution of electoral support (Jeffery et al. 2016; Mycock and Hayton 2014). How exactly the increasing de facto territorialisation of British government exacerbates this problem will be the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Devolution as a Challenge to Political Order

In this chapter I will look closer at the problematic nature of the UK’s current devolution settlement and more specifically how it can undermine the national political order directly or indirectly through its influence on party competition. I will begin my discussion on devolution with some of the general problems concerning its handling and the workability of the current settlement, before presenting different scenarios to reform it. I will not try to give a comprehensive account of its historical development and the various details of its content and procedures, since I am primarily interested in the institutional and procedural shortcomings of the current settlement and the effects of potential reforms. Instead, I will focus on four problematic issues that impair an adequate handling of devolution or are hard to reconcile with the general functionality and logic of the British political system I have outlined so far. Afterwards, I will turn to two unsolved institutional aspects of the devolution settlement that dominate the political and scholarly discussion of its reform.

4.1 Devolution—A Systemic Liability? The first general problem in handling devolution is the incompatibility of a general ad hoc style of problem-solving and the settlement of the territorial question. As I have already mentioned, British politics is characterised by an incremental and ad hoc style of institutional reform, originating from a distrust in large-scale social engineering and an organic understanding of political development (Flinders 2010: 4–5; Jeffery 2009a: 291–292; Bogdanor 2009: 11–14). In general, this style of accommodation of political demands is considered to be one of the great strengths of the British political system and theoretically well suited to its institutional structure (Urwin 1982: 54– 68). But the lynchpin is that the introduction of devolution fundamentally changed the constitutional structure and the workability of this approach. The fundamental problem in applying this problem-solving style to reforming territorial governance was identified by Derek Urwin almost 40 years ago. Urwin © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_4

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(1982: 65–68) pointed out that the introduction of devolution would (probably) “have far-reaching and possibly unforeseen consequences”. According to his argument, the lynchpin of the whole question is not how much power is eventually transferred to the regions, but whether any power is permanently transferred. This would drastically change the style of intrastate accommodation because it limits the range and amount of resources the central state has to offer the regions and (at least semi-)autonomous actors, while simultaneously lowering the dependency of the periphery on the centre as well as raising questions in the centre about the legitimacy of further large-scale subsidies (McLean and McMillan 2006: 42–44). Even in a strongly centralised state, like the pre-devolution kingdom, the central government cannot rule on every political aspect directly. Instead, it always has to rely on some intermediate institutions, which usually have a certain degree of discretion about political decisions or the right to handle administrative tasks fairly autonomously (many authors also argue that the UK never was a completely centralised or unitary state; Bogdanor 2010: 168– 169; Hazell 2006a: 239; Urwin 1982: 23–31; Rokkan et al. 1987: 158; Mitchell 2002: 239–243). Still, as long as the central government holds complete control over financing and budgeting, it can enforce indirect control over these institutions by financially sanctioning or rewarding their behaviour. However, with increasing financial independence, or generally greater autonomy of individual regions, this approach seems less and less promising. Yet, this is only one dimension of the problem. While the transfer of autonomy rights through devolution was a (more or less) permanent ceding of central state powers, the expected final “settlement” of the Home Rule question never came, and instead territorial demands continued to grow. This was facilitated by severe shortcomings of the early devolution process which lacked and continues to lack a defined end (Jeffery 2009a: 292–298 and 305–308; Flinders 2010: 187–189 and 193–194; Bradbury 2009: 200–202). In most federal states, a more or less well-defined goal of the separation of powers between the central state and the federal subjects can be found, normally laid out in the constitution (Lijphart 2012: 175–180). In the UK, no such goal can be found and public discourse about regional autonomy in wake of the devolution referendums hardly took place at all (with small exceptions for Scotland, Flinders 2010: 193).1 This lack, however, was not completely unintended. Not clearly defining the purpose of devolution not only spared politicians a broader discussion about the nature of the union as a whole but also (even though only theoretically) preserved the aforementioned ability to incrementally and spontaneously change the settlement whenever it seemed appropriate (Jeffery 2015; House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution 2015: 28–30). The repercussion of this decision was unfortunately that political elites continued with an uncoordinated and non-foresighted expansion of devolution, often more influenced by party interests and short-term gains rather than the aspiration to build a coherent and resilient constitutional framework. 1 The

only exception is the Northern Irish arrangement (Jeffery 2009a: 294). Since the return of Northern Irish “Home Rule” was embedded in a broader and much more public peace settlement process, it has become far more “institutionalised” and long-term oriented.

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A second critical problem is the party system aspect of devolution. Historically, discussions about decentralisation typically surface once separatist movements are on the rise (for the UK, see Urwin 1982: 43–44 and 62–63; Bogdanor 2009: 90; Mitchell 2015: 94–95; Curtice 2015c: 590–592). However, Home Rule as a tool to weaken such nationalist movements has to be regarded as a double-edged sword since it introduces a second political arena, including regional parliaments and elections of some kind (McCrone 2012: 74; Gallagher 2009: 534–536) which might also lead to the development of regional party systems independent of the national one (Dunleavy 2005). The regional aspect of party system development was consciously recognised in the drafting of the initial devolution settlement. Here, Labour favoured mixed voting systems over the national FPTP system to prevent the nationalists from eventually securing majorities in the new regional parliaments (McCrone 2012: 69; Stolz 2018: 13). Discussions focussed on the effects on the national level usually revolved around what would happen if the ruling party held majorities in Scotland and/or Wales but not in England (Gallagher 2012: 8–12; Russell and Lodge 2006: 88; Hazell 2006a: 225). To this, I would add the potential problem of a separatist party holding the balance of power in Westminster. However, while these discussions involved some arguments about the political and constitutional consequences of such situations, their likelihood was normally rejected as well as the necessity to actively address them. Therefore, almost all analysts and commentators agree that the structural difference in electoral support between the major parties does not pose a potential danger of Conservative domination over post-devolved Britain (McKay Commission 2013: 12–21; Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 38; Gallagher 2012: 32–36; Hazell 2006c: 42–45; Bryant 2010: 263–264; Conservative Democracy Task Force 2008: 4–5; Sanders 2002: 94–99; the exception is Bogdanor 2009: 104–105). The critical point of this general agreement is that it is rather assumed than backed up with comprehensive scientific research. While the likelihood of a structural asymmetry in favour of the Tories will be a subject of the empirical part of this study and therefore does not require further elaboration here, the SNP’s or regionalist parties’ potential influence on government formation in general requires some closer investigation to outline why it is so problematic. As long as the nationalists only held a handful of seats in parliament and the national parties managed to regularly secure clear-cut majorities, this question was hardly relevant. However, with the SNP’s strong improvement of its parliamentary representation and the major parties struggling to secure these majorities it has become a far greater concern. It is generally accepted that regionalist and separatist parties are more concerned (at the national level) with policy-seeking, rather than office-seeking (Elias and Tronconi 2011: 513–514; De Winter 1998: 238–240). The overarching goal within this policy-seeking approach is to achieve further political concessions, either constitutionally or financially, towards the territory they represent (Elias and Tronconi 2011: 519–520; Türsan 1998: 5–6; Hepburn 2011: 6–9). Obviously, the more the autonomy rights are transferred to these regions, the more difficult it becomes (for statewide parties) to justify further concessions. Conversely, the more the balance

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of legislative rights tips in favour of the regions, the lower should be the chances of such parties joining the national government or cooperating with statewide parties in general. Since there is hardly anything left to gain from such collaboration (in terms of additional constitutional rights), these parties should increasingly turn into obstructionist forces (De Winter 1998: 235–237; Elias and Tronconi 2011: 519– 520). But even if this is not the case and the nationalists remain fairly open-minded to cooperation, the problem just shifts to another arena. Since they can no longer ask for the simple transfer of competences, they have to turn to specific issue demands (Hepburn 2011: 9–15). Accordingly, the nationalists would either have to choose concessions in policy areas that are already devolved (which is only possible in asymmetric forms of devolution) or decide to focus their influence on non-devolvable core issues of the central state. Since both these areas are usually of particular interest to the majority population, this might lead to a public backlash which should also decrease the likelihood of national parties to consider alliances with separatists or regionalists. The general problem here is the electoral imbalance between national and separatist/regionalist parties. While regionalist parties can vehemently push the interests of “their” populations over those of the nation’s general public, national parties, especially if they are or were in a dominant position in the respective region, have to balance these particularist interests with those of the nation at large (Jeffery 2011: 164). Thereby, in open competition national parties can easily be outflanked by regionalists as long autonomist sentiments among the concerned local population are not too low and the national parties have difficulties to adopt comparable demands of further decentralisation for whatever reasons (De Winter 1998: 216–219; Meguid 2008: 230–246; Massetti 2011: 48). Therefore, it seems fairly inconceivable that the SNP will be seriously considered as a coalition partner by the other parties over the next few parliamentary terms. This inadvertently leads to increased chances of hung parliaments (and government instability) as well as a potential shift in party competition in favour of a single party. The first effect is simply the result of the reduction of “available” MPs for government formation, since the SNP has to be considered an irresponsible opposition party in Giovanni Sartori’s (2005: 122–123; Ware 1996: 153–154) sense, while the overall number of MPs necessary for a majority remains the same. The second problem kicks in if the constituencies formerly held by the two national parties, and now in the hands of the separatists, were unevenly distributed between the national parties. If a single party, like Labour in the Scottish case, held the vast majority of the concerned seats, the second national party, in this case the Conservative Party, is clearly advantaged by the changes (Curtice 2015a: 43, 2017: 14). To prevent the corresponding negative effects, the volatility of the electorate as a whole would have to increase to preserve the former degree of competitiveness (Harrop 2015: 5). In addition, this not only forces Labour to address the devolution issue more actively than the Tories, but also makes it more vulnerable to electoral backlashes because it has to balance and satisfy the interests of both the Celtic and the English electorates (Curtice 2015a, 2017: 16– 17 and 19; Mitchell 2015: 90–96) while the Tories, as an effectively “English” party, could largely ignore Scotland.

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A third critical point about the current devolution settlement is that it is almost exclusively concerned with the allocation of competences while largely disregarding procedural regulations (Jeffery 2009a: 295–296 and 305–308; McEwen and Petersohn 2015: 195–198). When looking at its general features, we can observe a very striking difference about how it works in political reality and its theoretical framing and interpretation. While in political practice the British central state has ceded a significant number of policy issues and (mostly) abstains from intervening in the regional parliaments’ affairs, it theoretically retains its right to overrule every possible decision without any chance of appeal (Bogdanor 2005: 84–85, 2003: 228). This in itself is neither a crucial problem for devolution’s procedural workability nor for decentralisation settlements in general. However, the continuing piecemeal addition of ambiguous concepts and rules, coupled with inexplicit and intransparent procedures, makes conflicts between different actors more likely since all of these aspects are far more open to the interpretation of the involved actors than hardcoded and legally binding rules (Jeffery 2009a: 305–308; Petersohn 2015: 346–347 and 349– 351; Bogdanor 2003: 235–237). The absence of a comprehensive judicial review or neutral third arbiter further inhibits the legitimacy of the outcome of such conflicts (Hazell 2007: 593–595). Instead of addressing these procedural shortcomings and conflict resolution mechanisms, devolution reform continues to be overwhelmingly focussed on policy issues (Smith Commission 2014: 13–27; Petersohn 2015: 346– 347). The major issue here is that although British devolution has in political reality reached an arrangement character that is comparable to federalism or “quasifederal” (Bogdanor 2005: 84) it is still (on a theoretical level) treated as hardly more than a mere decentralisation of “minor” administrative and legislative tasks. However, since federal arrangements rely on the principle of equal sovereignty between actors over clearly differentiated areas of autonomy, they require at least two sets of rules in order to work effectively compared to arrangements between unequal actors that in the end rely on the principles of order and obedience. First, there have to be rules defining the policy competences of the different institutions. Normally, this is done by an open or closed catalogue of policy issues denominated to the different institutions, but it can also be arranged in a functional fashion, giving primary and secondary legislation rights to different federal levels (Campagna 2018: 286–287). Since none of the competence catalogues of modern democracies are defined clear enough to give straight answers to all potential questions of cognisance in specific political measures, it is even more important to outline the working relationship between federal institutions and the handling of potential conflicts between different institutional levels (Campagna 2018: 286–287; Sturm 2018: 443–447). In the UK, the relationship between HMG and the devolved parliaments and governments is mostly regulated by conventions. In these conventions (in this specific case the so-called Sewel convention), the central government accepts, as outlined by Bogdanor (2003: 225), “that it will not normally legislate on matters devolved to Scotland without the consent of the Scottish parliament [emphasis by Bogdanor]”. Accordingly, if HMG was going to introduce legislation with significant impact on devolved issues, it would be obliged to negotiate with the Scottish government to secure its consent. It is, however, important to bear in mind the (judicial) difference

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between “real” federalism and devolution as it is described by Bogdanor (2005: 84– 85). Here, federalism requires the central state to give up its right to intervene in delegated issues for political reasons. Since HMG has not yet ceased its formal right of intervention, the devolution arrangement does not fulfil the technical requirements of federalism and is therefore not recognised as a form of federalism by almost all British constitutional scholars (Hazell 2007: 584; Bogdanor 2005: 84; Henderson 2007: 153–155; Petersohn 2015: 349–351). Instead, it is argued that Westminster’s rights were only delegated to the devolved parliaments, while sovereign discretion remained in the hands of the HoC (Bogdanor 2003: 228, 2005: 84). This supremacy is also expressed in Westminster’s right to unilaterally abolish the devolved parliaments and devolution in general (Bogdanor 2009: 112). The political practice, however, looks quite different from these theoretical assertions. Up until 2014, it generally followed the described principle of mutual consent, laid down in the Sewel convention and myriads of informal coordination processes between the concerned parts of central and devolved governments’ administrations (Jeffery 2009a: 304–305; Hazell 2007: 582–583 and 589–592). Therefore, HMG has ceded its right to intervene and even increased the extent of issues legislated by the regions (Bogdanor 2005: 84–85, 2009: 112–119). Accordingly, in the forefront of the Scottish independence referendum, some politicians and scholars, most notably Scotsman and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown (2014: 242–245), argued to finally settle the constitutionally ambiguous situation by guaranteeing the “permanent” character of devolution or the devolved parliaments. While it seemed the nationwide parties’ agreement to vouch for the permanence of the Scottish parliament as part of the “vow”2 accommodated this call, the aftermath of the referendum demonstrated that this was not actually the case. Theoretically, the aforementioned guarantee could potentially fulfil the formal requirements of federalism because the permanence of the Scottish parliament would underline its independent sovereignty by withdrawing the HoC’s right to abolish it (Bogdanor 2009: 112). However, the major question that remained was how far this principle would reach beyond the purely physical existence of Holyrood. The inclusion of the Sewel convention in the new Scotland Act, 2016, s 28(8) seemed to extend this guarantee to the established practice of inter-institutional decisionmaking. In the aftermath of the EU membership referendum, legal conflicts surfaced under which the permanence guarantee was examined by the Supreme Court which basically concluded that it only applies to parliament itself but not to its rights, the devolution settlement in general or any specific rule about the working relationship between the central and Scottish government (Elliot, 26 Jun 2016). The resulting legal interpretation of the Scotland Act, 2016, rendered a bill that was supposed to simplify the constitutional situation even more ambiguous, incoherent and contradictory. 2 The

“vow” was a promise by the leaders of the three nationwide parties, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, to reform the devolution settlement should the Scottish people decide to remain part of the UK that was issued two days before final vote. In October 2014, the British government established the cross-party Smith Commission (2014) which created a legislative draft to implement the vow’s promises. These recommendations became law through the Scotland Act, 2016, on 23 March 2016.

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Instead of clarifying, simplifying or formalising the interaction and relationship between Westminster and the Scottish parliament, which is normally the goal of convention codification (Galligan and Brenton 2015: 20–22), the implementation of the vow’s promises might even have a negative long-term impact on the public perception of the devolution settlement. In a decentralised state, even if it is not a federal state, the interpretation of the legitimacy of political decisions can no longer be unilaterally shaped by the central state but is also influenced by regional actors (see for this the respective discussions by Rokkan and Urwin 1983: 124–154; Keating et al. 2003: 8–11; Keating 1998: 72–85; Hepburn 2011: 13–15). Accordingly, even though Westminster might act within its lawful rights when interfering or potentially colliding with decisions of the devolved institutions, this does not necessarily mean that the populations of the Celtic nations (and sometimes England) will also regard its actions as legitimate. While the vow did not explicitly guarantee a sovereign quality of the Scottish parliament, the promise to make Holyrood permanent (Cameron et al., 16 Sep 2014) clearly had some common sense implication that the new settlement would be substantially different from the old one, not only in the extent of devolved powers, but in its quality. Should, as the Supreme Court indicated, this not have been the intention of the 2016 Scotland Act and this interpretation be reconfirmed by political developments in the upcoming years, the Scottish population might share the conclusion of the SNP that the vow has been betrayed (Henderson and Mitchell, 27 Mar 2015: 26). A fourth critical aspect is connected to this problem and lies in the general detachment of devolution from public demands. So far, devolution has almost exclusively been driven by elite concerns which has led to its piecemeal character as well as large procedural and institutional gaps. Despite constant modifications, it has not only not quenched separatist sentiment in Scotland, but the missing integration of devolution into an updated concept of the union has also facilitated growing unrest with the constitutional settlement in England. In general, we can see an increasing dissatisfaction with the allegedly “privileged” status of the Celtic regions and a rising popular demand for a greater recognition of England as a political entity (Wyn Jones et al. 2013, 2012; Curtice 2010b; Jeffery et al. 2016; Henderson et al. 2015). One of the consequences of this development was the establishment of the Commission on the Consequences of Devolution for the House of Commons (McKay Commission in the following) by the HoC in 2012, which was tasked to investigate the effects of devolution on parliament and specifically how English popular demands towards devolution could be better integrated in the current settlement (McKay Commission 2013: 7–8). It is anachronistic but characteristic for the parliamentary handling of devolution that the McKay Commission, on the one hand, urged the need for an immediate response to these parliamentary challenges and the growing dissatisfaction in England (McKay Commission 2013: 15–21), but, on the other hand, concluded that a simple tampering with parliament’s internal procedural rules without any substantial consequences would be enough to address the problem (McKay Commission 2013: 52–62). In summary, I have outlined four major dilemmas (ad hoc problem-solving style, incompatibility with the party system, purely contential nature of devolution and

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selective problem perception) in the handling and reception of devolution that tend to create inadequate responses whenever the settlement comes under pressure or has to be reformed. While I have tried to illustrate these problems using specific examples, it is important to note that they are abstract and general, typically surfacing to some degree in every discussion about devolution reform. Accordingly, I will now look into the various reform options that are considered to overcome devolution’s sustained incoherencies and institutional anomalies.

4.2 Reforming an Unfixable System I will now address two specific, open questions or paradoxes that are traditionally identified as the most visible “problems” of the current devolution settlement, the “West Lothian Question” and the “English Question”. While the above-discussed problems were mostly procedural, representing shortcomings in the handling of devolution or interaction of different actors within its framework, the English and West Lothian Questions have to be seen as institutional gaps in the settlement (Hazell 2006b: 1–2). This means their discussion has been and their solution will most likely be subject to these general procedural problems. Before clarifying the different reform proposals to both questions, I will outline what they involve and illustrate some of their political implications. The English Question is the simpler one because it aims at the broader problem of England (except for Greater London) not being part of the devolution settlement. Accordingly, it asks whether and how England should be integrated in the “territorialisation” of British governance and policy-making (Hazell 2006b: 2–5; Bogdanor 2009: 99–100). Discussions on this subject focus mostly on two points. The first aspect directly concerns the answer to the original question by outlining different (mostly institutional) reforms that would create some form of devolution in England (Russell and Lodge 2006; Bogdanor 2010; Hazell 2006a, 2006c). The second aspect is more concerned with the question whether such devolution is necessary by looking into the political reform demands of the English population (Curtice 2006; Wyn Jones et al. 2013, 2012; Henderson et al. 2015). Conversely, the West Lothian Question originates from the difference between the formal and practical rights of the HoC, a divergence resulting from devolution. While parliament formally retains the indivisible sovereignty to make laws, in reality much of its legislation is only applicable in certain parts of the kingdom and, conversely, parliament does not legislate for the Celtic regions on a number of issues (Bogdanor 2009: 98–99, 2010: 156–158; Hadfield 2004b: 238–243; Russell and Lodge 2006: 65–70; McKay Commission 2013: 12–13). This accompanies three anomalies in parliamentary procedures. First, the geographical limitations of different laws are not matched by different procedures of law-making. Since it is assumed that parliament remains the absolute sovereign of the country, the legislative process makes no difference concerning the actual territorial applicability of a specific bill (McKay

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Commission 2013: 50; Gallagher 2012: 21–22; Russell and Lodge 2006: 85–87). Accordingly, all parliamentary bills are also voted on by the whole House, irrespective of their geographical reach.3 Practically, this means that MPs representing the Celtic constituencies are allowed to vote on laws that have no legal implications for their nations whatsoever, representing a second anomaly (Russell and Lodge 2006: 85–87). It also means that under specific parliamentary compositions, these MPs can vote down or ensure the passing of laws that only affect England, irrespective of the vote of the English MPs (Gallagher 2012: 3–5). A third dimension of the problem lies in government formation. Since it is only necessary for a party to hold a UK-wide majority of MPs, it is possible to form a government that does not hold a similar English majority and relies on the votes of Celtic MPs to effectively govern England (Gallagher 2012: 8–10; Bogdanor 2010: 156). This constellation of anomalies is not specific to the UK, but can happen in every political system with asymmetric devolution or federalism. However, the seriousness of the problem is determined by the extent of the asymmetry between the different regions and since the powers of the Celtic nations are very far-ranging while England has no devolution at all it is quite significant in the British case. These constellations of MPs’ voting rights lead to two additional unintended consequences which intensify the negative effects of these anomalies. Since English MPs are not allowed to vote on any issue devolved to the Celtic parliaments, nonEnglish MPs conversely have an exclusive potential veto right on England-only issues. The unintended effect here is that devolution not only withdrew English MPs’ right to decide on certain Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish legislation (which was the intention of devolution), but simultaneously handed Celtic MPs an additional (even though restricted) veto right on English legislation (Bowers and Kelly 2014: 5; Bryant 2010: 263). In a system of full separation of powers between the central state and the subnational subjects, the voting rights of MPs are typically curtailed in a uniform fashion because all national MPs lose the ability to vote on devolved subjects, while in the British case this qualification was limited to English MPs. The second point is related to the responsibilities and duties of Celtic MPs. Devolution meant a significant transfer not only of power, but also of work, to the regional parliaments. As a result, major parts of the classical constituency work of MPs simply do not exist anymore for Celtic MPs because all relevant decisions on devolved issues are taken in the regional parliaments (Bogdanor 2003: 229). This also means they can only claim to represent legitimate interests of their constituents as long as they work exclusively on issues concerning the whole of the UK (Lodge and Mitchell 2006: 102–104; Russell and Lodge 2006: 65–75). What remains exclusively in the hands of Westminster more and more boils down to core state functions, like defence, foreign policy, currency issues, general taxation and the budget (Jeffery 2015). This carries a double-sided problem with it I already mentioned in the last subchapter. If Celtic MPs 3 For the sake of simplicity, I will use the terms “English” or “English-only” to describe all situations

in which legislation or the legislative process does not apply to the UK as a whole (due to the asymmetric nature of devolution, it is possible that laws apply to none or only some of the Celtic nations).

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continue to work along the whole spectrum of political issues, they risk both losing the support of their constituents for focussing on policies they can hardly influence from Westminster and resentment of their colleagues and the English population for interfering in questions whose consequences they do not have to bear and lack a legitimate interest in (Russell and Lodge 2006: 72–73). Conversely, if they shift their attention towards the remaining “national” issues, they run into the risk of being perceived as too influential in areas that are particularly important to the UK as a whole since they primarily represent “national minorities”. The same problem would become even more serious once Celtic MPs are critical in forming a majority in the HoC (Russell and Lodge 2006: 76; Jeffery 2009a: 310–311). These developments have massive repercussions on the institutional “acceptability” of Celtic MPs in general, but especially of separatist parties (De Winter 1998: 238–241; Elias and Tronconi 2011: 513–517). Since I have already discussed this problem in more detail in the last subchapter, I refrain from repeating them here. What this section should have made clear is that the current devolution system creates a number of parliamentary, governmental and legitimacy anomalies or inconsistencies. So far, little has been done to address these inconsistencies (Jeffery 2015; Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 3, 29–30 and 49–50) and, as I will show in some more details later, they have consequences for both the public reception of devolution and the procedural workability of parliamentary and inter-institutional arrangements. Although it is possible that these problems will not be addressed in the foreseeable future, at some point it will be unavoidable to create a more coherent settlement (Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 57–58; McEwen and Petersohn 2015: 199–200; Jeffery 2015: 277–278). As I will point out in the next segments, most of these potential reforms have comparable effects on party competition and the way government would work. Therefore, it is imperative to consider these effects should party competition have become more territorialised over the last decades at which I will take a closer look at in the upcoming chapters. To identify these potential reform scenarios, I will follow parliament’s own work on the English and West Lothian Questions. Over the last fifty years, Westminster has investigated the UK’s major constitutional questions and discussed various reform options on multiple occasions (Kilbrandon Commission, Calman Commission, Silk Commission, Smith Commission, McKay Commission), often heavily relying on scholarly research and input by academic experts. Specifically, I will look at the most recent comprehensive investigation into the problem, done by the already mentioned McKay Commission in 2012/2013. In order to address the “English Question” in some way (McKay Commission 2013: 23–26; Hazell 2006a, 2006b; Gallagher 2012: 15–18), the commission identified options that can be summed up in six different categories: --> a “devolution discount” --> “English votes for English laws” (EVEL) --> an English parliament --> parliaments in the different English regions

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--> local devolution4 --> the dissolution of the union “Devolution Discount”: The idea behind this concept is to partially set off the parliamentary triple advantages (self-rule, full participation rights and over-representation in Westminster) of the Celtic nations by simply reducing their number of MPs below their share of the UK population. This approach should not be considered as a “solution” to the constitutional problems facilitated by devolution, but rather as a compensation mechanism for the continuing existence of the English and West Lothian Questions (McLean 1995: 267–268; Russell and Lodge 2006: 77). Therefore, it could be seen as a minimal invasive treatment. In terms of party competition, a devolution discount could have two effects. First, it might change the structure of competition in some constituencies of the Celtic regions. The effective reduction of seats would lead to the merger of several constituencies and could result in changing majorities in some individual seats. However, the consequences of such internal changes would be minuscule for Westminster (or simply coincide with the second effect) because only a completely lopsided redistricting favouring or disadvantaging Labour or the Conservative Party would influence the overall government formation prospects. Second, since all three Celtic regions actually have a smaller (or, in a foreseeable future, the same) population quota per MP as England (Rallings and Thrasher 2012: 126), every discount would lead to a relative increase of English MPs in Westminster. Therefore, the second effect would be far more consequential to statewide party competition structure by increasing the political weight of more Conservative-leaning England. Overall, the impact on party competition would still be the smallest of all the discussed reform scenarios since parliamentary representation would at worst change by around two dozen seats, some of them already regularly held by non-statewide parties. “English Votes for English Laws” (EVEL): The essence of the concept of “English votes for English laws” is fairly easy to understand. The basic idea is to identify whether a bill exclusively concerns England (and should thereby only be voted on by English MPs) or concerns the UK as a whole (and is thereby a matter for all MPs, Hazell 2006c: 42–44). There are roughly two different strands of approaches based on the concept of EVEL, a “soft” and a “hard” one. The hard approach aims at excluding Celtic MPs from all votes on Englandonly laws so that such laws only need to be approved by English MPs, irrespective of the overall majority situation in the HoC (Russell and Lodge 2006: 84). The soft approach stops short of this by simply trying to give English MPs a “greater say” (Hague 2014: 19). Therefore, it aims to only change the procedural instead of the functional roles of members of the House (Russell and Lodge 2006: 89–92; Gallagher 4I

will not specifically discuss the different forms of local devolution (“devolution deals”, elected mayors) here for the reasons outlined in Chapter 1, although some of my remarks on regional parliaments are interchangeable with this type of reform.

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2012: 19–21; McKay Commission 2013: 26). This allows for several measures with widely differing scope and impact. Instead of discussing all potential alternatives in detail, I will only try to illustrate the general principles and problems of the approach by comparing the strongest and the weakest possible measures. The weakest way to address the English Question by soft EVEL would be to simply grant English MPs a greater share of debate time for “English laws” (Gallagher 2012: 19) or alternatively introduce a double-count mechanism (Hague 2014: 19–20; McKay Commission 2013: 10).5 This would have negligible to nil material effect on legislation itself but eventually provide greater “publicity” for English political concerns. The strongest soft mechanism on the other hand would be a double-majority requirement (McKay Commission 2013: 26). In this case, England-only bills would be voted on by the whole House, but require both an overall majority and a majority of English MPs to become laws. Effectively, English MPs would have an absolute veto but also remain unable to promote English laws against a Celtic-based majority. This option also comes closest to the one finally implemented by the Conservatives in October 2015 (Cabinet Office 2015a: 24–26). The hard EVEL approach theoretically also allows different designs (but with far less diverse political implications). Since the critical difference between hard and soft EVEL lies in whether Celtic MPs are allowed to vote on the final version of an English bill (Gallagher 2012: 19–21), hard EVEL could be differentiated by the degree to which it allows non-English MPs to participate in the law-making process prior to the final vote. Before moving on to EVEL’s implications for party competition, I will briefly outline the basic features of William Hague’s EVEL proposal which was implemented in October 2015 and discuss why I consider it an inadequate and unsustainable “solution”. Its major feature is a double-lock mechanism (McKay Commission 2013: 26 and 51; Petersohn 2015: 348) that gives English MPs a de facto veto on all “England-only” legislation by limiting the committee stage before the third reading to a grand committee consisting only of (all) English MPs (Hague 2014: 26; Cabinet Office 2015b: 24). The procedure differs depending on whether a bill is partially or fully English-only. In the first case, MPs are just allowed to veto specifically English clauses, while in the second case they can also veto the whole bill. The critical shortcoming is that the grand committee cannot add amendments and existing amendments cannot be modified, but only be voted up or down. This allows English MPs to have some influence on the final content of “England-only” legislation, but it remains limited to a “destructive” vote of preventing unwanted content to pass. Also, since the final vote is taken by the whole HoC, the mechanism does not stop Celtic MPs from potentially bringing down “England-only” laws during the final vote (Hague 2014: 26). Consequently, the Hague proposal only addresses (and this is its critical shortcoming) the far less important aspect of the West Lothian Question: pressing through laws against an English majority (Gallagher 2012: 20). It does not address the constitutionally far more important problem of a “destructive majority” 5A

double-count mechanism means that the division list would not only include the names of MPs and how they voted, but also which region they represent (McKay Commission 2013: 10).

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(the voting down of a majority of English MPs by a non-English UK-wide majority). Since the Celtic regions tend to return far more diverse compositions of MPs, it is more likely that higher percentages of non-English MPs will end up on the opposition benches (Russel and Lodge 2006: 74; Garland and Terry 2017: 19–26). As a result, it is also more likely that the government will control an English, but not a Celtic majority. Under the Hague version of EVEL, however, controlling a Celtic majority (or a large enough English majority) remains more crucial because the laws’ exact contents are determined by the whole House, and the final passage continues to be decided by all MPs. The effect of hard EVEL on party competition is considerable. A government without an English majority in the HoC would likely be a minority government and need support from other parties to ensure the passing of relevant parts of its legislation (Russel and Lodge 2006: 73–75 and 88; Gallagher 2012: 25–26). On the other hand, the number of the governing party’s Scottish and Welsh MPs remains unimportant as long as it holds a UK-wide majority. In case of an English, but no overall majority, the winning party would also have to act as a minority government or facilitate some kind of coalition agreement. Accordingly, hard EVEL tightens the requirements of government formation by practically introducing a qualified majority demand (Russel and Lodge 2006: 88). Since these are determined by the majority situation in England (plus England considerably outnumbering the Celtic MPs), it simultaneously strengthens the impact of party competition in England on UK government formation and stability. How considerable the resulting burden ends up being depends on how symmetric and flexible the party competition situation in England is (Russel and Lodge 2006: 88; Bogdanor 2009: 104–105). Should we observe that it becomes increasingly inelastic, EVEL might prove a double liability to the British system of government by demanding more distinct parliamentary majorities, while simultaneously reducing their chances of happening. The problematic result of the Hague reform is that it has more or less the same effect on government formation as hard EVEL (Petersohn 2015: 348) but does not even provide a comprehensive answer to the English and West Lothian Questions. An English majority has almost become a necessary requirement of government formation as it would prove difficult for the government to work effectively if the opposition holds an English majority and with it the power to almost unlimitedly veto the government’s English legislation (Hazell and Sandford 2015: 18–19), something only the insufficient set-up of the Hague proposal might prevent. On the other hand, holding an English majority remains an inadequate condition to run the UK government. In conclusion, the Hague proposal creates even more complex and difficult conditions for situations of unclear majorities (for a general critique of the technical aspects of the reform, see Procedure Committee of the House of Commons 2016: 12–15).6 6 In general, the assessment of the Hague proposal’s operation has been quite damning. After its first

year in practice, the grand committee apparently convened only 15 times for a total of one hour and 23 minutes, with current HoC leader Jacob Rees-Moog describing it as “faintly ridiculous” (News & Star, 19 Dec 2016).

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English National Parliament : This concept would be the “natural” extension of devolution, if the union was truly understood as a “commonwealth of nations”, meaning that it is a mutual contract of equal nations enjoying the same privileges and the right to eventual withdraw from it. Complimentary to the Celtic parliaments, an additional law-making body for England would be created to complete the federalisation of the UK (McKay Commission 2013: 24–25; Russell and Lodge 2006: 88–89; Hazell 2006a: 221 and 224). This reform scenario can be differentiated into a de facto and a de jure approach. Under the de facto approach, it would be comparatively easy to turn Westminster into an English parliament by simply separating the working schedule into English and UK sessions. Most of the HoC’s modus operandi could be kept in place without serious changes, and English MPs could even serve as both regional and national MPs. This solution would largely overlap with a “hard” EVEL approach (Bogdanor 2003: 229; Bogdanor Submission 2012: 10). Alternatively, the creation of a separate English parliament would also be possible (Bogdanor 2009: 104); in this case, Westminster would remain only the UK’s national parliament. This de jure approach would naturally create not only two distinct parliaments, but also two separate governments. The changes to party competition under this scenario would be mostly comparable to EVEL (but eventually be more disruptive, especially in procedural terms). The major differences between EVEL and an English parliament manifest in case of contrary majorities in England and the UK. While EVEL would inadvertently lead to constitutional problems and an eventual crisis (as long as the government is unable to secure the support of one or multiple third parties to overcome its lack of a majority in England or Britain as a whole), the institutional separation of Westminster and an English parliament would allow for two independent governments, circumventing this problem to some degree. Even though the basic conditions look fairly identical in both cases, the constitutional and procedural differences would be considerable. In the second case, none of the actors would be able to bring each other down, creating a traditional intergovernmental negotiation situation, instead of an interparty one, which might defuse the negative consequences of contrary majorities. However, how viably such inter-institutional negotiations can be resolved would depend on how legislative, budgetary and taxation powers are distributed and to which degree the increasing interdependence between the different governments, noted by McEwen and Petersohn (2015: 198–200), would be either disentangled or seconded by clearer and more explicit procedural rules. Parliaments in the Different Regions of England: This reform concept is the one that has come closest to being implemented (apart from the introduction of soft EVEL) because it was voted on in a referendum for the North East region in 2004. However, the move backfired spectacularly, with almost 78% voting against its introduction (Flinders 2010: 190–191; Hazell 2006b: 8–9). Therefore, the political viability of this project is one of the lowest since it was so overwhelmingly rejected that actors trying to actively address the English Question

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would view another attempt as politically unrewarding or even toxic (Bogdanor 2009: 105; Gallagher 2012: 16). The general idea behind this reform is to use smaller territorial units within England as building blocks for a new devolution layer, typically either the nine regions of England or the ceremonial counties that structured pre-modern England. Many politicians prefer this option (despite seldom actively promoting it) over the “England as a whole” approach for several reasons. First, it would create fairly comparable regional units in terms of population and territorial extent (Sandford 2002: 791). The feared danger of a single dominant subject could therefore be evaded. The same would be true for a potential shift in the balance of power between the different political parties. A split-up of England into several regions might allow Labour and the Conservatives to keep hold of their respective regional strongholds, preventing any party from eventually taking long-term control over England as a whole (Bogdanor 2003: 104–105). A direct effect of this reform strand on national party competition would almost be non-existent. In basically all plans for regional parliaments, their competence endowment is envisioned to be far weaker than that of the Celtic nations (Flinders 2004: 135–137; Bogdanor 2003: 232–234; Hadfield 2004b: 248–249). Accordingly, English politics would continue to be widely made in Westminster. The indirect effects through changing perceptions of the importance of national and regional institutions could match the ones that took place in Scotland after the introduction of devolution (Keating 2006: 156–157). I would, however, emphasise that their appearance is very unlikely due to the lower amount of powers and the lower prevalence of regional identities. Conversely, regional party competition in England would become an important aspect of British politics and its academic reception. So far, party competition’s regional developments have been of little to no practical political consequence. With the implementation of regional parliaments, the territorial structure of party competition would be relevant not only to the composition of the regional parliaments and governments but also for the functioning and analysis of intergovernmental relations. Even though the competence endowment of regional parliaments would probably be very limited, inter-institutional coordination and cooperation would multiply simply because of the considerable number of new actors. Accordingly, my study would hold the strongest relevance for this reform option even though I see it as the approach with the most doubtful chances of implementation. Dissolution of the Union: The dissolution of the UK could be the result of the independence of one or more of the Celtic nations (and would be almost inevitable in case of an English declaration of independence). It would also be the most radical “solution” to or outcome of the UK’s constitutional challenges, which makes it very unlikely to be implemented (Hazell 2006a: 227–228). While there is some non-negligible public support for the idea (corresponding polls show that a stable fifth of the English population picks independence as its first choice of constitutional reform options, Wyn Jones et al. 2012: 11, 2013: 14–16), political elites will try to circumvent it under

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any circumstances, at least for the potentially disastrous economic and international consequences. However, averting a dissolution is also fairly easy to achieve. Since such a decision would probably be referred to the British electorate, lawmakers could offer a multi-option referendum, including one or several of the less radical reform proposals. With the major political benefit of a dissolution (English self-government) also being offered by the establishment of an English parliament or the introduction of hard EVEL, it is highly questionable how a majority of the English population could be convinced to prefer it over one of these less invasive alternatives. There is only one major difference between the dissolution of the union and the establishment of an English parliament that might be seen as an advantage by some, the question of financing. So far, the budget of England and the Celtic subjects is mostly determined by the index of the Barnett formula. Under the Barnett rules, the Celtic fringe receives significantly larger funding compared to its population size (before the further devolution of tax raising powers in 2016, the Celtic nations typically received between 10 and 30% higher funding than England; Webb 2007: 33; Keep 2018: 11), which would probably remain the case even after the creation of an English parliament. A dissolution of the union would most likely be the only way to end this and might therefore be a preferential option for those who strongly condemn the Celtic nations’ overfunding. Again, there is sufficient empirical evidence that a significant proportion of the English population (Wyn Jones et al. 2012: 10, 2013: 9, 11 and 15; Curtice 2010b: 7; Henderson et al. 2015: 271) regards these grants as unjustified, but it remains an open question whether this resentment would be strong enough to outweigh the political, economic and emotional costs of disbanding the union (Hazell 2006a: 227–228). In terms of party competition, the effects would again be straightforward. Unionwide party competition would be at an end and be replaced by the various regional structures. In the Celtic fringe, differences in voting behaviour between national and regional elections would most likely be levelled out, with regional elections’ voting patterns remaining dominant. The changes in England would be, counterintuitively, the smallest even though it is the most disruptive reform. The new English parliament would practically act in the same way Westminster does for England today, while the governmental double structure (the de facto existence of an English and British government) resulting from most other alternatives would not emerge, making eventual changes in individual voting behaviour unlikely. Having so far focussed on the different reform proposals themselves, I will now summarise the results and try to link them with the general problems of the handling of devolution I have identified in the first part of this chapter. I will also use these shortcomings to further clarify why the devolution settlement hinges so strongly on the political parties and, conversely, why the settlement has such a significant impact on party competition. The major point that has probably deluded the perception of the seriousness of the West Lothian Question and the English Question is the pragmatic understanding of politics in Britain (Hazell 2006a: 238–240, 2006c: 53–54; Bogdanor 2009: 107– 110, 2010: 164–170). As long as the different nationalists held only a handful of seats, there was neither a need to transfer certain powers to the Celtic nations nor

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to modify the decision-making rules within Westminster and the political system as a whole. Historically, the constitutional status quo only became unbearable for the two major parties in the face of exceptional danger or prolonged disruptions of the “usual” political business (Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 29–30 and 49–50). The critical point is that these “exceptional” pressures are getting more and more out of hand and move beyond the direct control of the major parties because they are increasingly facilitated by developments in party competition. It is especially the growing impact and professionalisation of the SNP that exposes the dangers of the current devolution settlement and heightens the risk of constitutional crises. Immediately after its success in the 2015 general election, the SNP took significant measures to step up its parliamentary role to that of a “real” opposition party. The first measure was the effective withdrawal of the party’s “no votes on English laws” policy. Since the introduction of devolution, it had been long-standing SNP policy not to partake in parliamentary divisions on issues that exclusively concerned England and Wales or England only (Bogdanor 2010: 161; Russell and Lodge 2006: 86). Although it was up to the leadership’s discretion to decide whether controversial pieces of legislation should be considered as “England-only” issues, the parliamentary party acted fairly conservative and limited its involvement to budgetary aspects and political questions that would have an extraordinary impact on Scotland (like Trident, renewable energy and the defence review, Russel and Lodge 2006: 86–87). The second major step was the introduction of a party whip to increase cohesion, especially in question of legislative votes. Before the 2015 election, the SNP had no whip system at all, but with its new system in place, the party performed a complete U-turn from its former non-involvement policy and low-level parliamentary organisation which led, as the Financial Times (Mance, 9 May 2016) described it, to the creation of a parliamentary party of “almost Leninist discipline”.7 Due to the SNP’s professionalisation coupled with the effective wipeout of the non-nationalist parties in Scotland in 2015 and 2019 as well as the two hung parliaments of 2010 and 2017, the parliamentary handling of non-English MPs has become of utmost importance to preserve the stability of British government. As I have extensively outlined, the UK system is structurally unprepared for regular coalition governments (Butler 1978: 116–118), but this situation becomes even worse once the balance in parliament is held by parties who either are openly separatist or at least exclusively represent clearly identifiable regional minorities that have to be paid off to ensure government stability. The SNP’s record in Westminster since 2015 clearly indicates that the party is actively using parliament as a platform to push its separatist goals (Hayton 2015: 130–131). Accordingly, if party competition continues to be unable to provide enough elasticity of the electorate for the voting system to fulfil its purposes of producing stable majorities and regular government turnovers,

7 According

to Philip Cowley (24 Nov 2015), the cohesion and discipline of the SNP are hardly matched by any other party. Based on the 130 votes in the HoC (from the general election 2015 to November 2015), he only counts six dissenting votes among SNP MPs (excluding one free vote).

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the conflict over the devolution settlement will turn into a catalyst that will further damage the functionality of the political system as a whole. The second major problem, political resistance to actively addressing the constitutional inconsistencies created by the devolution, rests in the same two reasons Fukuyama (2014: 504–505) identifies as main hindrances to a comprehensive institutional reform in the USA: relevant political actors lacking material incentives to change the status quo and general ideological opposition. For the Tories, the refusal of meaningful constitutional reform stems from Burkian reasoning. The party understands itself as the embodiment of the union and its political order. Therefore, it generally regards active changes to the status quo as an endangerment of the order as a whole (Mycock and Hayton 2014: 256–259; Jeffery et al. 2016: 346–347; Hazell 2006c: 43–44). The Labour Party instead opposes most of the discussed reforms for a different ideological reason, the preservation of national unity (Mycock and Hayton 2014: 259–263). National unity is not only central in keeping together the party’s more diverse electoral coalition but also to justifying its political demands (Select Committee for the Constitution 2014: 17–27 and 43–53). Central political rallying points of the party, like the NHS, the National Insurance and the Minimum Wage, depend on a broad public acceptance of universalist principles which presuppose a strong common “British” identity, conversely threatened by the emergence of nonBritish national identities (Mycock and Hayton 2014: 260). Accordingly, Labour’s proposals on the English and West Lothian Questions generally try to sidestep the emergence of stronger English, Welsh and Scottish identities by focussing on smaller scale, local solutions that would either reinforce more local or practically non-existent identities that pose no threat to “Britishness”. Looking at the impact of the discussed reform scenarios on party competition, the consequences would be quite similar for all of them (except for localised devolution and the weakest forms of soft EVEL). They would either lead to two distinct governments for the UK and England or force the British government to secure a qualified majority (meaning it would need both a UK-wide and an English majority). To some degree, this is also already the case, with provisions of the Hague proposals practically requiring an English majority to ensure the passing of English-only laws (Petersohn 2015: 348; Cabinet Office 2015a: 25–26, 2015b: 24–25). Accordingly, party competition would not only strongly hinge on the results achieved in England, but also force the parties to address England as a political entity more directly in their policies. While the regional distribution of electoral results has been of no political consequence in itself so far, the lack of an English majority, even though a party might have secured an overall majority, would become a problem of significant consequences for the stability of government (Russell and Lodge 2006: 88; Hazell 2006a: 225; Bogdanor, 24 September 2014). Conversely, the clearer separation of powers and responsibilities along territorial lines would raise questions of legitimacy if a ruling party achieved an overall, but no English majority because of the potential conflict with the majoritarian principle of original representation of the majority’s (or practically the plurality’s) will. Additionally, recent years have seen intensified scholarly interest in the development and consequences of the emergence of a distinct English identity (Jeffery et al.

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2016; Henderson et al. 2015; Curtice 2010b, 2006; Wyn Jones et al. 2013, 2012; Bryant 2010; Kenny 2015; Mycock and Hayton 2014; Hayton 2016). Until the early 2000s, English and British identity tended to largely overlap, and being English had no distinguishable meaning from being British. Since the demand of explicit political recognition as a group hinges on the self-awareness of the group under consideration, English devolution remained a low-priority issue in the first years after the introduction of devolution (Curtice 2006: 121–128). Accordingly, one of the major arguments against proactive and wider-ranging action concerning the English and West Lothian Questions had been that the English people did not strongly demand an explicit treatment of the problem (Curtice 2006: 138–139; McKay Commission 2014: 17–18; Hazell 2006a: 228–230). This was, however, neither an indicator of its constitutional necessity nor a proof that they preferred no action at all. The long-term experience of devolution has changed both the self-reception of the English people and their interpretation of the current constitutional settlement. These changes have manifested in a significant growth in English self-awareness, an increasing importance of self-perception as being English rather than British and much stronger feelings about the constitutional settlement (Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 9–16; Jeffery et al. 2016: 342). There are three relevant links here between these changes in attitudes and the constitutional order and party competition that should be recognised in future devolution reforms. First, there is a visible connection between the resentment against the constitutional settlement and the prevalence of an English identity (Keating 2010: 378; Jeffery et al. 2016: 342–343). Although the direction of the relationship is not clear, either the perceived heteronomy exercised by the EU and the Scottish government increases the consciousness of being English or the growing awareness of an English identity fuels resentment against “outside” influences on English politics (Jeffery et al. 2016: 340–341; Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 17–24), such a connection has politically explosive implications. While prejudice and distrust towards the EU have clearly been stronger, the highly negative perception of the SNP and the growing feeling that Scotland “feeds” on England will continue to reinforce “Englishness” as long as English devolution remains unaddressed and might carry the danger of future backlashes against the nationwide parties, especially in cases of constitutional crises (Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 36–38, 2012: 31–34). More generally, the erosion of “Britishness” and the shallowness of the union’s essence in the twenty-first century will further impair on the acceptability of the UK’s asymmetrical devolution (Jeffery 2009b: 395–398). Second, the three constitutional issues of the EU membership, (Scottish) devolution and the perception of the English Question seem to be interlinked, at least for those English people who hold strongly negative sentiments towards the political status quo (Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 20–23; Jeffery et al. 2016: 341–343). Accordingly, it seems that there are no individual, but only integrated solutions to these problems. As I have outlined in the previous point, the root of the problem seems to be the perceived rule of “outsiders” over England. If this is true, the piecemeal and low-level approach towards devolution in England that politicians have employed so far will be insufficient to counter this perception (Niendorf 2018: 82–83). On

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the contrary, it might even facilitate these feelings because the disparity in selfgovernment will become more apparent. The only way to comprehensively address it would be a clear-cut separation of powers and the disentanglement of competences and responsibilities, which has been the Achilles’ heel of the devolution settlement so far and one of the aspects constantly rejected in parliamentary debates on the issue. Third, the increasing self-awareness of English “patriots” is also connected to growing anti-establishment populism and therefore might have important direct implications for British party competition. Those who strongly criticise the constitutional status quo and feel closer to an English identity also deeply distrust the established parties in handling the interests of England and have a strong preference for UKIP, which they see as the best representative of these interests (Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 32–36; Jeffery et al. 2016: 346). As the various studies by Rob Ford and Matthew Goodwin (Ford et al. 2012; Ford and Goodwin 2014a, 2014b, 2016; Goodwin and Milazzo 2015; Dennison and Goodwin 2015) show, this antiestablishment populism reinforces the perception of the handling of other political issues, specifically the constitutional order and political system at large. Practically, this means that many UKIP voters (and English “patriots” in general) are more or less “lost” to the mainstream parties because they deeply distrust and often hate the “establishment” so much that they will not listen to its messages nor give it credit for actively addressing their demands (Dennison and Goodwin 2015: 179–181 and 185– 187; Ford and Goodwin 2014a: 126–136 and 191–213, 2014b: 280–284; McLaren 2013: 93–96). This will make it extremely difficult for Labour and the Conservatives to “sell” their, at best moderate, constitutional reform proposals to those most dissatisfied by the status quo (Mycock and Hayton 2014; Jeffery et al. 2016: 346–347). The difficulty in publicly solving the English Question therefore lies in the problem that the mainstream parties have to address the grievances of a group that prefers radical measures and increasingly distrusts the “establishment” while their limited offers will most likely accommodate only those who are not even concerned with the problem. Although UKIP and the Brexit Party have largely dismantled themselves, the connection between the broader phenomenon of anti-establishment populism and the unsolved constitutional question could provide a right-wing party with a “new” additional issue (besides immigration) once the current rallying point of Brexit is solved (Mycock and Hayton 2014: 264–265; Niendorf 2018: 82–93). The Tories’ “retrieval” of a significant number of these voters should therefore not be interpreted as a sign of positive and active support for the status quo nor a full appreciation of the mainstream Conservative Party by former UKIPers (Bale and Webb 2017: 53– 55). Accordingly, while the described constitutional problems are only top-priority issues for a minority of the population, their continuous disregard will further fuel the political disillusion of those feeling “left behind” and already being distrustful towards the political “establishment”.

Chapter 5

Measuring the Territorial Dimension of Party Competition

Having outlined the nexus of party competition, devolution and the style of government, it is now necessary to address the questions of the technical realisation of my study. I will start by briefly discussing potential time frames and illuminating some general difficulties in conducting long-term analyses of British elections. Then, I will operationalise the different dimensions of my concept of party competition, as indicated in Chap. 3.1.

5.1 Time Frame and Case Selection The starting point of my study is rather intuitive, but since the respective literature suggests some alternatives, I am going to briefly discuss my selection of the researched period. One of the crucial challenges for every long-term analysis of party competition or voting behaviour is to define a time frame during which elections take place under fairly stable and “comparable” basic conditions (Gross and Niendorf 2017: 368). This question is also of importance to establish a baseline structure of electoral support from which potential changes of party competition are estimated and therefore preclude to some degree as how impactful and positive or negative these developments are evaluated. Looking at these stable basic conditions, we can identify at least three potential starting points for researching the “modern” British party system: the elections of 1900 (foundation of the Labour Party), 1918 (or 1922, introduction of universal male and limited female suffrage) or 1945 (or 1950). I finally selected the 1950 election for several practical and theoretical reasons, which I will outline in the following. The major reason for choosing a post-World War II date as starting point is exemplified by Caramani (2004: 80, 2005: 304). He argues that the process of homogenisation of electoral competition lasted until World War II. With the end of the war, pre-industrial issues, like culture and religion, were swept aside as dominant political conflicts, being finally replaced by the “modern” left–right conflict. Since I assume © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_5

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that British politics has considerably “reterritorialised” over recent decades, it seems appropriate to pick a starting point at which, theoretically, the classical territorialised cleavages should have been at their low point of salience and the functional capital–labour conflict reached its consolidation as dominant electoral issue. Selecting the 1945 election, however, poses two problems. First, the election held an exceptional status comparable to the post-war election of 1918: Labour crushed the Tories in the most decisive electoral victory of British history by securing an almost uniform 12% vote swing and close to 240 additional seats. While the decisiveness of the Labour victory in itself is not necessarily a problem, it is clear that this was far from being a “typical” or “representative” British election since this victory was achieved after ten years without an election, the most destructive war in history, a coalition government running for almost 15 years and Labour proposing a singular expansion of the welfare state (Thorpe 2015: 118; Pelling 1993: 94). A second more technical problem lies in the continuation of certain pre-modern peculiarities of the British voting system that would have been even more problematic under any earlier starting date. The initial Boundary Commission Report, published in 1947, culminated in the Representation of the People Act, 1948, which abolished most of the pre-modern elements and anomalies of the voting system (like university constituencies, the business vote and multimember constituencies, Johnston 2013: 47). Accordingly, the 1950 election saw the introduction of the UK’s “modern” electoral system (Rose and Munro 2010: 2009–2010). Although these “anomalies” might not necessarily lead to significant distortions, I saw no additional benefits that would outweigh the corresponding problems of using the 1945 election and concluded that 1950 was a more suitable starting point. Having determined which elections to include, the question of how voting results can be analysed over time is most pertinent. Voting systems with single-member constituencies normally require some regular process of boundary review that adjusts the voting districts in line with demographic developments to ensure that the electoral weight of individual votes remains fairly equal nationwide (Schoen 2005: 376; Rossiter et al. 1999a: 164–173; Johnston et al. 2001: 69–88). For long-term electoral research; this creates the problem that the results of individual constituencies are barely comparable over longer periods of time because their territorial composition changes with each boundary review, even though they might retain their name (Rose and Munro 2010: 2016). While a long-term comparison of individual constituencies is still technically possible (Borisyuk et al. 2010b: 13–15; Rossiter et al. 1999a: 351–363), it is not viable.1 This means that long-term analyses typically require the use of some overarching, more stable territorial subdivision, like the states in the USA, the Länder in Germany or the communities and regions in Belgium, along which individual constituencies can be aggregated (Bogdanor and Field 1993: 220–221). Accordingly, how constituency boundaries are exactly redrawn is of significant importance 1 Modelling boundary changes through ward-level analyses is usually done for illustrative purposes

only because it has to use local election results (which are counted at the ward level, Rose and Munro 2010: 2016) and then extrapolate them to the constituency results of general elections since those are only published for the constituency but not the ward level.

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because the principles of the review process determine not only how stable or unstable the territorial composition of individual constituencies is, but also whether the redraw process explicitly respects the boundaries of these larger territorial units and therefore makes them viable aggregation units (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 140–164). In British boundary reviews, seats are first allocated to the constituting “nations” based on their electoral populations’ relative size in respect of the whole kingdom and the current size of the HoC (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 180–184). Afterwards, seats in England are allocated based on a calculated quota to the units of the local government structure (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 184; Johnston et al. 2001: 70–75). Initially, this distribution was based on the division of administrative counties established by the Local Government Act of 1888, which was strongly influenced by the older division of ceremonial counties (Butler 1955: 133–134). After the restructuring of local government in 1972, the Commission used this updated administrative division for its allocation. This leaves me with three potential geographical subdivisions that could be used as aggregation levels. As outlined, during the latest reviews the Boundary Commission has been using the administrative county structure for their initial seat distribution, which accordingly should be the most appropriate aggregation level. Of importance is also the fact that the requirement to respect “local ties” led the Commission to conventionally refrain from mixing wards of different counties, almost exclusively limiting redistricting to individual counties (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 283). However, the use of this structure is more problematic than it seems at first glance. The crucial difficulty lies in the mentioned local government reform of 1972 and its discontinuation of the organisational principle of regional administration. The last major reform before 1972 happened in 1888, and the pre-1888 structure basically included no considerations of modern public service provision or demographic and economic factors at all (Wilson and Game 2011: 53–58). Even though the 1888 reform was intended to improve administrative efficiency by paying more attention to functionalist principles of organisation (Wilson and Game 2011: 57–58; Leach and Percy-Smith 2001: 47–50), it continued to strongly rely on the older historic counties.2 The 1972 reform, however, fully embraced the principle of functionalist efficiency by creating more coherent territorial units (Johnston et al. 1997: 342; Wilson and Game 2011: 60–62), which sometimes resulted in vastly different territorial compositions (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 145). A further critical point was that the establishment of these functionalist considerations intensified the frequency and comprehensiveness of reviews of the county structure which pushed the principle of metropolitan clustering. As a result, the 1888–1972 county structure significantly deviates from the post1972 structure(s), making it hardly possible to aggregate constituency results on 2 Thus,

when I speak of historic counties I mean the updated structure of 1888, not the true historic counties of the pre-1888 era. Officially, both types of counties created by Local Government Act, 1888, s 1 and Local Government Act, 1972, s 1(1) and (2) are called administrative counties. To avoid confusion, I decided to only call the newest structure administrative counties and designate the 1888 structure as historic counties.

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5 Measuring the Territorial Dimension of Party Competition

either the historic county level or the administrative county level because doing so would require the same mechanism of boundary adjustment as a comparison of individual constituencies over multiple review periods, although to a significantly lower extent than in the latter case.3 This left me with one other potential option: the so-called regions (Fig. 5.1) or GOR (not to confuse with the Standard Statistical Regions). These regions were designed in 1994 as conglomerates of multiple counties as a result of the creation of the government offices for the English regions. These offices were intended to implement and administrate geographically wide-ranging but still regionally limited government policies and programmes (Pearce et al. 2008: 445–446 and 448–449; Leach and Percy-Smith 2001: 223–226). Since the regions’ boundaries were mostly drawn up along the borders of rural historic counties, reproducing the cross-cuts between the pre-1972 and post-1972 county structure could be mostly avoided (ons.gov.uk).4 With most of the cross-cutting boundaries between the county structures taking place within the regions but not between them, this subdivision has the significant advantage of requiring neither the recalculation of constituency results nor the ex ante exclusion of certain constituencies, although this comes at the expenses of having only nine English regions compared to the current 83 counties (plus Greater London) (Fig. 5.1).

5.2 Operationalisation of “Party Competition” In this chapter, I am going to outline how I attempt to empirically measure the degree of competitiveness of the British party system. As discussed in Chap. 3.1, my concept of party competition is based on the dimensional differentiation offered by Stefano Bartolini. Since the decidability dimension can only be researched in depth by a programmatic analysis, I decided to only indirectly include it in my study and focus most of my comments here on the three dimensions of vulnerability, contestability and availability. To operationalise the contestability aspect of party competition, I start with a preliminary analysis of the seat development in the UK. While the overall seat development has no negative or positive implications for the systemic contestability or individual parties’ ability to “contest”, the regional distribution of these seats might have. As I have discussed in Chap. 3.2, even in centralist states, support for political parties is not uniformly distributed but at least to some degree concentrated in certain areas. This is further fuelled by the local nature of electoral competition that forces parties to build majorities in regionally limited areas to secure parliamentary 3 Other

works (Pelling 1967; Dunbabin 1980; Miller 1977) analysing long-term regional electoral development typically use only a sample of constituencies or create their own stable territorial units to aggregate constituencies. However, Bogdanor and Field (1993: 212) admit that such a process was considerably complicated by the 1972 local government reform. 4 The exceptions are the territories between the North East and Yorkshire and the Humber where the heavily urbanised Tees Valley marks the border area as well as the ambiguous administrative status of the North and North East Lincolnshire authorities.

5.2 Operationalisation of “Party Competition”

65

Fig. 5.1 Regions of England, 2018. Source Office for National Statistics, Open Geography Portal

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5 Measuring the Territorial Dimension of Party Competition

seats (Johnston et al. 2012b: 884–894; Rossiter et al. 1999a: 333–334; Rodden 2010: 325–330). While this primarily concerns individual seats, it can obviously turn into a problem concerning a larger territory. As I will show in my empirical part, domination comparable to that of individual constituencies can also be observed in a growing number of regions. The reasons for such larger territorial homogenisations might be manifold, and of only limited importance at this point, but once they take place changes in the seat distribution between different regions will become an aspect of general contestability that demands attention (Borisyuk et al. 2010b; Johnston et al. 2012a, 1999; Rallings et al. 2008; Rossiter et al. 1999a: 349–363). Since new seats are actually created from an already existing electorate, it makes some difference to party competition whether new seats are created in areas of strong single-party dominance or a territory of balanced support and high competiveness. However, this is unfortunately the only aspect of the contestability dimension that can be directly observed in plurality voting systems. The major problem for this dimension lies in the fact that plurality voting systems do not independently change parties’ contestability potentials; instead, their consequences or effects are almost always dependent on the structure and distribution of parties’ support. Accordingly, even a party with less than 100,000 fervent and locally concentrated supporters can get a larger parliamentary representation than a party with several million supporters that are evenly distributed across the whole country (Farrell 1997: 17–19; Curtice 2015b: 34–37, 2018: 34–36). Some scholars use the concept of “electoral bias” to describe effects that could be considered as elements of the contestability dimension (Johnston et al. 2012b: 884–887; Rallings et al. 2004: 1375–1379; Johnston et al. 1999: 368–369; Borisyuk et al. 2010b: 11–13; Rossiter et al. 1999a: 1–48) which analyses how effectively votes of a certain party translate into seats. The major theoretical problem of this approach is it assumes that the “difficulty” of winning over a specific voter is the same as for any other voter. This, however, does not necessarily have to be true if a party generally convinces more voters in constituencies that are larger or have higher turnouts, while the other party typically secures fewer swing voters, but in smaller constituencies. Since electoral bias therefore not actually measures an independent voting system effect, I will employ a different procedure to shed light on the interaction of the party support structure and the electoral system’s translation mechanism. I will present parliamentary outcomes “produced” through different electoral result scenarios that are based on the parties’ actual campaign performances, thereby specifically analysing how the effect of the electoral system’s translation mechanism changes under different swing vote constellations. I think that this simulation is sophisticated enough to describe the contestability dimension of the British party system, especially since my main focus lies on the competitiveness of the two major parties, not the contestability potentials of new contenders (Bartolini 1999: 457–458). As I have outlined, Bartolini (2000: 52–54) argues that vulnerability should not be understood as the general elasticity of the electorate or parliamentary composition but specifically as the likelihood of removing the incumbent government, which Sartori (2005: 170) describes as the essence of two-party systems. Therefore, it is

5.2 Operationalisation of “Party Competition”

67

a party-specific phenomenon (although Bartolini (2000: 53–54) argues otherwise) which can have different values depending on the governing party. I have followed this assumption by independently estimating the vulnerability of both the Labour and Conservative Parties. To analyse government vulnerability, I will also start with a preliminary analysis. Here, I will look at the parliamentary majorities secured by the British governments over the last 70 years. While the seat majorities do not necessarily tell me anything about the electoral vulnerability, it should at least tell me something about parliamentary vulnerability. Since parliamentary vulnerability should theoretically be fairly low in a well-working majoritarian democracy, while electoral vulnerability should be high, it indicates how (territorially) extensive the opposition has to campaign to remove the incumbent government, thereby describing to which type of campaigning the government is vulnerable. I will also look at the regional distribution of parties’ MPs to see whether there are specific regions where parties’ seat returns strongly vary or remain largely stable, broadly indicating whether they are sensitive to party competition in the region or have reliable parliamentary returns. However, vulnerability ultimately depends on how safe the individual constituencies’ majorities are, meaning that electoral vulnerability is far more crucial than parliamentary vulnerability (Bartolini 2000: 54). The most obvious indicator for establishing it is the average majorities held by the parties in the different regions (Curtice 2018: 31, 2015b: 27–28, 2010a: 629–630) as well as their standard deviation (Johnston et al. 2001: 32–37), since they describe what kind of margins the local contenders have to overcome. Although this gives me an impression of individual parties’ general vulnerability, it inadvertently comes at the costs of losing all information about the situation in individual constituencies which is so crucial in estimating the actual extent of competitiveness in plurality voting systems. In addition, it only allows a very indirect estimation of the systemic properties of vulnerability that Bartolini (2000: 53–54) points out. In order to get a better insight, I will look into the development of the number of safe and marginal seats. This will allow me to estimate the actual impact of existing majorities and give me an impression of whether the UK rather experienced an increase in safeness or competitiveness, which can theoretically deviate from the party-specific developments if one party holds significantly more safe seats than the other. I will, however, supplement these results with a few general results concerning the development of the parties’ average majority margins. In addition to the majorities held by the parties, I will also look more closely at the parties’ vote shares in seats they hold and those not controlled by them, which, for the sake of simplicity, I will call the “majority” and “minority vote” in the rest of the text. While the indicator described in the previous paragraph gives me a direct impression of the safeness of individual parties’ seats, it does not show me the extent of support held by neither incumbents nor contenders. It also obscures certain aspects of the underlying competition situation, because the same safeness can be created by widely different distributions of the majority and opposition vote once there are more than two parties contesting the constituency (Johnston et al. 2001: 44–46). Accordingly, it is of some significance whether we have a perfect two-party competition, with A

68

5 Measuring the Territorial Dimension of Party Competition

holding 60 per cent and B 40 per cent of the vote, or a seat where party A holds 40 per cent and parties B, C and D hold 20 per cent each (Cox 1997: 77–79). The individual analysis of both factors for the two major parties is also necessary to see whether eventual changes in their support structure took place among the majority or the minority vote. The deviation or convergence of these developments should allow me to see whether regions are tending towards a competition situation of increasing or decreasing as well as general or party-specific vulnerability. As I discussed in Chap. 3.1, the availability dimension requires extensive polling and an analysis of individual-level preference building to be sophisticatedly measured in Bartolini’s sense (Bartolini 1999: 467–468; Caramani 2004: 38–42). However, I also argued that such an extensive empirical analysis is not necessarily required when researching a majoritarian democracy. The essence of party competition in these democracies is the choice between two competing government visions and government control through the electorate’s ability to vote the current administration out of office. The crucial aspect here is how well these mechanisms are actually performed, rather than their theoretical probability (Sartori’s 2005: 170). Following these considerations, I will base my indicators on actual changes in voting behaviour instead of trying to establish the theoretical or “true” size of the available electorate. In order to gain an impression of its extent, I will use three indicators: the average and maximum regional swing votes towards and against the parties, the accumulated swings of both parties and the divergence of regional vote swings from the national one. Calculating availability by actual vote swings is fairly straightforward. For the maximum swing, I simply look at the highest positive and negative swing ever experienced by the party under consideration in the respective region. The calculation of the average swings is a bit more difficult because it is necessary to define which elections should be considered for the calculation. Therefore, a more detailed description of my final calculation process will be given in Chap. 6.6. The accumulated swings of the parties were intuitively calculated by just separately adding up the positive and negative swings of each party for all researched elections. While these two indicators give me a good impression of the general elasticity of the regional electorate, they in themselves do not tell me whether any specific party profits from it and to which degree. This should be clearly observable by the regional deviations from the national vote swing, at least in the long run (see the respective comments by Curtice and Steed 1999b: 394–395, 1999a: 338–339; Johnston et al. 2005: 786–787; Dearlove and Saunders 2000: 175–176; Budge 1996: 19–21). As I have just outlined, the amount of swing voters should be indicated by the extent of vote changes. Larger than national vote swings indicate a greater volatility of the electorate and therefore larger numbers of available voters, while smaller than national swings point to a more segmented electorate and a greater importance of party loyalists (Caramani 2004: 34–40). Differences in the likelihood of voting for a specific party (or “bias”) should be observable by the direction of deviations from the national swing. However, the extent of deviations itself is not necessarily representative of the general properties of the regional electorate, especially if they are the result of a few exceptional elections. Accordingly, I decided to add another

5.2 Operationalisation of “Party Competition”

69

aspect to this indicator by looking into the reliability of bias occurrences. Depending on the result patterns I should be able to estimate the relevance of the available electorate for regional results and to which degree the local population is positively or negatively inclined towards the parties. In the second part of my empirical analysis, I try to bring my three-dimensional considerations about party competition together by taking a closer look at how the parliamentary composition would change under different circumstances. In general, I calculated two different scenarios for both major parties, a scenario of “average” or “normal” party campaign performance and a scenario of exceptional performance. This was done by applying the respective regional vote swings to the elections the party under consideration lost, meaning it failed to secure an absolute majority in the HoC. Based on the corresponding changes of constituency results, I then calculated a notional seat outcome which was analysed along the aspects of whether the governing party changes, whether there is an overall majority at all, whether England and the UK display the same result structure and how regional results developed over time. This way we can see how the electoral system would work under different performance assumptions. Theoretically, in a normally functioning majoritarian democracy, an average electoral performance by the main opposition party should be enough to secure a government turnover or, if this is not the case, at least preserve a clear majority of the incumbent government (Powell 2000: 10 and 20–21; Nohlen 2009: 433–434). Eventual changes in the territorial structure of support patterns are reflected by the different actual election results to which the vote swings are applied. If they evolve positively or remain broadly similar, the notional electoral outcome should typically display the same properties as theoretically suggested (government change and clearcut majorities) for both parties. Should the notional outcomes, however, regularly fail to end in government changes or continuously produce hung parliaments, then the support has developed in an institutionally dangerous way since the electoral system can no longer fulfil its main purpose of manufacturing majorities, unless the parties manage to improve their performance (Johnston et al. 2001: 20–48; Curtice 2010b, 2018). While the differences in seat returns between the notional elections of a single scenario should indicate the long-term changes in the underlying support structure of the parties, the differences in the seat returns between both scenarios (average and maximum swings) should indicate the performance effect on electoral outcomes. If the differences between both scenarios increase over time, this would indicate a higher performance sensitivity. Smaller deviations, however, indicate a lower impact of campaign performances and therefore lower chances for the parties to overcome the current seat distribution by stronger campaigns (Johnston et al. 2001: 36). Finally, if the differences between the scenarios stay at comparable levels, and the seat returns fall in both of them, we have the most difficult situation because performance increases can only compensate to a limited degree for the general decline in competitiveness. Conversely, if the deviations remain stable but the seat returns increase, then we have the best development in terms of competitiveness because the underlying party support has evolved in a way that makes elections highly competitive, even if the parties fail to put up a strong campaign performance.

Chapter 6

The Development of Regional Competition

6.1 Shifting of the Prize—Changes in the Regional Seat Distribution The first step towards empirically illuminating my concept of party competition is to look at the regional distribution of seats. In this chapter, I will outline the boundary commissions’ impact on seat distribution over the last 70 years. This is a preliminary step in assessing the development of the parliamentary weight of the different regions before examining more closely the regional electoral support of the parties. Accordingly, the regional seat distribution is not in itself a viable indicator of party competition development, but it is important for contextualising the regional trends of other indicators (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 191–192). Looking briefly at the development before the creation of the boundary commissions, two points are important to mention. The major development of boundary redistricting in the 19th and early 20th century was the weakening of southern England, today’s regions of the South West, South East and East, in favour of the most northern regions and, even more important, the kingdom’s capital (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 191). Under the unreformed House of Commons, before 1832, the south of England held almost 50% of all seats, while northern England was only awarded around 10%. London, with its 11 seats, was politically almost non-existent in pre-industrial times. Until 1945, this distribution had shifted massively. In 1945, Greater London became the region with the largest political weight, being awarded 115 of the 640 HoC seats. This massive gain came at the expense of the three southern regions of England, which were reduced to 133, less than half their percentage a hundred years earlier. The other “winners” of the various redistributions were the northern regions, with My data set used for the upcoming calculations is derived from two main sources. The pre-1997 results are based on Daniele Caramani’s (2000) “Elections in Western Europe since 1815” (which includes voting results until 2000), while results from 2000 to 2010 are derived from Pippa Norris’ “British Parliamentary Constituency database” (pippanorris.com). These numbers were supplemented by Rallings’ and Trasher’s raw data for the Electoral Commission for the latest three elections on which also Norris’ data set is based. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_6

71

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6 The Development of Regional Competition

Table 6.1 Regional seat development (1950–2010) Greater London

1950

1955

100

102

Feb. 1974 92

1983

1992

1997

2005

2010

84

84

74

74

73

East

38

41

45

51

51

56

56

58

South East

60

61

70

77

78

83

83

84

South West

45

45

46

48

48

51

51

55

East Midlands

39

39

40

42

42

44

44

46

West Midlands

52

54

56

58

58

59

59

59

Yorkshire/Humber

57

55

54

54

54

56

56

54

North East

31

31

31

30

30

30

30

29

North West

84

83

82

79

79

76

76

75

Wales

36

36

36

38

38

40

40

40

Scotland

71

71

71

72

72

72

59

59

Northern Ireland

12

12

12

17

17

18

18

18

625

630

635

650

651

659

646

650

UK

Note Missing elections indicate that no seat changes took place since the previous election

the North East increasing its numbers from 12 to 31, and the North West, which tripled its numbers from 28 to 88 (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 191–192). These general trends of the nineteenth and early twentieth century all came to an end with the Initial Boundary Review of 1947. As Table 6.11 shows, the development of seat numbers since then is unidirectional for most regions over the whole research period and runs against the trend of the pre1947 period in most cases. The biggest winners of these processes are the South East (+31 seats) and the East of England (+22). The largest decreases, on the other hand, were experienced by London (-42) and Scotland (-12), although both are technically special cases. The most obvious and perhaps most surprising development is the gigantic fall in seat numbers for London. After the city’s representation peaked in 1945, its political weight constantly declined with every review to today’s 73 seats, a loss of 36.5%. The reasons for this are manifold, but I want to point out one with a very close connection to my study. McLean and Mortimore (1992: 302) and Rossiter et al. (1999a: 153–154 and 337–339) argue that the main reason lies in the overrepresentation of London’s inner-city constituencies. Since the Boundary Commissions had and have no clear rounding rules for determining the final number of seats attributed to a county (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 185), the English Commission strictly adhered to the principle of not crossing borough borders when creating the capital’s constituencies. This led to an artificial overrepresentation of London because many boroughs fell below the rounding points, but the Commission was reluctant to reduce their seat 1I

excluded a discussion of the planned implementation of the 2018 boundary review since the government decided to cancel it in March 2020 and ordered a completely new review based on the current HoC size rather than the initially planned 600 seats (Proctor, 26 Mar 2020).

6.1 Shifting of the Prize—Changes in the Regional Seat Distribution

73

entitlement. Once Greater London was created in 1965 by joining the capital with the four surrounding counties (Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent and Surrey), the situation became increasingly unbearable and the English Boundary Commission started joining several boroughs to determine seat entitlements. In addition, the merger of the more rural neighbouring counties with the metropolitan parts of London allowed a reduction of the typical overrepresentation of non-urban areas (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 164–165) because they were considered city boroughs afterwards. The major reduction of Scottish constituencies was centred on 2005 because it was a result of the introduction of devolution. As part of the settlement, the Labour government felt that the decades long overrepresentation of Scotland in the House of Commons was no longer justifiable and ordered the Scottish Boundary Commission to redraw the electoral boundaries based on the same voter quota as England (Johnston 2015: 5). The biggest positive changes can be observed in southern England; all three regions managed to achieve considerable gains in seat numbers. The growth in the Midlands was not as marked as in the south, but both regions also managed some smaller increases with the East Midlands displaying a rather recent growth while the West Midlands’ development has been a more prolonged one. Since I argue that the inner English distribution of political support has become more territorialised and therefore limits the parties’ potentials of electorally reaching out into regions they do not already control, it is also necessary to take a short look at the regional seat balance in England alone. Excluding London, the south now holds more than a third of all English seats, while it was only a quarter in 1945. London on the other hand has lost almost 40% of its parliamentary weight in England, dropping from 22.6% of the English seats after the war to only 13.7% in 2010. Simultaneously, the north’s weight fell from 34.3 to 29.6%. The Midlands’ position meanwhile improved slightly from 17 to 19.7% of England’s constituencies. This already has some implications for the regional character of party competition because the rebalancing of seats has shifted the biggest electoral “price” from the north to the south, but not in favour of the capital. Instead, the major trend of the 19th century that saw London unilaterally gaining at the expense of the south of England has been completely reversed. In result, these lopsided developments with distinct changes in the south of England and a more or less stable situation in the North, Celtic fringe and the Midlands might aid the Conservatives, who generally gather more seats in the south than in the north, if other party competition indicators also show a structural advantage of the Tories in southern England (Curtice 2017: 17–18; Rossiter et al. 1999a: 338–339; Johnston et al. 2017: 68–69). Even though the increasing political weight of the south has not changed enough to provide the Conservatives with a significant advantage the trend clearly indicates that it will turn into an even bigger electoral “prize” over the next years. The outlined developments are going to be further accelerated by the new redistribution rules of the planned 6th Periodic Review of Westminster Constituencies, which intends to curtail the previous practice of status quo preservation and impose stricter equality criteria for constituencies. Having finished my examination

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of the regional distribution of constituencies, I will now turn to another preliminary indicator that is closely connected to the competition dimension of “vulnerability”: the development of parliamentary majorities.

6.2 Stable and Changeable? Government Formation and Parliamentary Majorities Before looking into the regional distribution of seats won by the parties, I will address the overlying question of the majority distributions between the different nations of the kingdom. The most obvious and problematic result of skewed regional support between political parties would be a governing party that commands an overall majority in the HoC but only holds a minority in England, which is by far the largest nation of the union. As I have already discussed in Chap. 4, this creates not only certain legitimacy but also institutional difficulties. But significant parts of the British scientific community only see this as a problem under hard EVEL or argue that its implications are foremost of a theoretical nature (most notably Gallagher 2012). However, my broader focus on devolution implications that includes institutional relations and effects on party competition, rather than a purely procedural perspective on law-making should justify a brief second look at the distribution of parliamentary majorities among the different nations of the kingdom. In accordance with Gallagher’s (2012: 35) results, we can quickly see that a Conservative-voting England was finally governed by a UK-wide Labour majority in three of our 20 elections. While this sounds acceptable from a purely systemic point of view, it is far more alarming from Labour’s point of view. The party held a UK-wide majority on eight occasions but achieved an English majority on only five of them. Effectively, one-third of its electoral victories were owed to the party’s dominant position in the Celtic regions; conversely, this also means that it managed to secure an English majority in only five out of 20 elections. In addition, there were two situations in which the Tories secured clear majorities in England, but only reached pluralities in the UK and depended on the support of third parties. Table 6.2 summarises all elections in which the overall majorities in the UK differed from the English ones. Apart from these important deviations of the English and nationwide majorities, and therefore government formation itself, there were also some situations where governmental stability was heavily influenced by the differences in Celtic and English seat returns. By this, I am referring to situations where national majorities were so narrow (ten and below) that they could be easily lost over the duration of parliament due to defections, by-election losses or expulsions. The respective differences between the British and the English outcomes are displayed in Table 6.3.

6.2 Stable and Changeable? Government Formation and Parliamentary …

75

Table 6.2 Majority situation in the HoC compared to England Election

UK result

English result

1950

Slim Labour majority (majority of three)

Conservative plurality (one seat short)

1964

Slim Labour majority (majority of two)

Slim Conservative majority (majority of seven)

February 1974

Labour plurality (16 seats short)

Slim Conservative majority (majority of nine)

October 1974

Slim Labour majority (majority of two)

Labour plurality (four seats short)

2010

Conservative plurality (19 seats short)

Safe Conservative majority (majority of 32)

2017

Conservative plurality (eight seats short)

Safe Conservative majority (majority of 31)

Table 6.3 Governmental stability situation in the HoC compared to England Election

UK result

English result

1951

Slim Conservative majority (majority of nine)

Safe Conservative majority (majority of 18)

Discounting unionist-Conservative pact: Conservative plurality (one seat short) 1970

Safe conservative majority (majority of 17)

Safe Conservative majority (majority of 27)

Discounting unionist-Conservative pact: slim Conservative majority (majority of seven) 1992

Slim Conservative majority (majority of ten)

Safe Conservative majority (majority of 58)

2015

Slim Conservative majority (majority of six)

Safe Conservative majority (majority of 53)

All in all, even if we relax the impact criteria2 of differing regional majorities on the nationwide results only slightly, the number of affected elections increases to ten (or nine, if 1970 is not fully counted) out of 20 elections, compared to Gallagher’s three out of 15. In summary, those ten elections clearly point into one direction. Whenever the majority situation in the HoC was tight, with one party winning only a slim majority, the English result was highly in favour of the Conservatives. There is not a single close election in which Labour managed to achieve better seat returns in England than in the kingdom as a whole. At this point, it is therefore safe to say that an increase in the parliamentary weight of England will strengthen the Conservative 2 Instead of Gallagher’s very strict “West Lothian question” criteria (“Does the victorious party also

hold a majority of the English seats?”, Gallagher 2012: 10), my criteria asks whether the character of the English majority is different from the UK-wide majority.

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6 The Development of Regional Competition

Party’s ability to form the UK government, especially in situations of close electoral results.

6.3 Towards Single-Party Domination—The Territorialisation of Parliament After having reviewed the distributions of majorities between the different nations of the UK, it is time look closer at the connection between the regions and parties’ seat returns. The relative and absolute parliamentary weight of the different regions (analysed in Sect. 6.1) in itself bears little importance to party competition as long as the parties win comparable numbers of seats in every region. But once certain parties come to dominate particular regions, those regions’ representational strength starts to affect the potential parliamentary power of the parties because of the of two-level distribution problem of plurality and majority voting systems elaborated in Sect. 3.2. I will do this by comparing two different aspects of seat development. First, I will look at whether both parties win comparatively equal numbers of seats or a single party dominates and how this proportion developed over time. Second, I will look at the volatility of seat returns in order to estimate the sensitivity of the region to the parties’ actual campaign performance. As I have already discussed, in realworld elections, only a limited number of seats is effectively up for grabs since a significant portion will almost never change hands due to excessive majorities, very low willingness of the electorate to change its vote or little campaign investments by the parties. The more “frozen” seat returns are, the less important a region becomes for actual campaign specific competition. I will start by looking at the Labour Party and its development in the southern regions and then look at the Conservatives before working my way towards the northwest. London will be the last region to be analysed because it represents the most distinct trend in terms of seat returns. Table 6.4 yields some interesting results concerning Labour’s seat returns in southern England in general. In the South East and South West, the trend is almost exactly the same. In both regions, Labour has never won more than 10 seats, unless it won an overall majority. But even then, the increase was at best mediocre. Only during the landslide elections of 1997 and 2001, when the party managed to win more than 400 seats nationwide, it also won 20 or more seats in these regions. This already indicates that additional seats in the south of England are a bonus on top of the Labour victories achieved elsewhere rather than a way of actually winning an election. This trend is mostly matched by the opposite development for the Tories in the South East (Table 6.5). The Conservatives started with an already high baseline of over 50 seats, only missing it in 1950 and 1966, and increased it to over 75 in 1983. Although the Conservatives suffered considerable losses during the Blair era, their returns stayed at the baseline level of the 1950s, showing the extreme structural robustness of Tory support in the South East, even in the face of a Labour landslide.

6.3 Towards Single-Party domination—The Territorialisation …

77

Table 6.4 Labour-held seats by region 1950

1951

1955

1959

1964

1966

1970

Feb. 1974

Oct. 1974

1979

GL

52

50

48

42

53

65

55

50

51

42

E

12

8

6

5

11

16

5

9

13

5

SE

11

8

6

4

8

13

3

5

8

2

SW

11

10

9

7

7

11

6

7

8

5

EM

24

24

23

20

23

26

18

19

21

16

WM

32

32

32

25

28

32

24

33

35

25

YH

37

36

32

31

37

39

36

38

38

34

NE

27

25

24

21

27

27

26

26

26

26

NW

45

40

36

38

52

57

44

51

55

48

W

27

27

27

27

28

32

28

24

23

22

S

37

35

34

38

43

46

44

40

41

44

315

295

277

258

317

364

289

302

319

269

UK

1983

1987

1997

2001

2005

2010

2015

2017

2019

26

23

57

55

44

38

45

49

49

E

2

1

22

20

13

2

4

7

5

SE

0

1

22

22

19

4

4

8

8

SW

1

1

15

16

13

4

4

7

6

EM

8

11

30

28

25

15

14

15

8

WM

22

22

44

43

39

24

25

24

15

YH

28

33

47

47

44

32

33

37

28

NE

23

24

28

28

28

25

26

26

19

NW

38

39

64

64

61

47

51

54

42

W

20

24

34

34

29

26

25

28

22

S

41

50

56

56

41

41

1

7

1

209

229

419

413

356

258

232

262

203

GL

UK

The South West is mostly in line with the trends observed for the South East, but the remarkable point here is that the absolute variation in returns between very successful elections and major defeats is even slimmer for Labour. Again, the baseline number of seats won by Labour has declined over time. For the Conservatives, the South West has been their most stable region for a long time. From 1950 to the October election of 1974, their seat returns were constantly within an overall margin of three (except for 1966). Although the party made considerable gains during the Thatcher years, these proved somehow unstable, with the party losing almost half of its seats during the New Labour era. The party benefitting from these developments were the Liberals, who established themselves as the main contender to the Conservatives until their 2015 meltdown. It is, however, important to note that neither of these developments effectively weakened Tory dominance in the region. The Liberals could

78

6 The Development of Regional Competition

Table 6.5 Conservative-held seats by region 1950

1951

1955

1959

1964

1966

1970

Feb. 1974

Oct. 1974

1979

GL

48

50

54

60

48

36

47

42

41

50

E

25

30

35

36

30

25

36

35

31

39

SE

49

52

55

57

53

48

58

64

61

67

SW

34

35

36

37

36

31

37

36

35

40

EM

15

15

16

19

16

13

21

20

19

24

WM

20

20

22

29

26

22

30

23

21

31

YH

19

20

22

23

18

15

19

15

15

19

NE

4

6

7

10

4

4

5

4

4

4

NW

39

43

46

44

31

25

39

29

26

32

W

4

6

6

7

6

3

7

8

8

11

S

32

35

36

32

24

20

23

21

16

22

289

312

335

354

292

242

322

297

277

339

1983

1987

1992

1997

2001

2005

2010

2015

2017

2019

56

58

48

11

13

21

28

27

21

21

UK GL E

48

50

47

33

34

40

52

52

50

52

SE

76

76

76

54

53

58

75

79

73

74

SW

44

44

39

22

20

22

36

51

47

48

EM

34

31

28

14

15

18

31

32

31

38

WM

36

36

29

14

13

16

33

34

35

44

YH

24

21

20

7

7

9

19

19

17

26

NE

5

5

4

1

1

1

2

3

3

10

NW

39

37

29

9

9

9

22

22

20

32

W

14

8

5

0

0

3

8

11

8

14

S

21

10

11

0

1

1

1

1

13

6

397

376

336

165

166

198

307

331

318

365

UK

only absorb a small fraction of the region’s seats from Labour because the party’s baseline number was already extremely low at the time of the Liberals’ ascension. On the other hand, the Liberals were almost unable to capture additional constituencies from the Conservatives. The electoral collapse of the LibDems in 2015 is of utmost importance to party competition in the region and England as a whole. For the first time since the end of the war, a considerable number of seats in the region (15) were lost by a third party and could be reclaimed by the two electorally pressured major parties. However, Labour’s failure to capture more than one of these constituencies (Bristol West) from the Liberals was an alarming sign of the critical combination of the party’s lack of basic support and its inability to mobilise swing voters in the region (Curtice et al. 2016: 392–393).

6.3 Towards Single-Party domination—The Territorialisation …

79

Looking closer at the East of England, we can see that the region displays approximately the same trends, although turnovers were slightly more volatile and Labour held a slightly higher baseline number of seats than in the rest of the south. However, the party had not been able to increase, or even cling to, its fortunes in the region, although the region’s seat numbers increased by 50% since 1950. For the Conservatives, the trend in the East was fairly positive. In general, the party won at least 30 seats before the end of the 1970s. During the 1980s, they increased their initial baseline numbers by more than half to 45–50 seats, which they only missed during the New Labour elections. In summary, while Labour effectively lost seats over time, the Conservatives not only held their initial baseline but were able to secure additional seats as well as capture almost all newly created seats. The Midlands’ results illustrate another important aspect of the nature of party competition between the Conservatives and Labour. Labour had a very stable basic number of seats during the 1950s and first half of the 1960s. In the East Midlands, this baseline was around 50% of all seats; in the West Midlands, it was a bit higher, between 60% and two-thirds. The campaign performance seemed to have little effect on the returns in those regions, with the difference between the worst (1959) and the best (1966) nationwide performance during this period being just six seats for the East and seven for the West Midlands. In the East Midlands, this was matched by the Conservatives’ development, which started at around 15 seats and stayed at that number until the 1970 election. The pattern then changed considerably with the advent of the Thatcher era. Since 1979, Labour has not managed to win more than 20 seats in the East Midlands, which was effectively its low point during the previous phase, unless it “overperformed” during the New Labour era (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 338–339, 1999b: 394–396). Once it overperformed, however, the seat swings were considerable. The Conservatives on the other hand seemed to benefit in line with the small redistributions created by the Boundary Commission, constantly increasing returns until reaching a maximum of 44 in 1987. The New Labour era saw the Conservatives’ seats drop by around 50%, but again, it is important to compare this with the Tories’ initial baseline during the 1950s. Here, we can see that, like in the southern regions, they never fell below their initial 15 seats, although Labour had achieved the gargantuan task of generating a regional swing of 10.2% in 1997 and an accumulated regional swing of 20.1% since 1983.3 In the West Midlands, the same trend can be observed, albeit not as strongly as in the eastern Midlands. Labour managed to maintain an average of around 30 seats until 1974, which they nominally almost defend today, if one includes the Blair years. If those are excluded, the number drops to 23. These numbers indicate an important shift in the character of party competition in the Midlands. During a first period until 1974, Labour held a robust baseline of seats, but the actual national performance seemed 3 When I describe or use regional vote swings or vote shares in the empirical part of my study, these

numbers are not weighted by the electoral size of the different constituencies. The main reason for this procedure lies in the structural difference of Conservative and Labour support with the Tories typically holding stronger support in more populous and higher turnout constituencies while Labour’s vote is concentrated in smaller constituencies and those with lower turnouts (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 338–339; Johnston et al. 2012b: 883–884).

80

6 The Development of Regional Competition

quite unimportant since it produced very limited seat swings (Steed 1999: 331–333). During the second period, however, the party’s baseline declined, and the number of potential seat swings increased as long as Labour performed very well. But when it lost votes or made only small gains, returns remained close to its new, reduced baseline number of seats. The development for the Tories also strongly mirrored that of the East Midlands. The only difference lies in the lower baseline number (around five seats lower) and the already-mentioned higher volatility during the first phase. The party has strengthened its returns from slightly more than 20 to around 30 seats since the Thatcher years. This points to a non-uniform vote to seat function, meaning that the party had to cross a critical barrier of votes before it was able to make meaningful gains, but, once it achieved this, the returns increased exponentially (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 338–339). Especially, with the 2019 election, the Tories seem to increasingly have the better end in the West Midlands, but both the number of seats held by both parties and the Tories’ development over time indicate that the region still remains fairly competitive. The north of England is a completely different story. Yorkshire and the Humber is by far the most stable region for the Labour Party. In the 20 elections analysed here, Labour won between 31 and 39 seats on all but five occasions (1983, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2019). The same goes for the Conservatives, who won between 16 and 24 seats on all but five occasions (1966, 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2019). The party’s baseline number of seats today (around 17) has remained almost the same compared to the pre-Thatcher era (around 18). In summary, the region has played virtually no role in terms of long-term party competition and short-term electoral performance for both parties, since only the Blair era saw considerable seat changes in favour of Labour. Mostly, the same applies to the North East. It shows the smallest spread of seat returns for the whole kingdom, ranging from a minimum of 21 to a maximum of 28 seats for the Labour Party (before 2019). However, in terms of seats it is also the smallest English region and the second smallest region of the UK as a whole. Therefore, the average relative spread in Yorkshire and the Humber is far smaller since it has almost twice the number of constituencies. With Labour controlling between two-thirds and 90% of its seats, other parties barely existed in the North East. Conversely, the story of the Conservatives’ development in the region is quickly told. They were only able to win a double-digit number of seats in 1959 and 2019, which still just amounted to a meagre third of the region’s constituencies. The situation in the North West differs considerably from the rest of the north and is more difficult to interpret. While Labour is the stronger party, the spread of its returns is far wider, ranging from 36 to 64 seats. The first striking observation is the point of Labour’s heaviest defeat. While the party performed worst in all English regions during the 1983 election, except in the North East, its poorest records in this region were recorded in 1955 and 1959 (Berrington 1965: 21–22). Only considering the seat numbers and the election dates, it seems that Labour experienced two different phases in the North West. Until the end of the 1950s, the returns were relatively stable and somewhat sheltered from larger performance impacts. But since the 1960s, seat numbers began to vary uniformly in accordance with the nationwide seat results.

6.3 Towards Single-Party domination—The Territorialisation …

81

This indicates that the region is, at least for Labour, very sensitive to the party’s electoral performance and holds a significant potential for swing seats. The North West is also one of the more interesting regions for the Conservatives. Until 1959, the party constantly held slightly more than 40 seats, but since then its results have become more volatile. Its support collapsed over the next two elections with losses of about 20 seats (Berrington 1965), only recovering during the 1970 election. Under New Labour, the Tories experienced the highest absolute losses among all British regions, and they had serious troubles regaining a foothold afterwards. Accordingly, the region has seen a significant Conservative decline, especially since the end of the 20th century. Scotland is probably the region which has received the most academic attention in respect of party competition; especially, once Budge and Urwin’s (1966) seminal study of Scottish voting behaviour was increasingly challenged around the 1980s. This is the result of two complementary trends which we can be seen in Tables 6.4 and 6.5. During the 1950s, Scotland was clearly a battleground region, with both parties winning an almost equal number of seats. However, 1959 proved to be a game changing election for the Tories, who lost nearly a third of their Scottish seats and never crossed this line of 24 seats again. This was followed by another landmark election in 1987, when their numbers halved once more, dropping from around 20 to ten. Ten years later, the wipe out of Conservatism in Scotland was completed. Labour on the other hand profited from the first Conservative breakdown in 1959, when they were able to capture more than 40 seats for the first time and held at least this number until the 2015 election. Although the SNP managed to win a few constituencies and establish itself as a parliamentary party during the Thatcher years, the nationalists were unable to offer a suitable alternative to Labour (Hassan and Shaw 2012: 21–59). Even the disillusion with the New Labour government had little effect on the SNP’s returns. The notional Labour losses from 2001 to 2005 have to be largely attributed to the boundary changes undertaken in 2004/05 (Webb 2005: 760; Denver et al. 2004). In summary, Scotland became another and perhaps the most important, electoral backbone of the Labour Party because it regularly delivered a high baseline number of seats, was fairly insensitive to poor nationwide performances and offered additional gains when the party ran a successful campaign. The de facto wipe out of all unionist parties in 2015, and to a lesser degree in 2019, as well as the Conservative resurgence in 2017 will be dealt with at a later point of my analysis. Wales is also an interesting case in terms of seat development and has been relatively well researched. The region has a long history of liberal radicalism and has always been a rough territory for the Conservatives (Urwin 1982: 31–51; Rokkan et al. 1987: 176–189). The Tories have neither won a majority in the region since the 1850s nor more than a quarter of the Welsh seats during the researched period, except for the Thatcher era and 2019. However, even at their highpoints in 1983 and 2019, their 14 seats accounted for just a third of the overall number of seats (Curtice and Steed 1999b: 403). In contrast, the Labour Party became the driving force of Welsh politics during the inter-war period when it disposed of the Liberals (Urwin 1982: 46; Rokkan et al. 1987: 179–180). Like London and the Midlands, Wales was a safe and stable bet for Labour during the 1950s and 1960s. For the first

82

6 The Development of Regional Competition

seven elections after the war, its returns varied only by a single seat, except for the landslide election of 1966. Although the returns decreased under Thatcher and then surpassed initial numbers under New Labour, the baseline afterwards stayed mostly the same (about 25 seats) as in the 1950s. Although the 2019 result looks particularly worrying, it is less serious than the developments in other regions for reasons I will analyse in more detail in the next chapter. I placed London at the end of my analysis because its results have considerable implications for the development of party competition in Britain. In the first decades after World War II, London was an almost perfect example of a deeply split region. Both parties held an equal number of seats and the difference in returns between them exceeded ten seats on only two occasions (1959, 1966) until 1979. This also meant that the regular turnover between two elections was quite small in comparison to London’s large parliamentary representation. These factors could indicate two potential structures of support. Either the electorate was so volatile that the different parties’ gains cancelled out each other on most occasions or the majority of constituencies were deeply partisan and very few seats sensitive to electoral campaigning. The second option seems more likely because it is inconceivable (for now) that a region with a highly volatile electorate does not reflect major electoral swings on the national level. However, the situation began to slightly change with the 2nd Boundary Review of 1969. The review decreased London’s number of seats by ten, which seemed to have an enduring negative effect on the Conservatives.4 The reason for the reduction lies mostly in the creation of the Greater London area in 1965. With the de facto abolition of the smaller counties surrounding the old City of London, the slight overrepresentation of these counties came to an end. Thereby, the Conservatives, who controlled the majority of the more rural areas of Essex, Surrey, Hertfordshire and Kent, seemed to bear the brunt of the seat reduction. Interestingly, further seat reductions in 1983 and 1997 appeared to restore the competition capabilities of the party (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 353 and 359). Accordingly, London became a forerunner region of the “Conservative Revolution” under Thatcher. Although the overall number of London’s seats was again reduced by eight from 1979 to 1983, the party managed to win 17 additional seats from October 1974 to 1987 while Labour’s support collapsed, seeing its returns halved within the two elections of 1979 and 1983 (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 340). In the same way, London also proved essential for Labour’s return to power in 1997. Nowhere was the Conservative meltdown greater in relative and absolute numbers than in the country’s capital. Even though the region was marked by longterm trends that only changed abruptly after certain upset elections, it was still a very strong indicator of national electoral performance.5 This, however, changed with the end of the New Labour era, and today, the city exhibits a strong pro-Labour bias. 4 According

to Rallings and Trasher (2012: 127), the 1969 review introduced the fewest significant changes of all periodic reviews, but the large changes in seat numbers in London and the South East indicate that the biggest impact of boundary alterations fell on both regions. 5 Until 2005, the city’s seat returns were in favour of the party winning the election in 14 out of 16 cases. The only exceptions were the “unusual” elections of 1951, when Labour won a majority of votes but the Conservatives a majority of seats (fittingly, each party secured 50 of London’s seats),

6.3 Towards Single-Party domination—The Territorialisation …

83

Summarising the overall trend, we can assert that Labour has managed to become the dominant force in the city since the New Labour era, most likely breaking the capital’s former status as a region of balanced competition. In summary, we saw distinctive competition situations in the various regions. While most were biased towards a single party, some were fairly evenly split. Conversely, a significant number of regions were less sensitive to individual campaign performances than to long-term loyalty represented through low seat return volatility. This was accompanied by the long-term decline of a single party in certain regions which was only overcome in landslide elections.

6.4 Uneven Decline—The Development of Electoral Support Having thus far focussed mostly on the parliamentary representation of parties and regions, it is now time to look closer at the parties’ actual electoral support. Before focussing on the results, I have to discuss some implications of different vote share patterns for the character of party competition. The connection between vote shares and the corresponding seat returns in majority and plurality voting systems was first comprehensively researched by Gudgin and Taylor (1979) and then specifically for the UK by Johnston et al. (2001). In general, it is rather obvious that the higher the vote share becomes, the larger a party’s parliamentary representation should be.6 However, in a voting system with more than one electoral district, the vote shares of individual constituencies can deviate considerably from the mean vote share of all districts. The less evenly or more “regionalised” voter support is distributed, the greater the potential variety of parliamentary outcomes under the same mean vote share (Johnston et al. 2001: 33). The aforementioned authors show that the actual seat returns can be explained by a combination of the mean vote share and its standard deviation, making specific combinations of both factors more desirable for individual parties than others. As a general rule. (1) (2)

a party’s seat share increases the lower the standard deviation is, as long as the party holds more than 50% of the vote (Johnston et al. 2001: 35). a party’s seat share increases the higher the standard deviation gets, as long as the party holds less than 50% of the vote (Johnston et al. 2001: 37).

However, we have to be careful in interpreting these “laws” under the premises of my party competition concept. Johnston et al. (2001: 37) acknowledge a problem, but do not further elaborate on it, that occurs once the mean vote share of a party is slightly above 50%. Under such circumstances, the concerned party maximises its theoretical seat returns as its vote share deviation decreases. But this distribution and 1970, when London defied the nationwide late swing and delivered a majority of its seats to the Labour Party. 6 All of following remarks assume a classical two-party system unless explicitly stated otherwise.

84

6 The Development of Regional Competition

also means a maximum “vulnerability” of the party because even a very small swing against it would inadvertently flip large portions of its seats. If the standard deviation under such a vote share is very high, the party’s seat returns will often be much lower, but these lower returns are far better protected against swings in its opponent’s favour. We can see that the final interpretation of vote share numbers heavily depends on whether one adopts a dynamic perspective, analysing the strategic character of party competition, or a static one, looking only at a single election. Since I aim to analyse long-term trends of party competition, I clearly give preference to the first perspective. This means I have to modify the “desirability” of the above stated general relationships. Accordingly, the closer the seat returns between the two major parties are, the more preferable it is for a party to have a high standard deviation because it indicates that the party under consideration has a strong electoral backbone of very safe seats. Instead of having to defend a large number of constituencies, it can concentrate its efforts on a limited set of seats where contests are very close and require a good campaign performance to win them (Cox 1997: 77). Conversely, it is preferable to have a homogenous vote distribution if one has a significant vote share lead, irrespective of the seat returns (Johnston et al. 2001: 36). This makes it difficult for challengers to actually swing constituencies, and the party needs only small gains in constituencies it loses to win further seats. Having a low vote share or a large shortfall in the vote share compared to the leading party makes such a distribution undesirable. In this case, it is better to secure a highly skewed vote spread as it provides a number of very safe strongholds that are out of the opponents’ reach, while some seats are only lost by very small margins, comprising perfect target seats. However, depending on the asymmetry between the vote shares of the leading party and the one under consideration, it can also mean that the weaker party has little to no chance of overturning the ruling party (Johnston et al. 2001: 37). The final viability hinges on the number of close contests the smaller party has lost so far. If this number is high enough, a high standard deviation is preferable; otherwise, a more homogenous distribution will offer the only chance to potentially oust the government (Bartolini 2000: 53). However, the “rules” outlined above are only the most basic guidelines to assess the strategic usefulness of support structures. Once we can decompose parties’ general support further, it is possible to specify those rules and give more accurate information about the benefits or disadvantages of certain support structures. The most important piece of knowledge here is the distinction between the seats a party wins and those it loses. Depending on how high or low the vote shares in both of these types of constituencies are the more or less prone a party will be to seat losses and winning additional seats. Obviously, the most preferable situation for a party is to have a high vote share in general. But if the share in won and lost seats differs significantly,7 assessing the party’s competitiveness depends on the party system structure and in which type of 7 In

this case by “different”, I mean the distance between the actual vote share of the party and the vote share necessary to flip the seat either in favour or against the party.

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

85

constituencies the vote share distribution is more crucial. If a party is already the strongest in terms of seats returns, it is more favourable to have high shares in seats it wins because this will make it more difficult for other parties to challenge it, while the party itself has no need to win further constituencies. For a weaker party, high vote shares in lost constituencies might enable it to topple the victorious party at the next election, while high shares in successful, but low shares in unsuccessful, contests will normally make this endeavour more difficult (Johnston et al. 2001: 37). However, the larger the seat majority of the leading party is, the less important these factors become. Also, the usefulness of high vote shares in successful constituencies declines the larger they get because the general elasticity of the vote is naturally limited. Having discussed the optimal distribution of vote shares between won and lost constituencies, I will make some brief comments on the most useful distribution within both types of constituencies. In general, it is more preferable to have a highly skewed distribution and correspondingly a high standard deviation between the constituencies a party has not yet won. This creates a clear set of target seats with smaller majorities it has to overcome, which is strategically easier to achieve than a higher uniform swing in a larger number of constituencies. Conversely, a homogenous medium lead in all victorious constituencies is far more preferable than a highly skewed distribution, especially for the governing party. As I have already pointed out, parties’ general interests lie in achieving a parliamentary majority, not in winning every single constituency. Therefore, they will confine the bulk of their resources to areas where they have a realistic chance of winning the seats they absolutely have to carry in order to win. Decreasing the competitiveness of all seats, even if only by a slight degree, and forcing other contestants to spread out their resources seem strategically more promising for the commanding party than having an equal number of excessively safe and highly competitive seats (Gudgin and Taylor 1979: 69). Again, the usefulness of these structures begins to reverse at a certain point, depending on how large the gulf of seats between the parties is. In order to employ the differences I have described so far, I will differentiate the observable trends for the parties as “negative” and “positive” “homogenisation” and “territorialisation”. The differences should be clear by now. “Negative homogenisation” takes place whenever a party’s vote share and the deviation are in decline because the combination of both trends (potentially) leads to an exponential fall in the number of safe seats for the concerned party or lowered chances of winning seats it does not control, while homogenisation is always positive for the competition capabilities of a party as long its vote share increases and always negative when its vote share falls; the situation is a bit more complex for processes of territorialisation. The actual effects of territorialisation heavily depend on their regional distribution. “Positive territorialisation” can take place under two circumstances. The vote share increase must either be concentrated in constituencies which the party already wins, but only by mediocre margins, or in regions where the party is normally defeated but has some prospects of eventually winning by reasonable vote share increases. “Negative territorialisation” conversely describes situations in which vote share losses are

86

6 The Development of Regional Competition

either focussed on seats which a party usually wins, but only by “unsafe” margins, or constituencies it might capture by reasonably improved performances. National Developments Looking first at the general patterns of support development, we can reveal distinct and fairly different trends for both major parties. While both shared a general decrease in support over the last seventy years, the distributions of these decreases were not uniform. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Labour Party (Table 6.6) was clearly able to muster larger support in the constituencies it won than the Conservatives. During the first seven post-war elections, the party never dropped below a mean vote share of 57% and topped 60% on two occasions, while the Tories (Table 6.7) never managed to top 59% and failed to reach the 57% margin five times. This difference continued to exist after 1970 despite the overall decline in support of both parties. Labour outperformed the Conservatives in their victorious seats in all but three elections, often with considerably higher shares. Also, in the earlier years, Labour scored higher average vote shares when it actually won a lower number of seats than the Conservatives. The reason for this is fairly simple; the party held very large majorities in its strongholds but could not achieve comparable numbers in newly gained seats, thereby reducing its overall majorities in successful contest whenever it won higher numbers of constituencies. The Tories showed their strongest performance during the Thatcher (as well as the Brexit) era when their results in successful constituencies varied between 51 and 53%. After 1992, they lost almost five per cent and only managed to achieve between 45 and 48% afterwards, with 2015, 2017 and 2019 seeing a return to a number above 50%. Also, the party had considerably higher vote shares in successful contests whenever it won an election (compared to the elections it lost). This means the Tories’ vote swings were considerably more uniform than Labour’s, and the party needed good electoral performances, not only to win, but also to secure its supposedly safe seats. In comparison, we can see that Labour became more sensitive to electoral performance in this aspect, while the Tories became more immune to it. The critical point for the Labour Party is, however, the downward trend it has experienced since 1997. The party slipped from 56.9 in 1997 to 46.5% in 2010, while the Conservatives maintained their already comparatively weak performance of 47–48%. Labour’s return to the 50% margin in 2015 seemed to correspond with the party’s abysmal seat returns of just 232. But, even the significant improvement of the 2017 election rather laid bare its problem than signalling encouraging developments. As we can see, the party gained more than 9% in the seats it won but only around 7.5% in the constituencies it lost while the deviations hardly changed compared to the previous election. Coupled with the fairly small gains of just 30 seats it becomes obvious that Labour tended to pile up at least as much votes in seats it already held as in constituencies it had to win. Conversely, its minority vote seems to have reached such low levels that the party’s massive vote increase had almost no effect in terms of seat returns. Looking at Labour’s nationwide vote shares in minority seats, we can see that it generally scored better when it was winning elections and worse when it was losing.

46.63

49.13

47.30

44.67

45.54

49.88

45.25

38.92

41.10

39.12

29.23

32.87

36.92

45.86

43.83

37.86

30.97

32.35

41.89

33.88

1951

1955

1959

1964

1966

1970

Feb. 1974

Oct. 1974

1979

1983

1987

1992

1997

2001

2005

2010

2015

2017

2019

17.53

17.72

16.50

15.90

15.11

16.62

17.86

17.84

17.85

15.74

15.99

15.28

15.69

14.72

15.46

15.56

14.46

13.65

13.44

13.77

632

631

631

631

628

641

640

634

633

633

623

623

623

618

618

618

618

617

613

612

54.04

59.46

50.18

46.47

48.94

54.45

56.93

53.80

52.60

47.62

54.19

53.38

52.11

57.52

60.27

57.75

58.15

59.41

60.22

57.25

Vote share in majority seats Mean

N

Mean

Std. deviation

Vote share

1950

Election

Table 6.6 Labour support in the UK

10.26

9.85

8.95

7.73

7.55

7.97

9.47

8.69

8.85

7.20

7.76

8.78

9.46

8.93

9.54

9.67

8.75

8.39

8.74

9.41

Std. deviation

203

262

232

258

356

413

419

271

229

209

269

319

302

289

364

317

258

277

295

315

N

24.35

29.41

21.98

20.25

23.35

24.60

24.87

24.31

21.69

20.17

27.67

28.22

26.51

34.48

35.00

32.67

35.01

37.43

38.84

35.37

Mean

Vote share in minority seats

10.93

9.63

9.56

10.25

9.02

9.30

8.99

11.28

10.43

9.75

10.00

8.53

8.70

9.40

8.65

8.70

8.97

7.99

7.57

7.08

Std. deviation

429

369

399

373

272

228

221

363

404

424

354

304

321

329

254

301

360

340

318

297

N

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support 87

43.43

48.44

49.77

48.88

42.37

40.55

44.94

37.89

35.73

43.56

42.51

41.98

41.10

30.22

30.98

31.61

35.70

36.71

42.59

44.01

1951

1955

1959

1964

1966

1970

Feb. 1974

Oct 1974

1979

1983

1987

1992

1997

2001

2005

2010

2015

2017

2019

16.72

15.39

16.19

14.57

13.97

13.14

12.23

14.05

14.53

13.26

12.38

12.04

10.61

12.00

11.08

10.69

12.15

13.04

12.85

12.13

631

632

632

632

627

640

640

634

633

633

622

622

623

616

617

618

613

612

605

608

56.28

55.36

50.12

48.07

47.51

47.15

44.61

52.04

52.09

51.01

52.85

46.21

46.36

53.65

49.95

50.30

56.82

58.98

58.16

53.10

Vote share in majority seats Mean

N

Mean

Std. deviation

Vote share

1950

Election

Table 6.7 Conservative support in the UK

7.44

6.36

6.31

6.33

4.55

3.64

3.94

5.91

6.66

7.17

5.86

4.55

4.83

5.39

5.02

5.36

6.86

7.29

6.86

6.77

Std. deviation

365

318

331

307

198

166

165

336

376

397

339

277

297

322

242

292

353

335

312

289

N

27.18

29.66

21.96

24.00

24.28

25.32

25.22

28.77

27.19

28.20

32.42

27.31

30.16

35.41

34.49

35.27

38.11

38.63

38.10

34.67

Mean

Vote share in minority seats

9.84

10.16

9.53

9.64

10.26

10.24

9.95

9.66

9.31

7.68

8.24

9.25

8.29

9.78

9.59

9.18

9.09

9.19

9.11

8.79

Std. deviation

266

314

301

325

429

474

475

298

257

236

283

345

326

294

375

326

260

277

293

319

N

88 6 The Development of Regional Competition

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

89

However, this general observation is more spurious and sometimes less pronounced than for the Tories. In general, examining Labour’s minority support we can identify three different periods. Minority support was comparatively high until the election of 1970, between 39 and 32%. In February 1974, the share dropped by almost 8%, a fall that was repeated during the 1983 election when it dropped by another 7.5%. What is remarkable is the fact that these voters seemed to never return to the party, even when the Liberals, who profited overwhelmingly in February 1974 and 1983, suffered serious setbacks like in 1979, 1992 and 2015. Sitting at around 22% in 2010 and 2015, it was highly questionable how Labour should have mustered a large enough swing vote to overturn the then-time Tory majority in a single election. Jeremy Corbyn came close to achieving this, but the low number of competitive seats made it difficult for the electoral system to produce the typical exaggeration effect necessary to achieve such a feat (Curtice 2018: 31–33). The Conservatives also started quite strong in their minority seats generally scoring more than 35% until February 1974, the exceptions were 1950 and 1966 when they narrowly missed it. Again, the Tories have historically performed best whenever they won an election, with the exception of 2010 and 2015. After 1970, the situation began to change with a 5% drop in support, after which the party only crossed the 30% line in February 1974 and 1979. Despite the 10% fall in the mean vote share until 1983, the Tories stabilised under Thatcher and have remained at a 24– 25% level since the New Labour era, except for 2017 and 2019. This stable baseline of 25% marks the second trend apart from the general loss of support. Accordingly, the initially significant difference in support between successful elections and defeats mostly diminished, but the party managed to stay ahead of Labour, which lost out even more. Today, both parties share a very low level of support in their minority constituencies, hovering between 20 and 25% over the last 20 years, although the Conservatives have been faring slightly better over the last two elections. Accordingly, they have mostly failed to preserve their structural advantage over Labour which was created by the party’s split in the 1980s. But Labour has also failed to expand its electoral base beyond the seats it won during the Blair era. The increasing difference (22.1% for Labour in the 1950s and 28.5% in the 2010s, 19.4 and 26.8% for the Tories, respectively) between the vote share in successful and unsuccessful contests for both parties also indicates that it has become more difficult for them to swing constituencies. In order to preserve parliamentary elasticity, they would need to increase the average vote swing, a factor I will analyse closer at a later point (Curtice 2015b: 28–29, 2018: 31–33). Even the huge vote swings of 2017 hardly had an impact on this development because only the Tories managed to score a moderately higher vote share improvement in their minority seats than in those they already held (7.7% compared to 5.24%). Regional Developments After having analysed the national trends in voter support, I will now take a closer look at the regional developments, again beginning with the Labour Party’s results

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in southern England, before discussing the trends for the Conservatives. Afterwards, I will move further to the northwest ending with the trends for Greater London. In the South West, the Labour vote share in minority seats has not exceeded 18% since 1979, except for the latest two elections. Even under New Labour, improvements hardly matched 2% and its typical vote share was comparable to Tory support in Scotland before 2017. While the South West has never been an easy territory for the party, initial support in the 1950s was lower than in any other English region, the disparity between the region and the rest of the country multiplied. The party’s number of successful contests has generally been fairly low and the respective vote share has hovered well below the national average. What is especially devastating for the party is the result of the 2015 election. Although 15 seats previously held by the Liberals became available, Labour completely failed to take advantage of the LibDem collapse: the party’s vote share in lost seats increased by only 2.2% and even remained below the already weak results of 2005 (Cutts and Russell 2015: 79–80). Although the outcomes of the last two elections seem to be a bit more indicative of Labour’s actual support in the region, they are hardly any better than those of the Cameron years. This, however, was not mirrored by an exceptional Tory dominance in the region. Instead, early Conservative performances were rather underwhelming, with the party typically scoring three to four points below their national average in constituencies it won. The results homogenised since 1966 and even slightly outranked the nationwide vote under Thatcher. Starting with the first Labour vote surge in 1992, vote shares returned to the previous pattern of slight underperformance and have remained there until today, except again for the latest elections. Looking at the Tories’ contender position, we can see a different picture. Initial support in minority seats was quite strong, with the party generally achieving vote shares above 40% in the 1950s and 1960s. While they dropped significantly in February 1974 (Butler and Kavanagh 1999: 114–122 and 128–145), they remained fairly stable afterwards. A mentionable result is that of 2010 as the 36.3% average was the highest minority vote share ever scored by one of the two major parties since 1992. It also underlines why the Tories managed to claim 14 of the 15 seats the LibDems lost in the South West in 2015. Conservative minority support was so strong that it easily outnumbered that of any other party in the rest of the country. Accordingly, the Tories would have steamrolled the Liberals even under a very moderate swing and outmatched Labour, even if the swing between Labour and the LibDems had been almost uniform. Still, the Conservatives managed to concentrate their vote share improvements in exactly those seats they had lost in 2010 and the gains were so high that they achieved the same high degree of uniformity of support they held before 2015. The last two elections show a further consolidation of Conservative support with the party scoring well above average percentages as well as extending its majority shares even above its formerly best results of the 1950s. In general, Labour’s South Western trends are matched by the development in the South East which is why I refrain from discussing it in more detail. The only mentionable difference lies in the higher vote share Labour achieved in minority constituencies as long as it was not defeated heavily.

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

91

The Tory development, on the other hand, includes some noteworthy aspects. First, the South East has been one of the few regions in which they managed to score above 60% of the vote in successful contests right after the war. It then dropped closer to national averages until the Thatcher years when it soared again and typically outmatched them by 3 to 4%. Under New Labour, it fell back to national levels and has slightly outnumbered them since 2010. This points to some pro-Tory bias that allows the party to exponentially increase its support once it delivers a strong campaign performance. The Tories’ minority vote also displays very favourable characteristics but again, the number of cases is very limited. Until 1970, the results indicated a positive homogeneity. Even after this first period, electoral support remained strong, despite the general decline of the two major parties. Accordingly, the Tories held a stunning nine point higher-than-national vote share under New Labour and remained well above it in the few seats they did not hold since the Cameron era. The region’s competition situation can be briefly summarised: while the South East is the (almost impregnable) bastion of Toryism in the kingdom, it is an electoral nightmare for Labour. Thus, Labour’s crucial concern in the region should not be how to win additional seats, but rather how to counterbalance the strong growth of its electorate that continues to give the region increasing parliamentary weight. Strategically more dangerous for the Labour Party is, however, the development in the East. While it seldom managed to extract a considerable fraction of seats from the region, it was in a very strong contender position immediately after the war. The party’s vote share in lost constituencies was never lower than 38% until February 1974, and it was the only region in which it ever surpassed an average of 42%. However, the overall decline in the East was notably more serious than in the rest of the south. Compared to the pre-1974 period, the vote shares in 2010, 2015 and 2019 nearly halved to just around 20%. The only consolation for the party lies in the higher-than-average vote share increase during the New Labour era, which indicates that a powerful Labour campaign can gain enough traction to create a considerable uniform vote swing. The number of Labour’s successful contests is typically so low that a reliable assessment is difficult, except for the fact that support generally ranks below the national average. Taken together, it remains hardly conceivable how the party should manage to substantially increase its seats numbers in any of three regions of southern England. Conversely, the East is a region of stable support and growing returns for the Tories. Over the last 70 years, support in constituencies won by the party only fluctuated between 54 and 43% with the exception of the two latest elections. While most of the English regions display a continuous decline in support this is not the case in the East. Instead, the overarching pattern seems to be one of campaign performance dependency for the Conservatives. In general, their vote shares expanded above 50% whenever they won an election, while they were below it when they failed to win, with the extent of decline depending on the gravity of defeat. This indicates that the region contains a significant number of swing voters, which is, however, typically too small to overturn larger amounts of Tory seats. The Conservatives secured quite weak vote shares during the first post-war decades, only beginning to match the national ones during the Thatcher years when the standard deviation was the lowest in the

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6 The Development of Regional Competition

whole country. Since the party’s seat returns have typically remained very high, this significant segment of swing voters must have been distributed in a strongly favourable pattern. The region’s very positive support structure is also underlined by the results in Conservative minority seats, even though they have to be handled with caution because of the low case numbers. In the early years, the vote shares clearly exceeded the 40% margin, meaning that the Tories were already extremely close to completely monopolise the region. Irrespective of the considerable general decline in the minority vote, the region’s results stayed well above the national averages (typically at least five points) since the Thatcher era. Especially, in the light of the two latest elections, the East has become the powerhouse of Toryism that now not only excels all other regions but also delivers results reaching high-end performances of the 1950s. In the East Midlands, Labour started from an average position. The party held around 60% of the region’s seats on a slightly below-average vote share and a corresponding standard deviation in successful contests. As in many other regions, the first significant breakdown of support happened in February 1974, when support collapsed by 4% and never recovered except from 1992 to 2001 and in 2017. The next major drop took place in 1983, when it fell by another 6% (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 339–340 and 343). Today, Labour’s below-average results indicate that the party is in a fairly weak position in its victorious constituencies with quite low majorities and a medium increase in homogeneity, which is undesirable in case of small and shrinking vote shares. Its significant shedding of seats in 2019 somewhat relaxed the situation, but this should hardly be any kind of consolation in face of Labour’s abysmal current seat returns. The party’s initial position in its minority seats was much better. Labour generally scored close to or above 40% and therefore clearly outmatched its national results by over four points. However, the party still proved unable to win even small numbers of additional seats. The reason for this might be seen in the very homogenous distribution of its vote. Accordingly, the standard deviation was the second lowest of any of Labour’s regional seat sets. However, this strong support in minority seats began to evaporate in February 1974 when the party’s vote share dropped by 10%. The recovery under New Labour was significant as vote shares again outranked the national averages by almost six points; however, they mostly just restored the losses of the Thatcher era. Today’s results offer a mixed bag for Labour. While its minority shares are well above the nationwide results and the standard deviations are much higher than in the 1950s, the significant seat losses since 2005 (Denver 2010: 595, 2015: 12) are hardly set off by these mediocre competition advantages. The Tories’ development in the seats they lost in the East Midlands is interesting. While significant portions of their support vanished, the region still evolved in a positive way in national comparison. In the 1950s and 1960s, the vote shares were slightly above the national results (around two points). Although the election of February 1974 saw a major drop in Tory support, regional vote shares started to outnumber the national ones by larger margins than before. In the Thatcher years, they were typically six points higher, before returning to three to four points under New Labour. While the party retained above average results, the lower standard deviations in 2010 and

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

93

2015 coupled with slight vote share losses from 2001 to 2010 indicated that it had depleted its potential of winning additional seats in the region. However, the 2019 election obviously disproved this conclusion. The Tories’ significant vote gains just overwhelmed the ailing Labour Party due to the combination of Labour’s prolonged underperformances and the Conservatives’ strong starting point. The Tories’ situation in constituencies they won was fairly close to Labour’s. Until 1970, the party only achieved vote shares well below its national results. Afterwards, numbers seemed to strongly depend on the regional performance. When the party was faring well and the vote shares increased they also received higher seat numbers, while lower vote shares diminished them. This might sound trivial but carries some explanatory value because it indicates a strong vote swing in the additional seats the Tories gained since otherwise the overall vote share could not have grown without significant increases in the standard deviation. After the Thatcher era, vote shares remained mostly in line with the national averages but delivered quite different seat returns. Today’s pattern points to an increasing importance of targeted campaigning (Kavanagh and Cowley 2010: 335–338; Curtice et al. 2010: 395–398). While earlier contests were characterised by uniform vote swings and high homogeneity, the majority vote share only changed slightly, except in 2017, and the standard deviation grew in accordance with seat returns during the latest elections. Meanwhile, standard deviation dropped significantly in minority seats in case of major seat returns (except in 2019), coupled with slight vote share losses. Therefore, the Tories managed to flip exactly those seats in which they already held strong minority support, while the campaign had almost no impact in constituencies with very low minority support. Accordingly, while the East Midlands held good electoral potential for a Tory comeback in the 2000s, they should have maxed out their seat returns in the region at the latest with the 2019 election. Their general results are now much closer to those of southern rather than northern England, especially the very strong vote shares in majority seats (the third best Conservative results in 2017 and 2019). Although it is too early to estimate whether they constitute a long-term change or not, they clearly support the observation that the region developed a significant bias towards the Tories. The West Midlands’ results for Labour are of some interest. After the war, the party’s support in the seats it won was very stable, with a spread of the vote share of just above 5% and a comparatively low standard deviation over the first ten elections. Even the collapse of its vote in 1983 by around 7.5% was quickly recovered, and the party almost managed to return to its previous results in 1997 and 2001 (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 339–340, 1999b: 401; Steed 1999: 331–333). However, the second breakdown of its vote under New Labour and the Cameron administrations became dangerous for the party, especially since its results clearly fell below the national averages and reflected those of the Thatcher years so closely. The major increase in the standard deviation from 2010 to 2019 also suggests that the party was only able to consolidate its appeal in a limited segment of seats it held. Even with the 2019 collapse the numbers show little solidity in the few remaining Labour seats. The average majorities are only slightly higher than the national average and the increased standard deviation indicates that there are still some seats with very low majorities that might be taken over by the Tories. Conversely, Labour always

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6 The Development of Regional Competition

performed very well in its minority seats. No matter how good the overall results were, the party mustered stronger support here than in the rest of the country. This trend was most pronounced under Thatcher as well as during the 1997 election, and, although it weakened afterwards, it remained persistent. It was also met by a strong increase in the standard deviations since the 1950s, indicating that there are some seats the party is close to winning, despite its decline in electoral support. However, this seems to have changed since the 2015 election. Since then the party’s vote share increases have been larger in seats, they already held than in those it could not capture, while vote losses were concentrated in minority rather than majority seats, which indicates a rather unhelpful tendency to rack up surplus votes instead of support that can be translated into seat gains. Considering the region’s former battleground status and Labour’s recent massive decline, its current vote gain pattern seems to be an additional liability rather than an asset. The Conservatives slightly overperformed in the seats they won until the October election of 1974. Afterwards, the results were quite close to the national ones: slightly worse until the Labour landslide in 1997 and slightly better afterwards (except for 2019). The trend for the lost seats was very close to that in the East Midlands. The party again managed to secure a six-point higher vote share than on the national level under Thatcher. Even though they lost out over six points under New Labour, the advantage over the national results remained at least four points. An interesting point is that the Tories managed to outmatch Labour in the constituencies it could not win under the Cameron governments and the New Labour era by more than 2.5%. This clearly shows that, even though they significantly expanded their seat returns from 2010 to 2019, they are still in a better position to win additional ones than Labour.8 Considering the numbers for both parties, the West Midlands are a quite competitive region. Compared to the national level, both parties usually perform better in seats they lose and weaker or much the same in constituencies they win, a typical combination indicating high vulnerability and strong campaign performance dependency. However, the 2017 and 2019 elections have modified this situation. As I have said, Labour’s vote gains were very unfavourably distributed while Conservative gains displayed a far better structure with a notable increase in the standard deviation among minority seats and a very homogenous distribution in majority seats. The competition situation in the region is therefore quite unique. While it still exhibits fairly strong performance dependency and campaign sensitivity the initial stacks are distributed very unevenly in favour of the Conservatives. Again, the numbers for the North East display a pattern of very strong Labour domination. The party scored vote shares exceeding 60% in the constituencies it won before the election of February 1974, reaching 63.6% on average and topping the national results by five points. Even the major drop in support in 1974 did not threaten Labour’s general overperformances in the region. The Thatcher years saw some further erosion, but the New Labour years marked an unmatched return to the support levels of the 1950s. The two elections of 2010 and 2015, however, display 8 This

is crucial because, as Johnston et al. (2017: 64) show, the region had the highest proportion of Conservative—Labour contests during the Cameron years.

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

95

an alarming decline, matching the national averages which, so far, had only been an exception. Even the 2017 upset did not lead to a full recovery and rather reflected the 1992 than the 1997 result. Accordingly, 2019 seemed to be a somewhat logical conclusion of these highly problematic trends although a closer look reveals some very unique developments. The massive support drop in majority seats coupled with a steady standard deviation indicates a uniform collapse in all majority seats. However, the fact that the standard deviation in minority seats almost halved while the support level remained the same despite the significant seat losses clearly implicates that the breakdown of support was not as uniform as initially suspected. Instead, certain seats experienced such high vote losses that they fell from an average majority seat support level to that of an average minority seat. While it is too early to assess whether this decline will last, the now very low standard deviation and weak majority support clearly show that traditional Labour strongholds have eroded in a threatening pattern. The number of unsuccessful Labour contests in the North East is too low for most elections to reach reliable conclusions, but the few elections with higher case numbers back my earlier observations of a significant Labour dominance until the 2010s. Conversely, the development in seats held by the Tories is hard to interpret because of the low number of cases, but it is even less remarkable than in the minority seats. In the 1950s, the Conservatives scored slightly below the national average in both vote shares and standard deviations. The standard deviation then fell, reaching a low point under Thatcher and increased only very slightly afterwards, while vote shares mostly declined in line with national developments. Today, the North East indicates mixed electoral potential for the Tories because of the outlined trend of negative homogenisation that saw their vote share, even though just by an average level, and the standard deviation drop. Labour’s unprecedented decline in 2019 as well as former Labour supporters’ willingness to finally vote for the Conservative Party handed the Tories the tools to actually turn their now better than average minority support into potential seat gains. Much of the region’s competitiveness will depend on how well the Conservatives manage to hold onto these new voters and whether Labour can reverse its formerly creeping and now rapid decline. The North West displays fairly weak initial results for Labour and comparatively high stability, which has to be interpreted as a positive sign in the light of the negative overall trend for both parties. Labour’s initial contender potential was quite low, with the party scoring around 36% in seats it could not win until 1970 which was only slightly higher than in the two most southern regions of England. This number fell to less than 30% in 1974 but remained very stable, at around 29%, until 1997. Since then, it slightly decreased to 25–26%, remaining stable around that number until 2017. This was matched by the development in seats held by the party. The region started out with very weak results, typically three to four points below the national average and a similarly low standard deviation. However, these characteristics flipped in October 1974 and have remained reversed since then. Accordingly, Labour has been able to score significantly higher vote shares since 1997 (typically around 3% higher) and increased the deviation to between 8 and 11%. Effectively, the North West is the only region in which the party did not just manage to preserve its relative

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6 The Development of Regional Competition

electoral support, but also achieved a positive development pattern (a positive territorialisation). Combined with the fairly high support base in minority constituencies and the high standard deviation, today’s North West offers perhaps the best mix of already strong support and expansion potential for the party. These developments were further accentuated by the 2017 election which gave Labour its second highest minority and majority vote share in the whole country. However, the 2017 election also showed Labour’s apparent maximum seat potential in the North West under its current support structure. Although the general vote share and deviation were close to the 1997 results, it only scored ten seats less, again racking up considerably more surplus votes than additional support in its minority seats. Interestingly, some of these results are also true for the Tories. In the time of strongest Conservative support just after the war, the party secured both average vote shares and standard deviations. However, the 1964 election marked a watershed for the party, which suffered an almost 8.5% vote swing against it, the highest in the region’s history (Berrington 1965: 21). This drop in support would turn out to be long lasting, with the Tories typically scoring around 49% in their majority seats afterwards. While there were some fairly large shifts between individual elections, like in February 1974 (Steed 1999: 315) and 2010 (Denver 2010: 594–595), these were only temporary modifications. Accordingly, the region showed vote shares well below the national average during the Thatcher years, but slight overperformances during the New Labour era. The minority seats also underline the Tories’ initial strength. Until 1964, they scored almost 42% on average in the seats they could not win, more than four percentage points above the national average, indicating a very promising challenger position. But while the pockets of Tory strongholds managed to resist erosion after 1964, support in the minority constituencies melted away in several waves. In February 1974, their vote share dropped by over 7.5%. The medium improvement in 1979 proved short lived, and in 1983, their vote share fell again by almost 5% (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 339). The last major collapse came with the election of Tony Blair in 1997, when the party lost another 5%. Today’s numbers seem to have stabilised around the national average. The only consolation for the Conservatives is that the standard deviation increased continuously and doubled from 5.3% in 1950 to around 11% in the 2010s. Taken together, the region represents one of the worst overall developments for the Tories. After the war, they held around half of the North West’s seats with safe majorities and were in a very strong contender position, but after 1964, the party’s robust support structure collapsed as a result of increasing homogenisation coupled with shrinking majorities in the seats it held, a creeping loss of seats and a profound electoral decline in minority constituencies. Even 2017 and 2019 did little to modify these developments. The results for Labour’s minority seats in Yorkshire and the Humber closely resemble those for the North West for the post-war phase and the 2010s. Accordingly, the party held only mediocre support in the 1950s and 1960s, while today’s performances are significantly above average. The major difference between both regions can be found in the intermediate phase between 1974 and 1997. During this time, Yorkshire displayed considerably weaker results than the North West, with

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

97

Labour only achieving between 23 and 28% (compared to 24 and 329 ). The vote shares began to equalise again after 1997 so that today the North West only displays a slight advantage over Yorkshire. The somewhat halted decline of support coupled with a slight increase in the standard deviation makes it one of the more profitable targets of Labour campaigning, exemplified by the fairly good outcome of 2017. In the constituencies the party won, the initial situation was quite positive. Vote shares were solidly above 60% until 1974, and the standard deviation was typically above 10%, indicating that the party controlled a significant number of very safe seats. Labour continued to overperform in the region despite an irreversible drop in support in 1974 (Steed 1999: 334). However, the New Labour era seemed to enable a second, very negative trend. Accordingly, majority support quickly collapsed by 15.5% from 2001 to 2010 and remained below the previously worst result of 1983 in both 2015 and 2019. The significant increase in the deviation from 2015 to 2019 as well as the corresponding seat losses points to a quite disparate decline of support with specific areas bearing the brunt while others remained steadfastly loyal to Labour. In summary, Yorkshire has become a mixed bag for the party. Even though it continues to control the majority of seats and the ones it does not already win are within its reach, it has also lost almost all of its advantages in the seats it holds, making them more dependent on campaign performance than on long-term support. Tory results in Yorkshire reflect the Labour developments to a certain degree. The Conservatives also started slightly stronger in the region than compared to the kingdom as a whole, successful constituencies were won by at least one percentage point more and the higher standard deviation points to some significant strongholds. Only the minority constituencies displayed a rather unfavourable pattern, with clearly lower than average vote shares and slightly lower deviations indicating little potential for performance-based seat gains. The major breakdown came in February 1974 (Steed 1999: 334), when the Tories fell below the 50% margin for the first time and only managed to cross it again in 1979. However, since then the situation in their majority seats remained remarkably stable typically revolving around 48–49%. Finally, the vote surges of 2017 and 2019 allowed a return to the support levels of the 1960s. The development in seats the party lost was also fairly stable, although pointing downwards. Again, the major drop came about in 1974, but in this case, it took place over both elections instead of being concentrated on a single one. As a result of the general downward trend, minority support matched the national average of around 24% under New Labour although the latest two elections saw outcomes slightly above the national average. In summary, the numbers indicate that the Conservatives hold a well-defined segment of seats which so far also marked the limit of their electoral potential, at least until 2019. Minority seat support is just about average, and the low standard deviation shows that it is fairly difficult for the party to expand beyond the constituencies it typically wins although the quite concentrated vote surge in 2019 underlined that exceptional elections can flip an additional segment of constituencies. Still, it is worth mentioning that the foundation 9 The 24% of 1983 were, however, an exception, on all other occasions Labour scored at least above

28% in the region.

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of the successful 2019 campaign was already laid in 2017 when the Tories scored their highest UK-wide improvement of the minority vote (+10.2%) in the region. Wales is a very interesting case. Originally, it was Labour’s safest region in the UK. The 27, respectively 28, seats it took during the first six post-war elections were won by devastating margins of 63.8–67.4%, while the rest were lost with around 35.2%. Compared to this, today’s numbers show a significant decrease in support. Although Labour came close to a 60% margin in its successful constituencies in 1992 and 1997, its vote share dropped below 50% in 2005. Since then it has fallen by another 5% and is now almost 20% lower than it was in the 1950s and 1960s (Johnston et al. 2005: 788), with the exception of 2017. This development becomes a bit more disturbing when looking at the standard deviation in successful contests since it was very high, with a maximum of over 14%, in the 1950s but fell to just about 6% in the 2010s, the clear sign of a negative homogenisation. Conversely, the vote share in minority constituencies dropped to around 30% in 1974 and then to around 25 in 1983, although this was only a moderate decline compared to the rest of the country (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 349 and 353). The party then quickly stabilised and continues to hold these above average results. The region’s development resembles the one the Tories experienced in Scotland, although it is not as consequential and devastating. Until 2019, this negative homogenisation was not strong enough to chip away Labour’s large seat reservoir in Wales (Bradbury 2010: 729–730, 2015: 102– 103). However, 2019 made clear how vulnerable the Labour Party has become and that, if this trend continues, it might experience even more serious seat losses in the near future simply because its once vast majorities have melted away (Bradbury 2015: 115). There are two striking observation for the Tories in Wales. The first one is their structural disadvantage. Once the party’s vote share in successful contests had dropped below 50% in 1964, it remained fairly stable at around 44% but seat returns fluctuated heavily between 14 and three. Therefore, the vote gains and losses must have been extremely lopsided and concentrated in individual constituencies. The second striking observation is that Wales is the only region in which the Tories did not experience a significant decline of minority support. Until 1966 they held around 25.5% in their unsuccessful seats, which retracted by some points whenever they lost an election and slightly increased if they were successful. This number then fell to around 20% under New Labour, but that was far less accentuated compared to the development of all other regions. Although this would generally be a good development, the party’s very weak initial support base means that it remains very difficult for it to win seats by solely relying on its own performance; instead, it strongly depends on other parties’ results. However, today the Tories are probably in their best position in Wales for the last 100 years. With the shrinking of the structural asymmetry between the two major parties to just 5%, the Conservatives were finally able to claim a moderate amount of the Welsh seats. Still, their considerable seat gains in the last election owed much to the combination of the devastating collapse of Labour support by over 8% and a very strong concentration of Conservative vote gains in individual constituencies.

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

99

Looking at Scotland, we can identify interesting developments that strengthen some of our earlier observations. Initially, Labour scored around 57% in successful constituencies, which was only a mediocre showing compared to the rest of the country. These mediocre numbers are further underlined by the fairly high uniformity of majorities, below-average minority support and the significant number of seats it did not win. In February 1974, its majority support dropped below 55%, stabilising around 50% in subsequent years, most likely a result of the double incursion of the Liberals and SNP, coupled with a surprisingly positive performance by the Tories (Steed 1999: 324–325). This, however, did not lead to increased party vulnerability because both the growing heterogeneity of support and the increasing seat share point to additional returns thanks to the weakness of the other parties. Since the trend of Labour’s electoral support in Scotland mirrored the national development, results remained below the nationwide numbers and only exceeded them when Scotsman Gordon Brown was running for re-election as Prime Minister in 2010 (Mitchell and van der Zweet 2010: 709–711). The most disturbing part of this development is the one in the seats Labour cannot win. Accordingly, the mean vote share declined from 34 to around 20% over the last 70 years. Specifically, it dropped more rapidly and to lower absolute numbers than in other regions, beginning with a significant fall of 3.7% in 1970. With the SNP surge of 1974, the minority results were already below those of the southern regions and only exceeded them as a result of the seat reduction before the 2005 election. Since deviation did not keep up with this development, it is safe to say that Scotland had been divided into three parts of Labour support. First, there were the “old strongholds”, which were fairly, but not the safest pockets of Labour support in the UK. The second group were constituencies in which Labour had been decently strong but could only win thanks to the declining competitiveness of its main challengers or favourable vote splits. Third, in the weakest regions the party had been practically non-existent and only had chances of winning under very exceptional circumstances (Niendorf 2015: 352–353). In summary, Labour’s electoral standing in Scotland is confirmed to have been one of hidden weakness (Hassan and Shaw 2012: 5–17). Although seat returns increased over time and were quite reliable, its underlying support structure was rather precarious. With its support indicators being constantly weaker than the national averages, but seat returns being very high, the party was punching way above its weight and owed its success to the fragmentation of its challengers. However, before the 2015 meltdown, Scotland had been extremely important to Labour’s national competitiveness, specifically because of this favourable support:seat ratio. Conversely, this might make a Scottish recovery even more difficult for Labour since it would have to reproduce a very specific support pattern or otherwise secure even more support than before to ensure the same seat returns (Harrop 2015). Compensating the breakdown through additional gains in other regions will be extremely hard since most of the regions analysed so far have either experienced a negative support development or offer only very limited additional seats. The 2019 snap election then delivered the worst result since the end of the war with Labour now hovering around minority support levels that are five percentage points lower than its national average. Therefore, it is difficult to see any meaningful recovery in terms of seat returns in the

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foreseeable future although SNP majorities in many Scottish seats are comparatively low. Accordingly, while Labour is still second placed in 26 of the 58 Scottish constituencies, only four of these seats have a majority of 10% or less. For the Conservatives, the remarkable decline of electoral support in Scotland is again underlined by all researched criteria. However, the Tories’ starting point was exceptionally good. Their majorities were not only higher than their national averages, but also higher than Labour’s, while the same was true for their minority support. Accordingly, majority support remained between 56 and 61% (two to three points higher than on the national level) until the end of the 1950s, and minority support lay between 38 and 40% (1 to 3.7% higher than the national average). The fairly high deviation in constituencies won by the Conservatives, combined with a fairly low one in seats they lost, indicates a quite favourable vote distribution, with some safe strongholds and a large number of highly competitive seats the party had not won previously. In the 1964 election, the Tories lost around 6% in constituencies they won and 5.7% in those they lost, while also losing seven seats. This decline was followed by another shockwave in 1974. Its two elections saw the party’s majority shares drop by almost 11% to the same level as its initial minority support. Minority shares fell by almost the same amount, indicating a region-wide uniform collapse and a negative homogenisation of support in general. Accordingly, Tory support became so low during the Thatcher years that the party was no longer able to even hold a handful of seats. The considerable success in Scottland in 2017 was therefore probably only possible through the combination of the serious shortfall in the nationalist vote and the concentration of the unionist vote in favour of the Conservatives (Henderson and Mitchell 2018: 116–120). Although the Tory revival took a considerable dent in 2019, the seat losses have to be attributed to the party’s low majorities rather than the volatility of its newly found support. Therefore, its current support structure strongly resembles that of the Thatcher years which is at least a significant improvement to the years in the wilderness under New Labour. As I have already indicated, Scotland was and is a rather curious case in terms of party competition. While it was very balanced in the 1950s, it was also an ultimately non-competitive region. The fairly small changes in seat returns and electoral support, despite the general equality of both major competitors, point to a highly segmented electorate with a very low amount of potential swing voters. Even the almost complete breakdown of the Tories did not significantly change the pattern of Labour’s electoral standing in the region, although it secured larger seat returns as a result. Instead, it seems to have led to a vote split that strongly favoured Labour while disadvantaging its opponents. Therefore, the party was able to extract considerably better seat returns than its electoral support structure suggested. It remains, however, unclear how stable the outcome of the last major realignment as a consequence of the independence referendum will be (Henderson and Mitchell 2018: 122–123). Greater London again exhibits its already discussed properties as an initially quite balanced but uncompetitive region. It can also be counted as a fairly safe region for Labour during the 1950s and 1960s, when the party scored slightly below 60% in the constituencies it won. After the 1970 election, it faced a massive uniform drop in support from which it only partially recovered in the 2010s. Although there were some

6.4 Uneven decline—The Development of Electoral Support

101

large increases in October 1974, 1997 and 2001, these proved to be only temporary gains. Labour’s majority vote share has fluctuated around 53% since 1992, except for the two latest elections, with its main characteristic being its high volatility. This also qualifies the fact that the region has typically delivered at least slightly better vote shares than the rest of the country in recent years because a fairly strong and very reliable support base was exchanged for a strong, but highly unreliable pattern. These developments are somehow different from the constituencies in which the party is in a minority position. Labour started out with average results slightly above 35% and a mediocre standard deviation of 7.25%. This explains why London had been so stable in terms of seat returns in the early post-war years. Since the party was below a 40% margin, which was also quite uniformly distributed, it was difficult in an effectively two-party system to change even a handful of seats without major vote swings. During the Thatcher era, Labour experienced a serious setback in its weaker parts of London by losing 7% before stabilising at around 27% (Curtice and Steed 1999b: 386–399, 1999a: 340). On the other hand, the comparatively large increase (around 3%) in standard deviation can be seen as a positive outcome. Labour’s problem in the capital was laid bare in 2017. It scored its best result for all analysed elections concerning its overall vote share and majority support, but secured a far lower percentage of the capital’s seat than in 1997. As it seems the segmentation of London’s electorate still remains a recognisable factor. Therefore, a relevant number of seats remains out of the party’s reach even in case of a landslide and this number seems to have rather increased than decreased. The Conservatives’ development is comparatively close to Labour’s with one exception. The party started with a lower vote share (around 58%) in the constituencies it won and dropped to less than 50% under New Labour. The major difference lies in the constantly lower deviation. This indicates that Tory seat returns are more precarious than Labour’s since they are based on lower vote shares and a more homogenous distribution. The minority constituencies’ development has been even closer to Labour’s result, except for the Conservatives’ smaller deviation. All in all, London displays only medium electoral potential for the Tories, despite the large number of non-Conservative seats and at least average vote shares in these constituencies. Conversely, the average majorities and low deviation make Conservative seats in the capital a fairly promising target for its contenders and might therefore nullify eventual Tory gains. This is further underlined by the fact that, although both parties hold the same amount of minority support, Labour has higher support in constituencies it wins, forcing the Tories to garner larger swings to make actual gains (Denver 2018: 17–18). Summary In general, the results indicate very diverse and individual developments for almost all regions. While a couple of regions display similar support patterns today, they were often the result of very different trends. This is most obvious when comparing the three southern English regions. Currently, all of them are dominated by the Tories, while Labour can hardly hold its very limited ground. The initial situation after the war was, however, very different. While the South East had always been

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a bastion of Tory support and an electoral desert for Labour, the Conservatives’ support in the South West started out comparatively weak but continuously improved over the course of the century. Labour was also effectively displaced as the Tories’ main contender by the LibDems; however, their collapse in 2015 did little to restore Labour’s competitiveness (Cutts and Russell 2015: 79–80). Conversely, the East of England showed an initially balanced competition situation. Even though the Tories secured the vast majority of the region’s seats, their majorities were comparatively weak. Labour, by contrast, was in a very strong contender position generally just failing to mobilise the critical vote swings necessary to secure larger amounts of seat turnovers. The development over the last 70 years has seen this strong challenger position almost completely evaporate, while the Conservatives managed to closely align the region’s results with their performances in the rest of the south. The regional developments closest to each other were those of the East and West Midlands, although their current status still displays mentionable differences. Both regions had already been fairly competitive in the 1950s, becoming even more performance dependent over time and then shifting towards a structural asymmetry in favour of the Tories while still preserving their general campaign sensitivity. These developments were, however, rather exceptional. The general trend observable in most regions was one of growing single-party domination (Bogdanor and Field 1993; Curtice and Steed 1999a, 1999b). Typically, this trend favoured the party already in a more commanding position, but sometimes, like in London and Scotland, quite balanced regions also became subject to increasing single-party hegemony. The last general trend that characterised this growing uncompetitiveness was the phenomenon of uneven electoral decline (Curtice 2018: 31–33, 2010a: 629– 632). The most serious drops in electoral support could often be observed in parties’ minority seats, especially in regions where the parties already controlled only a small number of seats. This indicates a development I will further analyse in the upcoming chapter, the potential increase in individual seats’ safeness. Such an uneven decline of electoral support between the incumbent and main challenger party should increase the incumbent’s actual majority even though its popular support is receding, making it less vulnerable and thereby “freezing” party competition. Accordingly, this can result in the paradox that a greater diversity of the vote leads to a less diverse and more entrenched parliamentary situation or party competition in general (Curtice 2018: 41–42).

6.5 More Volatility, Less Vulnerability—The Problem of Increasing Local Majorities Probably the most important question in assessing the competitiveness of a party or a party system is what kind of majorities the opposition needs to overcome to defeat the incumbent government (Bartolini 2000: 53–55). By examining the actual majority situation, I approach perhaps the most crucial aspect of the limits of party competition.

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While reaching the 50% plus one threshold of the national vote should theoretically be “enough” to secure an electoral victory; this theoretical assumption holds limited value for analytical purposes because the composition of parliament is not determined by the national vote but by the results in all individual constituencies (Johnston et al. 2001: 35–36). In order to analyse this aspect in a straightforward and accessible fashion, I have simply divided all constituencies into five different categories of “safeness” based on the extent of the majority held by the party winning it. To further supply these results, I will also, when relevant, present information on the parties’ average victory margins, but not review them in detail for the reasons outlined in Sect. 5.2. There are no generally accepted rules for defining which constituencies have to be considered as “marginal” or “safe”; therefore, my thresholds might be disputed by other studies or authors. The most commonly used classification is a distinction between seats with a margin of up to 10% between the first and second-placed candidates (“marginal”) and those above 10% (“safe”, see, for example, Curtice 2010a: 630, 2018: 31; Rossiter et al. 1999b: 158).10 Other classifications, such as which seats have to be considered as “super marginal” or effectively “impregnable”, are less well defined. All constituencies within a margin of 2% or less, respectively, a uniform swing of one or less per cent of the vote, will be treated as “supermarginals”. The lead in these seats is so low that no party can completely ignore them even though they are not necessarily the most important “battleground” areas. Typically, the party leading the polls limits its resource spending in such constituencies since it is assumed that the general trend indicated by the polls is enough to swing these seats. Conversely, the party trailing behind tends to put higher investments into these seats to potentially offset some inevitable seat losses by securing these ultra-marginal constituencies. Seats with a 2 to 5% lead are typical “short-list target seats”,11 meaning that majorities are close enough for the concerned parties to include them on their target lists. None of these seats can be ignored completely, unless the governing party has an overwhelming parliamentary majority and only needs to somehow defend it, since they are theoretically so easy to flip that exchanging them for other targets 40 or 50 places lower on the list seems seldom rational. Constituencies with a 5 to 10% margin are considered “wider target seats” because the lead remains close enough to flip them without exceptional vote swings but large enough to require some decent campaign efforts and considerations about voter migration and target group mobilisation. Accordingly, the strategic handling of these 10 The Electoral Reform Society (2010: 48) for example used a more performance-based estimation by employing an 8% swing for Lab-Con contests and a 6% swing for seats held by the LibDems. 11 The terms “target seats” and “target list” are usually used exclusively for seats not currently held by the party in question. These notions are, however, not very feasible for describing parties’ campaign strategies. It should be obvious that no party focusses all of its resources on gaining seats, when it also needs to defend those it deems to be in danger of being lost. Accordingly, I will use both terms in this broader sense, describing both constituencies already held by a party, but requiring campaign investment in order to hold them, and seats a party seeks to gain through active campaigning.

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cases by party campaigners changes, when compared to the two categories above. It is the individual constituencies in this category for which parties typically have to decide whether they want to seriously invest or concede. Parties naturally have only limited resources and manpower to spend in an electoral campaign and therefore have to prioritise specific constituencies. Campaign investments might become too high, demographics too unfavourable or the projected national swing too small to realistically win certain of these constituencies, leading campaigners to regularly exclude some of these from their internal target lists. Therefore, parties will try to find a set of constituencies in which the other side will either not invest at all or at a considerably lower level. Since this decision-making is mostly focussed on this category, it carries exceptional weight in determining the final campaign outcome. All seats within the 10 to 20% margin are considered “safe” under normal circumstances; however, they remain prone to aggressive targeting, considerable turnout changes and effective campaign performances in general.12 To underline this point, it is illustrative to look at the seat changes between the two major parties during some of the latest elections. Under 2015 s very small swing vote, just one of the 18 seats that swung between Labour and the Tories had a higher than 10% margin. Under the fairly large vote swing against Labour in 2010, the respective numbers were nine to 51. Of these nine, only four had a lead of above 12 points and none had one above 14%. In the 2017 snap election, 33 seats changed hands between Labour and the Conservatives, but just eight had a majority of above 10%. These numbers indicate that even under a significant vote swing, “safe seats” only represent a minority of actual changes, becoming completely negligible under small swings. The last category includes all constituencies with a 20% plus lead. Seats with such majorities are in most cases beyond party competition most obviously because no British party has ever achieved a nationwide average vote share increase of 20% with the only exception being the SNP in 2015 (Mitchell 2015: 98), if one relaxes the criteria for non-national parties. Table 6.8 presents the results of the overall seat safeness without regard to the winning or runner up party or the individual regions. The first and perhaps most important point we can derive from the numbers is a considerable decline in the overall competitiveness, even though the numbers indicate two distinct time periods rather than a continuous fall. It is fairly obvious that the 1979 election marked a watershed. Before it, the number of safest seats never exceeded 300, with an average of 261, whereas it only dropped below 300 on two occasions after 1979, reaching a substantially higher average of 329. Even if we take the different seat increases resulting from the boundary reviews into account,13 this would mean that around 8% of all constituencies moved into the zone of absolute safety compared to the first period.

12 Rossiter

et al. (1999b: 158) are, from my point of view, too generous in considering these seats as “close”. 13 Meaning that I discount every newly created seat as a “very safe” one in advance.

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Table 6.8 Seat safeness 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1966 1970 Feb. Oct. 1979 1974 1974 Super marginal

38

42

34

38

42

44

40

36

39

33

Short-list target seats

58

59

58

46

47

43

61

55

53

47

Wider target seats

96

87

84

101

107

111

75

81

95

64

Safe

153

151

154

141

171

159

176

239

192

160

Very safe

268

274

288

292

251

261

266

212

244

319

GB seats

613

613

618

618

618

618

618

623

623

623

1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 2005 2010 2015 2017 2019 Super marginals

26

22

36

24

22

40

36

26

49

25

Short-list target seats

51

52

44

43

27

Wider target seats

75

72

87

86

75

47

52

26

42

38

79

105

67

71

Safe seats

160

156

137

156

72

182

180

161

140

109

139

Very safe seats

321

331

330

GB seats

633

633

634

332

335

282

278

373

361

358

641

641

628

632

632

632

632

The number of safe seats (10 to 20% majority) started with fairly stable numbers, normally making up around 150 seats or a quarter of parliament’s MPs at most elections in the first phase, averaging 171 seats. From 1979 to 2019, the average number was 153 seats, which would almost be the same average as for the first phase (161 seats) if we exclude the outlier election of February 1974. Taken together, the fairly uncompetitive seats (“safe” and “very safe” ones) made up around 70% of all seats in the first half and 76% in the second half of the post-war period. Looking at the super marginals, we conversely see a decline of slightly above 20%. In the first period, they averaged 39 seats, while in the second phase, it was only 31. It is, however, mentionable that the spread between individual elections changed considerably. In the first phase, the results were never more than five seats higher or lower than the average, while in the second period, the spread stretched from 22 to 49 cases, even though the average had declined. A similar fall can be observed for the short-list target seats, which fell from 53 to 43 seats on average. While the competitive constituencies initially made up roughly a sixth of Great Britain’s MPs, today it is only a ninth. Finally, the category of mediocrely safe seats shows a small decline, from an average of 93 to 78 constituencies, but a fairly stable spread, ranging from 75 to 111 in the early period to 64 to 105 during the later one. The overall result for the development of seat safeness is strikingly clear. The only category of seats that experienced a considerable increase was the safest one. The fairly uncompetitive constituencies stayed almost exactly the same, while the marginals and the mediocrely competitive ones suffered moderate declines. This

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might sound surprising if we take into account that both major parties’ vote shares have been continuously declining both in the seats they win and seats they lose. There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon. First, the decline is, as I have already shown to some degree, unevenly distributed with higher average vote share losses in constituencies in which a party is normally unsuccessful and lower declines in seats it typically wins. If this is true for both parties, we witness a process of “regionalisation” in which the party system as a whole becomes less competitive because the main contender party (in the individual constituencies) loses more votes than the incumbent one (Curtice 2010a: 631). A second explanation could be the electoral rise of third parties. In a situation of equal competitiveness, third parties can lower the competitiveness as long as their support is always drawn from the main contender party in individual constituencies rather than the party winning the district. If this phenomenon is more widespread than a unilateral pull, where support is overwhelmingly recruited from a specific party, or a uniform draw, where both major parties lose comparable amounts of voters to the third party, then general competitiveness declines although major party support is also declining (Johnston et al. 2001: 44–46). Regional Developments Before analysing the individual parties’ results, I will give a brief overview of the general developments of safeness and marginality in the different regions. The first striking observation is that the change in the safest seat category was not simply the result of a slight overall shift in all constituencies; but instead, it was heavily regionally concentrated. The largest safety increase can be found in the East of England, a region that had almost no impregnable constituencies in the first phase (usually below five “very safe” seats in the first and over 30 in the second phase). Basically, the same development took place in the South East although the Tories already held a significant amount of strongholds after the war (initially between 30 and 40, later between 50 and 60 “very safe” seats). The remaining regions, like the West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber and the North West, either mostly preserved their initial level of competitiveness, with some exceptions during landslide elections, or fluctuated strongly between individual elections, like the South West and to some degree Scotland. Lastly, there is one case of a clear, though very limited, increase in competitiveness in Wales (a fall of “very safe” seats from around 20 to just slightly above 15 seats). In the next step, I will look at the individual safeness distribution for each party (Tables 6.9 and 6.10) to determine whether one of them has a competitive edge in these terms. The most striking difference between both parties is the overall number of uncompetitive seats held, especially during elections they lost. Labour only dropped below 100 extremely safe constituencies in 1983 and even scored between 110 and 120 during the rest of its worst defeats. The Tories, on the other hand, never came close to these figures. Only on a single occasion (1950) did they hold more than 100 uncompetitive constituencies in face of a defeat. Instead, their worst results in

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107

Table 6.9 Safeness of Conservative seats 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1966 1970 Feb. Oct. 1979 1974 1974 Super marginal

21

21

17

14

21

23

19

16

18

17

Short-list target seats

28

27

23

24

23

22

40

23

30

21

Wider target seats

47

46

40

46

46

64

31

47

53

38

Safe

79

84

89

92

105

69

102

143

110

79

Very safe

114

134

166

178

97

64

130

68

66

184

Conservative seats

289

312

335

354

292

242

322

297

277

339

1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 2005 2010 2015 2017 2019 Super marginals

11

13

21

13

8

11

17

14

17

14

Short-list target seats

30

24

18

Wider target seats

37

37

52

19

8

17

24

12

23

21

33

27

17

40

30

27

Safe seats

89

98

68

34

70

78

68

76

65

57

65

Very safe seats

230

204

177

30

45

85

150

210

194

231

Conservative seats

397

376

336

165

166

198

307

331

318

365

1997 and 2001 reduced them to a meagre 30 and 45, hardly half of Labour’s low point of 86 in 1983. But, even when the Conservatives won an election, they had some trouble increasing their seats’ safeness. On average, they scored 182 very safe seats compared to Labour’s 195 in successful elections, despite generally achieving higher seat returns.14 These results are matched by the average majority margins of both parties. The Tories’ best victory margins in 1983 were only 1.9% higher than those of Labour-held seats in the same election. Meanwhile, Labour outscored the Conservatives in this respect by more than 5% on eight occasions and by more than 10% in 1966, October 1974, 1997 and 2001. However, the 2015 election appears to have become a game changer for the Tories since the distribution of their seats between the different categories changed far more significantly than their small vote share and seat gains might suggest. Accordingly, the Conservatives achieved the highest percentage of safe seats during the whole post-war period (63%), even five points higher than the respective figure for their landslide in 1983, despite scoring a more than five point lower vote share than in 1983. Having finished my preliminary observations for the general safeness and marginality distribution between the parties, I will now look closer at the parties’ regional distributions. Party-specific Developments The Labour hold on the East of England was, bluntly put, non-existent, before declining even further. Effectively, the party has no baseline of seats to rely on, 14 Again, these numbers are strongly influenced by the Tories’ very good performances in the last three elections. Excluding these their average would only amount to 173.

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Table 6.10 Safeness of Labour seats 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1966 1970 Feb. Oct. 1979 1974 1974 Super marginal

16

20

17

23

21

20

18

17

15

15

Short-list target seats

27

32

35

22

24

16

20

28

19

25

Wider target seats

48

40

43

54

55

44

42

30

35

22

Safe

72

66

63

48

64

88

73

85

74

76

Very safe

152

137

119

111

153

196

136

142

176

131

Labour seats

315

295

277

258

317

364

289

302

319

269

1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 2005 2010 2015 2017 2019 Super marginals

13

8

12

6

7

18

14

Short-list target seats

16

22

21

15

13

23

Wider target seats

33

26

27

43

38

46

Safe seats

61

52

62

65

83

86

121

149

290

209

229

271

419

Very safe seats Labour seats

11

19

8

17

9

11

12

48

29

24

27

86

64

48

42

50

272

183

115

135

166

106

413

356

258

232

262

203

and their numbers show no signs of competitive ability at all. Instead, the East of England displays a fairly uniform development in favour of the Conservative Party. In terms of safeness, the Tories had a rather rough start. The vast majority of their seats were located in the intermediate or the “safe” category. The Thatcher years, however, provided a considerable shift in the party’s support base. In 1979, the safest seat category already made up over 60% of all Conservative seats. Even though the New Labour era brought a drawback, the majorities were far higher than they had been during the less successful elections in the East of 1950, 1951, 1964 and 1966. The strong seat return increases in 2010 and 2015 also translated into significant safety increases. With an average victory margin of over 35%, the East finally surpassed all other regions in 2019 turning it into the safest stronghold of the whole UK. The picture of the competition situation in the East of England has now become much clearer. The facts that the Tories did not hold significant majorities in the early post-war elections and that seat turnovers to the Labour Party remained minimal indicates that the available electorate had been comparatively small. No matter how strong Labour performed nationally, it could hardly overcome the small majorities the Conservatives held. This already strong strategical advantage became even more robust thanks to the relative growth in baseline support for the Tories. The South East clearly has been and mostly remains the heartland of Toryism in terms of party competition. Of the constituencies won in the region since 1950, 64% displayed Conservative majorities above 20%, with no other region even reaching a 50% threshold. While the party not only increased its number of South Eastern MPs, it also strengthened its popular majorities from 54.9% of its seats being very safe over the first nine elections to 70.2% during the latest eleven elections. It should, however, be mentioned that today the region also displays the highest standard deviation of

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all regional victory margins meaning that despite the very high general safeness majorities still vary considerably. Labour’s story in the South East is quickly told. The party’s meagre seat returns of the 1950s were quite competitive and these few seats were lost over the next decades. In the South West, the Tories started from a mediocre position in terms of safety. Typically, seats held by them were up to around 40% very safe, with almost the same number being just safe. The region had been a traditional stronghold of the Liberals which had a heavy influence on the safety of Conservative seat returns. The 1964 election saw the first safety collapse with the Liberals increasing their regional vote share by 6.2%. This was followed by another massive Liberal incursion during the two 1974 elections, when they improved their regional vote share by 12.7%, plus another point in October. Only in 1979 did the Tories accomplish a significant step towards safety, which, again, was quickly overcome by the rise of the SDP-Liberal coalition. This made the breakdown of the LibDems in 2015 even more crucial since it propelled the Tories into a novel situation where they not only controlled the vast majority of the region’s constituencies but did so by huge margins. If this is the culmination point of competition development, and the 2017 and 2019 results reinforced this interpretation, then it has been a very positive one (for the Tories); otherwise, the trend of regional safeties would have been at best stagnant or even decreasing. The regional development for Labour is short and negative. The party started with a small number of safe seats distributed like those of the Tories. This small number then slowly declined, and the party’s remaining seats became more competitive. The Midlands display a fairly competitive and balanced situation. Even though these characteristics have broadly remained the same since the 1950s, we can observe some relevant changes. In the East Midlands both parties together typically held around ten non-competitive seats, a small number in comparison to other regions. This number increased with the Thatcher era to slightly below 20 very safe contests. The interesting point is the distribution among the parties because typically the regionally dominant party controlled almost all of these seats while the challenger held almost none. While the Thatcher era had the largest regional impact for the Tories, with victory margins and standard deviation spiking in 1979 and then stabilising on higher levels than before, Labour headed for disaster (Curtice and Steed 1999b: 401). In 1987, local Labour majorities had been 16.6 points lower than the national average, and the fairly low deviation of 8% indicated that the party barely managed to cling to its former strongholds. However, this lopsidedness still underlines the high competitiveness of the region with an even spread among the categories under balanced election outcomes and a skewed distribution in case of clear victories. The latest four elections saw a certain break with earlier results since now around two-thirds of the Tories’ and half of Labour’s seats have to be considered very safe, a much higher number for both than at any point before. In the West Midlands, the overall situation was the other way around. While individual seats had quite small majorities in the eastern parts of the Midlands, majorities were more significant in the west. Therefore, around 50% of both parties’ seats were already very safe in the 1950s. In 1959, Labour support was crippled, and it took the party until 1974 to

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re-establish its former levels of support, a result of the distinctive voting behaviour in the Black Country (Steed 1999: 331–333), which were again devastated in 1979. Irrespectively, Labour’s safety distribution hardly changed, and it continues to score around the same seat returns and majorities as in the post-war era whether it loses or wins (although this was harshly interrupted in 2019). What has changed is the sensitivity of the region to campaign performance, which is also true for East Midlands. While Labour’s results in both regions were independent of the nationwide electoral results in the 1950s, they now strongly depend on it. Tory development in the West Midlands has also been not particularly promising, although the elections of the 2010s have improved their standing in the region. The party managed to score at least a 50% rate of very safe seats until 1959, irrespective of seat returns and general election results, but subsequently failed to achieve such a rate unless it also secured at least 30 seats and even then chances of this happening were just 50%. In summary, both regions display three central characteristics: a strong dependency on national campaign performance, a strong interaction of safeness and seat returns and a tendency to either produce large safety and seat shifts or just insignificant changes. This points to a peculiar composition of the electorate. The fairly low number of constantly safe seats indicates comparatively equal shares of party loyalists and a crucial number of available voters. However, since the regions only appear to either experience huge vote shifts or insignificant ones, the electorate also seems to be “unwilling” to frequently adjust its vote, only displaying considerable changes in cases of earthquake elections. Yorkshire and the Humber display mixed results for Labour. In general, slightly more than 50% of the party’s seats were absolutely safe and the rest’s positioning depended on Labour’s national performance (victory margins were still initially four to five points higher than nationwide). On the positive side, Labour’s relative support base remained fairly stable over time, even though failing to deliver exceptional returns. There are hardly any changes or surprising observations for the Tories in the region. The party’s performance never had a great impact on their regional results; no matter how good or bad the Tories fared nationally, the returns were almost always around 20 seats, with half of them being very safe and another quarter being fairly safe. This is also affirmed by the victory margins which usually turned out to be just average or even worse than the national ones in cases of Tory victories and slightly to considerably better than the national results in cases of Conservative defeats. Therefore, the observations match those for the Labour Party, simply on a lower level. Accordingly, the available electorate seems to be comparatively small and evenly distributed so that it seldom makes any difference, delivering very stable returns and only small uniform vote swings. Still, the 2019 election proved that under exceptional circumstances this quite stable pattern could be overcome at least temporarily. There is not much to tell about England’s smallest region, the North East had always been rock solid territory for Labour. On only three occasions did Labour’s iron grip begin to loosen. While few North Eastern Labour voters were tempted by Thatcherism many in the region were ready to lend their support to the SDPLiberal coalition in 1983, thereby lowering the “safeness” of Labour seats without

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delivering them to another party. The same phenomenon could be observed in 2010, when larger proportions of Labour supporters had grown disillusioned with the party after 13 years of government, but, reluctant to give their vote to the Tories, chose the Liberal Democrats instead. In summary, the region has little to contribute to party competition, which conversely makes it indispensable to Labour’s competitiveness, because the actually available electorate seems small compared to the more or less encapsulated voters.15 The 2019 election challenged this seemingly iron-clad structure. Although the Tories made significant gains they still failed to even slightly increase the safeness of their seats while the safeness of the remaining Labour seats dropped significantly (average majority margins fell by an astonishing 11%) due to the fact that former Labour voters for the first time overwhelmingly chose the Conservative Party. What happened to Labour in the North East in 2019 came close to the 2015 disaster in Scotland. With majorities now being over 10% lower than the national average and even falling behind those of southern England the party is staring into an electoral abyss. Therefore, the North East currently looks more like a typical battleground region of the 1950s, and it remains to be seen how quickly and to which degree it will return to its earlier competition structure. The North West exhibits the second-best development for Labour. Although the party already started with a high percentage of the region’s seats, these were overwhelmingly competitive or more correctly, not absolutely safe (average majority margins were between 7 to 8% below the national average). Accordingly, the uncompetitive constituencies never constituted more than a third of the party’s seats until 1964 and only more than 50% on two occasions (1966, October 1974) before 1983. From then on, competition development was heavily skewed in favour of Labour. It peaked in 1997 and 2001 when around 93% of its seats fell into the fourth or fifth safeness categories. But even during the nationally unsuccessful campaigns of 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019, the numbers stayed between 70 and 85%. Conversely, the Tories started in a strong position for a region with such balanced returns, too. However, this indicator again reinforces my general assessment of Conservative decline in the region. Originally, around 50% of Conservative-held constituencies were uncompetitive, clearly exceeding the other categories as well as the safeness of Labour seats. Interestingly, the party’s descent began in 1964 (Berrington 1965: 27– 29), when the “safe” seats outnumbered the “uncompetitive” ones for the first time. Today, any gains above the party’s baseline of around ten seats typically remain quite competitive, something even the 2019 election could not change. Taken together, the “unavailable” electorate seems to have shifted in favour of Labour in almost all constituencies (Curtice and Steed 1999b: 401–402). This trend turned formerly contested seats into safe ones; and initially pulled Conservative seats towards Labour. The available electorate seems large enough to turn some of these seats, but the shifts

15 The

problem with the available electorate lies in their reluctance to support the Tories. Labour’s strength in region rests to a significant degree on the favourable vote split between the Tories and the third parties. This reluctance, which repeated itself every time the Labour vote took significant hits in the past, makes it difficult to consider these voter segments as truly “available”.

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in the unavailable electorate have been so significant that the overwhelming majority still withstands the average Tory incursion. Looking at Wales, the developments match those observed earlier. The Conservative Party almost never held any “very safe” seats, and, whenever it managed to expand its small numbers, these gains remained very competitive. This also confirms our observation that Conservative gains were mostly a result of very favourable swing vote distributions, which often were just large enough to overturn former majorities but too small to offer long-term protection. For Labour, the region has been one of extreme stability, securing between 16 and 18 uncompetitive seats in half of all elections and close to around 20 in almost all remaining ones. Even during the Thatcher years, the party managed to keep the majority of its seats way out of the Tories’ hands. The reason for this can be seen in the extreme victory margins of Labour seats which lay between 35 and 40% after the war. However, this also made the results of 2010, 2015 and 2019 so disturbing since they almost exactly matched those of 1983 and 1987 (Bradbury 2015: 115–116). Accordingly, victory margins and standard deviations have almost halved since the 1950s with average majorities being down from 38.5 to 20% and standard deviations falling from 20.1 to 11.5%, clearly showing a negative homogenisation. On the other hand, the 2017 results are such a close reflection of Labour’s typical performance in the region (although the average majorities only reflected those of 1987) that it is still unclear to which degree the party’s grip on the region is actually slipping. Scotland displays an interesting, although at this point fairly predictable, development. The region had initially been very competitive because both parties held a comparable number of seats while majorities were quite average. Until 1964, the Conservatives’ shares of “very safe” seats were always higher than 50%, while Labour never crossed that line. Only under Thatcher did the tides finally turn the region into one tightly dominated by the Labour Party (Curtice and Steed 1999b: 415–418, 1999a: 338 and 340–341). It is, however, important to note the effect of the boundary review of 2005 on the safeness of Labour seats. While the vote share changes of the other parties were comparatively small between 2001 and 2010 (Tories: 14.7, 15.1 and 16%; LibDems: 16.1, 22.7 and 19.1%; SNP: 20.3, 18 and 20.2%), Labour experienced a moderate safety decline (down from 80.4% very safe seats to 63.4 and 73.2% in 2005 and 2010). In the light of the high fragmentation of the opposition vote, safeness must have been reduced to a certain degree by the changes in the constituency boundaries leading to a higher concentration of individual parties’ support in specific constituencies. The collapse of Labour in 2015 leaves some questions about the electoral future of Scotland. Although the swing towards the SNP was so high that the overall “safeness” in the region remained mostly the same as in 2010, despite nearly all seats changing hands, it is unclear whether or how long the SNP can manage to uphold these high majorities, which was already called into question to a large degree during the 2017 election (Henderson and Mitchell 2018: 117–120). Much of Scottish parties’ support in national elections depended on the public perception of whether they would be able to protect Scotland’s interests in Westminster (Johns et al. 2009: 227–230; Curtice

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et al. 2009: 182–190; Carman et al. 2014: 81–97, 112–129 and 139–151), something that is difficult for the SNP to achieve in opposition. However, this question of protecting Scottish interests seems to have been replaced, at least to some degree, by the independence question (Henderson and Mitchell 2018: 110–114) which reinforces the polarising nature of the SNP. Accordingly, Labour’s decline in Scotland continued even after the 2015 election, but not in favour of the SNP. Instead, especially strongly unionist Labour supporters began flocking to the Scottish Conservatives (Henderson and Mitchell 2018: 119–120), who then pushed Labour into third place in the 2017 snap election. Initially, this helped the nationalists because it further eroded the electoral base of the often second-placed Labour Party. However, since the SNP had already flayed the Labour vote so significantly in 2015, the Tories quickly began to overtake Labour in many constituencies, transforming the spreading out of the unionist vote into a concentration. This process continued to a certain degree in 2019 with Labour shedding even more of its support while the Tories were hampered by the resignation of Ruth Davidson over conflicts with their, in Scotland deeply unpopular, Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Accordingly, while the SNP was able to restore some degree of safeness in 2019, it still remains to be seen how reliable these regains are. The development in London has been fairly unspectacular. Labour seat changes also led to an almost uniform shift in safeness, with every seat gain adding another very safe constituency. For the Tories, this trend is broadly the same, but more erratic and less uniform. The reason for this lies in the fact that seat safeness in the region begins to exponentially decline once Conservative seat returns come close to 40 seats or lower. Accordingly, the Tories only have a rate of 47% of very safe seats while Labour has an acceptable ratio of around 58%. The most mentionable current development has been the decline of overall safeness as a result of the Liberal vote surge in 2005 and 2010. Both elections belonged to the few ones when London’s number of very safe seats dropped below the 40% margin, damaging the major parties’ majorities significantly. Conversely, the Liberal breakdown of 2015 led to massive increases in safeness which, however, were almost completely lopsided in favour of Labour. As a result, the Conservative safety pattern of 2015 remained almost exactly the same as in 2010, while Labour increased the share of very safe seats from 50 to 71%, simultaneously winning another seven seats. The 2017 and 2019 elections further accentuated this development with Labour adding more very safe seats, reaching strong to very strong margins 84 and 73%, while the Tories once again fell below 50%. Still, looking at the victory margins, we can see the flipside of the latest Labour support development, indicating the party’s tendency to rack up humongous amounts of surplus votes, instead of crucial support in seats it does not already hold.

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6.6 Structural Limitations—Regional Differences in Voter Mobilisation In this chapter, I will take a closer look at the question of how strongly regional electoral performances deviate from national ones. This should allow me to further establish the importance of floating voters and encapsulated party loyalists, or, in other words, the degree to which regional results are determined by campaign performance or long-term alignment. In order to illuminate this aspect of electoral availability, I will look at three indicators. My first indicator is the “bias reliability”,16 which describes the frequency by which a region delivers better or worse vote swings to a party compared to the national level. It shows me how reliably the electorate is positively or negatively predisposed towards a party. Continuous overperformances should reflect a general inclination of voters to prefer a specific party over its contenders, the phenomenon I described as long-term “alignment” or “party identification” earlier. Conversely, regular underperformances should indicate a non-situational “hostility” (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 38–40). As Caramani (2004: 31–43) argues, under a strongly functionalistic pattern of party competition, regional heterogeneity should be very low and regional swing votes therefore match the national averages. If this, however, is seldom the case, then we have a “territorialised” form of competition in which parties’ individual and short-term campaign performances are less important to individual voting decisions than long-term orientations bound to certain geographic characteristics or connected sociodemographic aspects. My second indicator is the “additive swing vote deviation”. This indicator measures the accumulated bias of a region’s electorate towards or against a party which is what Caramani (2004: 36–37) describes as the degree of “uniformity in response”. Deviations can technically result from two situations. In the case of a positive “additive swing vote deviation”, the regional swing vote could have been higher than the national one if the party achieved a positive national swing. If the party lost support in the country as a whole, the negative swing could also be lower than the national one, sometimes even a positive one. Negative “additive swing vote deviations” indicate the opposite result distribution. The theoretical reasoning behind it should be obvious: if the indicator revolves around zero, the region’s electorate neither favours nor opposes the party in question and the national campaign performance simply translates uniformly. The more the indicator deviates from zero, the more or less effective the party’s campaign efforts turn out to be, with success being determined by a general (negative or positive) predisposition of the regional electorate.

16 In this chapter, I will employ the public notion of the term “bias” rather than the strictly psephological one (for this see for example Johnston et al. 2001: 8–13). Accordingly, bias here has to be understood as an individual’s cognitive conscious or unconscious refusal to treat all parties as equivalent options when entering the decision-making process leading to the final voting decision (Adams 2001: 123 and 127–132).

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While my second indicator shows me the general amount of bias parties are experiencing, it does not tell me whether this bias is located in the “available” electorate or among “encapsulated” party loyalists (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 36). Conversely, my first indicator shows me how deep, in terms of resilience, resentment or benevolence goes and therefore how far parties can rely on it. It also helps me to determine which group of the electorate is actually the origin of the disposition towards a party, but this would require another set of data (Caramani 2004: 38–39). In order to get a reliable impression of the extent of floating voters, I calculated a third indicator. This third one is the “overall volatility” measured by simply adding up the values of the vote swings received by both parties over all elections in a specific region. They reflect the maximum number of floating voters relevant to the major parties because, in a maximum volatility scenario, all voters defecting Labour and the Tories would chose a third party instead of the other major party, while every additional vote gained by them would come from a third party, different from the ones receiving the major parties’ defectors, it therefore assumes the highest electoral instability reflecting Bartolini and Mair’s (1990: 43–45) pattern of “extensive competitiveness”. These results are then contrasted by the accumulated positive and negative swings of both parties in the region under consideration. They will give me a good impression of the general number of vote changes and how balanced they are between the parties. Accordingly, a strong prevalence of “available” voters should be indicated by a high volatility and fairly equal amounts of swings (positive and negative) of both parties (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 209–210). When looking at the specific regional outcomes for our indicators, four potential patterns of swing vote relations should generally indicate a non-arbitrary and reliable voter support structure: (1)

(2)

(3)

Additive swing vote deviation is (almost) always positive (or negative) for a party, no matter of the direction of the national swing, and bias reliability is very high: This indicates a long-term surge (or decline) in loyalist support because the swing changes are completely out of line with the evaluation of the party by the nationwide public. Additive swing vote deviation remains small over time and/or the direction is volatile (low bias reliability): This indicates a classical “campaign” region. The vote swings strongly depend on the individual party’s performance and show no sign of long-term structural alignments favouring or penalising a particular party. It is important to note that the direction of the deviation is generally irrelevant, but it should be volatile since this indicates the effectiveness of parties’ electoral campaigns (Caramani 2004: 39–40). Additive swing vote deviation is high and in accordance with the direction of the national vote swing (low bias reliability): This should be the case in regions with large numbers of swing voters. A high deviation in favour of the winning party should indicate that large voter segments are ready to swing with the political mood of the country in general. In such cases, the influence and importance of party loyalists is limited. Instead, the results heavily depend on

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(4)

6 The Development of Regional Competition

larger sways of volatile floating voters and therefore on the short-term aspects of the individual electoral campaign (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 38–46). Additive swing vote deviation tends to cancel out the national vote swing (high bias reliability): This means the strength and direction of the deviation depends on the national vote swing. The direction must be opposite to the national trend and the strength close to the UK-wide. In these cases, we have a highly divided electorate with a large overall proportion of party loyalists who vote irrespective of the general public’s mood changes. Here, the amount of loyalist support is extremely important for a party’s competition capabilities because the limited number of swing voters restricts the chances of overcoming the established distribution of support and therefore constituency majorities (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 194–195).

It is important to note that the described patterns only focus on the development of vote swings and not parties’ basic support (Caramani 2004: 36–42). Accordingly, they will only be applicable without modifications in cases where both parties initially held fairly comparable vote shares. In cases of very disparate initial vote share distributions, it will be necessary to modify the assessment accordingly. These patterns might also be modified in cases of elections with exceptional vote swings, like February 1974, 1979, 1997 and 2019. This might be necessary, if a party’s defeat is the result of an underlying creeping alienation of party loyalists. At a certain point, this frustration boils over, leading to droves of voters deserting the party at the same time, instead of a continuous depletion (see, for example, Ford and Goodwin 2014a: 126–138 and 169–175). Alternatively, in such elections a deviation from the national result could be far more positive for the losing party. This happens if the winning party’s success is based on maximising swing voter appeal. In such situations, regions with a “frozen” competition pattern (Type 4) should be able to resist the winning party’s landslide and therefore deliver much more favourable results to the losing party (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 336–343, 1999b: 392–405). Once again, there were different mathematical possibilities for calculating my indicators. Like before, I decided to use the unweighted constituency results to estimate the regional and national vote swings. However, I also checked my results against those using the weighted vote share, in order to control for distortive effects resulting from my calculation mechanism and will discuss eventual significant deviations. As illustrated, I split the indicator, estimating both the extent and reliability of the regional deviation from the national vote swing. Looking first at the reliability, we can see that Labour (Table 6.11) is quite disadvantaged. The only region that reliably delivers better results is the North West.17 For the Tories (Table 6.12), the situation is notably better, even though they cannot match the North West’s 17 overperformances, as three regions (the East, East Midlands and Wales) tend to help them regularly, including the highly important battleground of the East Midlands. The opposite numbers (reliably worse than national results) further underline the 17 I put the cut-off point for a stable bias occurrence or reliability at two-thirds of the elections being under- or overperformances, which in this case is 13 or more elections.

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Table 6.11 Regional deviations of the Labour vote Additive swing vote deviation

Average positive swing

Maximum positive swing

Additive positive swing

Average negative swing

Maximum negative swing

Additive negative swing

13.70

5.74

13.13

51.63

− 5.07

− 10.15

− 50.72

E

− 4.41

4.83

12.01

43.48

− 6.07

− 12.34

− 60.69

SE

− 1.73

4.05

10.44

37.76

− 5.10

− 10.22

− 52.28

SW

− 1.18

3.93

11.45

36.07

− 4.94

− 10.27

− 50.03

EM

− 4.55

4.36

10.20

40.08

− 5.66

− 10.13

− 57.41

WM

− 2.78

4.00

9.21

36.29

− 5.16

− 9.30

− 51.86

YH

0.77

4.43

9.77

39.92

− 5.19

− 10.49

− 51.94

NE

− 2.63

4.80

10.54

43.17

− 5.86

− 12.82

− 58.59

NW

15.48

5.14

10.04

46.25

− 4.36

− 8.39

− 43.56

W

− 4.26

4.44

12.03

39.98

− 5.70

− 11.88

− 57.02

S

− 13.37

0.19 (2.43)

7.66

30.94

− 2.78

− 17.76

− 57.10

GL

Overall volatility of support

Results above national average

Results below national average

Significant positive deviation

Insignificant deviation

GL

102.35

11

8

7

8

4

E

104.17

8

11

5

9

5

SE

90.03

9

10

4

9

6

SW

86.10

8

11

5

8

6

EM

97.49

6

13

2

13

4

WM

88.15

5

14

4

8

7

YH

91.86

12

7

4

12

3

NE

101.76

9

10

5

9

5

NW

89.81

17

2

6

12

1

W

97.00

11

8

6

7

6

S

88.04

9

10

6

6

Significant negative deviation

7

Conservatives’ advantage on this indicator. The only affected region, Scotland, has become an electoral wasteland for the party so that its regular underperformances are relatively meaningless and simply reemphasise the party’s long-term decline. Labour, on the other hand, is more disadvantaged concerning its two regions of underwhelming support. Since both Midlands have become more crucial in determining the national electoral outcome it is a pretty negative result for Labour to regularly underperform here. The numbers stay mostly the same if the weighted national vote swing is employed, with at most two elections per region switching between over- and underperformance. The only results showing serious deviations are those of Conservative

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Table 6.12 Regional deviations of the Conservative vote Additive swing vote deviation

Average positive swing

GL

− 11.07

2.25

E

10.66

4.04

SE

0.55

Maximum positive swing

Additive positive swing

Average negative swing

Maximum negative swing

Additive negative swing

8.84

28.41

− 3.65

− 14.35

− 38.80

9.37

43.23

− 3.23

− 12.85

− 31.89

3.45

9.27

35.47

− 3.70

− 12.90

− 34.24

SW

6.99

3.79

8.10

38.46

− 3.36

− 11.24

− 30.80

EM

13.90

4.19

8.04

44.56

− 3.04

− 11.64

− 29.99

WM

8.89

4.00

9.22

41.52

− 3.38

− 10.08

− 31.95

YH

1.43

3.13

8.21

33.53

− 3.24

− 9.43

− 31.43

NE NW W S

1.17

3.39

9.33

36.92

− 3.56

− 10.86

− 35.07

− 8.43

2.93

6.34

30.13

− 4.12

− 10.18

− 37.89

7.44

2.98

8.72

30.25

− 2.41

− 8.87

− 22.13

− 23.06

1.86

13.16

26.27

− 4.55

− 7.76

Overall volatility of support

Results above national average

Results below national average

Significant positive deviation

Insignificant deviation

− 48.65 Significant negative deviation

GL

67.22

7

12

4

10

5

E

75.12

13

6

9

8

2

SE

69.71

12

7

5

9

5

SW

69.25

11

8

6

11

2

EM

74.55

15

4

10

7

2

WM

73.47

11

8

5

12

2

YH

64.96

8

11

4

12

3

NE

71.99

11

8

6

7

6

NW

68.02

7

12

0

11

8

W

52.38

13

6

4

13

2

S

74.92

4

15

4

3

12

support in Yorkshire and the Humber (flipping from 8:11 negative to 11:8 positive). These differences originate from the very small positive bias the Tories hold under the weighted calculations, which reverses once the size of the voting population is no longer accounted for. This indicates that the party tends to increase its vote share slightly disproportional in constituencies where larger numbers of people vote. In the next step, I will look more closely at the amount of bias the parties are receiving. To do this, I first summed up the regional results’ deviation of all elections to acquire the “additive swing vote deviation” and then assigned the individual election’s deviations to three different categories. The first category includes significant overperformances reflected by a margin of more than one percentage point above

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the national vote swing. The second category comprises of all results at least 1% lower than the national average. The third category reflects all results between these margins and thus includes all cases without a significant bias. This second step is necessary to control for excessive overperformances in individual elections. For the Tories, six regions hold interesting results. The most pronounced is clearly the Scottish result, delivering a stunning −23.1% net bias against the party. But, the North West and London also show not be underestimated biases of −8.4 and −11.1%. Positive developments can be found in the East, the West Midlands and the East Midlands, with +10.7, +8.9 and +13.9% biases, respectively. Labour on the other hand scores more distinct positive numbers and less pronounced negative biases. The party manages very strong showings in the North West and London with +15.5 and +13.7%. Conversely, the worst bias Labour experiences is the −13.4 in Scotland, which is over 40% lower than the Conservatives’ Scottish numbers.18 When looking at the strength of individual biases, in general, the majority of cases lie in the middle category, even for regions that display a stable bias frequency towards a single party. It is, however, important to note that the use of the unweighted vote swing provides a “harder” test for the indicator and therefore fewer significant deviations from the national swing than a weighted vote swing because a region’s constituencies have to score more uniform results to display larger biases. In case of a weighted calculation, it is enough for a party to perform better in more populous or higher turnout areas (Johnston et al. 2001: 46–47). Despite the majority of cases displaying insignificant biases, we can see some confirmation of our observations for the first indicator dimension. The Tories score a relevant number (at least one-third of all researched elections or seven cases) of strong overperformances in two regions (East, East Midlands), both of them also displaying a high general reliability. Again, the East Midlands show a very favourable pattern, delivering significantly lower than average results on only two occasions but very strong ones for over half of all elections. On the negative side, Scotland not only guarantees weak results but also with a large extent, giving the Tories considerably worse vote swings on twelve occasions. In addition, one of the regions with a reliable positive bias (Wales) falls flat when looking at the bias extent. Also, reasserted are our findings for the North West, which always denied the Conservatives a better than average performance and instead provided them with disproportionally weak results in eight cases. One last observation concerning the Tories that meets the eye is the high concentration of insignificant vote swings deviations in certain regions. In three regions (Wales, West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber), the Tory results are very often in line with their national vote swing, showing no sign of electoral advantage or disadvantage. For Labour, the situation is quite different. The only region that delivers reliable positive results, the North West, mostly falls flat at closer inspection. Although it

18 It is necessary to mention that the Scottish numbers were strongly influenced by the 2017 election. The scores would have been −30.3 for the Conservatives and -7 for Labour without this exceptional election.

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almost never delivers highly negative outcomes, most positive results are insignificant. Mostly, the same is true for those regions that come close to a reliable bias. Therefore, Yorkshire displays comparable properties once the strength of bias is controlled for. The slight bias indicated for Wales turns out to be practically meaningless with a very balanced distribution of deviations. Only London shows a somewhat meaningful bias towards Labour which is however limited by its very low reliability. The most striking pattern of Labour’s results is its high volatility. Accordingly, insignificant deviations typically make up only the plurality of cases with deviating results being equally distributed between over- and underperformances (East, South East, South West, North East, Wales, Scotland). It is worrying for the party that even regions of longstanding and strong Labour support, like Scotland, Wales and the North East, plus to some degree London, display neither a significant bias towards the party nor a mentionable encapsulation of the electorate. On the positive side, no region constantly punishes the party as Scotland penalises the Tories. The two cases (West Midlands, Scotland) with at least one-third of substantial underperformances are borderline cases (only the West Midlands display some clearer signs of an antiLabour bias) with mostly insignificant biases and at worst a mediocre reliability of negative returns. Accordingly, although the results point in a negative direction, their overall impact is not devastating. In summary, the bias pattern for the Tories is marked by a general uniformity with the national vote, which is, however, broken by exceptional biases in some selected regions. These few biases are both more reliable and crippling/advantageous than Labour’s, providing the party with a very slight overall edge, since the only biases that are both strongly negative and fairly reliable are located in regions of longterm decline that have little potential to further hurt the Conservatives because they have already hit rock-bottom. Labour’s pattern reveals a slightly higher degree of unpredictability. Accordingly, the party secures no reliable and high positive biases in any region. On the upside, the few reliably disadvantaging biases in the West and East Midlands are at best of mediocre effect. In order to advance my analysis of the support bias, I will now try to estimate the relative importance of floating voters and committed party loyalists by looking more closely at the regional volatility. In general, regional volatility displays a fairly balanced picture. It ranges from 179% points (or 9.4% on average) in the East, down to 149 (or 7.9% on average) in Wales. Although the differences are not overwhelming, taken together with our other results they should give us a sufficient impression of the voter type distribution. The capital displays the fourth highest volatility, and the distribution between the parties shows that Labour provides a clearly larger portion of vote changes than the Tories (60.4%). This could indicate a significant long-term development (either gaining or losing party loyalists), but we already know that this has not been consistently documented by earlier indicators. The fact that Labour’s overall equation of positive and negative swings amounts to +0.9% compared to the Conservatives’ net swing of −10.4% shows a certain weakness of the Tories in London since their swings are considerably smaller and far more negative than Labour’s. However, this also makes clear that Labour’s larger swings are characterised by high volatility

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instead of a long-term support surge. The final evaluation of the capital’s support structure remains difficult. The indicators analysed in this chapter denote a development very close to that of the North West, a region of increasing single-party domination. However, there are two factors that speak against this assessment. First, the distribution of electoral results in the capital has clearly shown that there are distinct phases of single-party domination, instead of a sustained long-term surge. Second, the main difference between the North West and London lies in the far higher accumulated negative swing against Labour in the capital. In a region of a long-term support gain, this number should be lower as well as the overall volatility of the Labour vote. Instead, the massive vote gains seem to be balanced by a relatively low reliability which is contradictory to the most important characteristic of a long-term vote surge. The results in the East are quite comparable to London but in favour of the opposite party. Labour again accounts for a larger part of the vote changes (58%), but this time in a negative fashion. The party’s negative swing is 17.2% points higher than its positive swing, while the Conservatives have a solid positive net swing of 11.3% points. The very high overall volatility might indicate a highly competitive region, but when looking closer at the Conservatives’ results, we can see that it points to the exact opposite. The Tories’ two major defeats in February 1974 and 1997 amount to 76% of their negative swing, clearly showing that they almost never lost mentionable support, have been riding on a long-term surge of loyalist support and floating voters are practically meaningless to the region’s competition situation. The South East shows that, as in the previous cases, about the same amount of the volatility is caused by Labour. While the Conservatives’ net swing is almost balanced, Labour has a negative swing that is 14.5% higher than its positive. The situation is therefore fairly close to the East. However, the relevance of swing voters is slightly higher, despite the significantly lower volatility, since the swings against the Tories are less concentrated on individual elections. The South West also follows the general pattern of the East and South East, but with a low volatility and an average bias in favour of the Tories. Accordingly, the Conservatives have a moderate positive swing distribution of +7.7%, while Labour ends up with a negative swing that is 14 percentage points higher than the positive. With average peak results, we can say that the South West has an “available” electorate of mediocre importance, despite its comparatively low overall volatility, that is slightly biased against Labour but not overwhelmingly in favour of the Conservatives. The East Midlands display results somewhere between a classical battleground region and a long-term surge of loyalist support by a single party. As already suspected, the region shows the third highest electoral volatility, indicating a classical battleground, and a distribution pattern fairly close to those of other regions with a high volatility. Labour is again responsible for a slightly larger amount of swing, but smaller than for the southern regions and the party’s net swing is highly negative (−17.3%). The Tories, on the other hand, have a very small accumulated negative swing and therefore reach a very positive net result of +14.6%. All in all, these numbers show that the Conservatives profit strongly from the increase in volatility, while Labour is highly disadvantaged by it with the difference between

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both parties’ negative swings being a whopping 27.4 points. As a consequence of the 2017 and 2019 elections, the East Midlands have now overtaken the traditional Tory strongholds of the East and South East in terms of pro-Conservative bias. However, this is a pretty recent phenomenon, and previous indicators showed that Tory support in the region still remains vulnerable enough to enable major seat swings in favour of Labour. Accordingly, I conclude that the East Midlands were the region with perhaps the largest and most crucial “available” electorate in the UK, although it is also important to note that the region’s swing voters were more volatile than London’s “available” electorate, which only tends to actually swing under rare circumstances. Despite this, the significant pro-Tory bias and their prolonged vote surge indicate that the region is turning into another Conservative stronghold unless Labour quickly finds a suitable counter-strategy. The West Midlands exhibit a surprisingly mediocre volatility for the fairly high degree of competitiveness we have observed for previous indicators, which also points towards a general advantage of the Tories. Again, Labour’s negative and positive swing distribution is moderately to highly disparate (−15.6%) while it is the other way around for the Conservatives (+9.6%). What spells particular trouble for Labour is its very low positive swing. It is now the party’s third lowest regional swing, while it is the third highest positive swing for the Tories strongly resembling those of southern England. This indicates that Labour not only lost considerably more support in the region than the Conservatives, but also that it has some problems securing new and “available” voters. The main reasons why the West Midlands remain more competitive than its eastern counterpart seem to, counterintutively, lie in its relatively small “available” electorate and the fact that Labour initially held a larger number of seats than the Conservatives. Yorkshire and the Humber lies in the lower spectrum of overall volatility. Although Labour voters are responsible for a larger number of vote changes, both parties score net swings at the lower end of their respective ranges. This fairly balanced development explains why Labour profited to a larger degree from the slightly increasing volatility. Since its majority and minority vote shares were already higher than the Conservatives’ support and it held a significant majority of the region’s seats, coupled with a very low number of swing voters, the Tories had to lose out at a considerably lower margin (which they did not) in order to profit from Labour’s decline. In summary, the region’s results remain largely determined by older long-term structures of support. Still, the 2019 shellshock spells trouble for Labour should it turn out to be a sign of the weakening of old party loyalties. The North East holds some interesting results concerning regional volatility. It shows a surprisingly high volatility (the second highest of all regions) which is clearly lopsided with Labour accounting for around 59% of it. Again, in comparison its net swing turns out to be moderately negative. More surprisingly, the Tories also score a comparatively mediocre net swing and volatility although the region has been one of considerable Conservative weakness. However, this development underlines why the North East continues to hold hardly any competition potential despite its mentionable number of swing voters. The fact that the Conservatives lost mostly

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comparable amounts of support made it practically impossible for them to secure any seats in a region with numerous and very safe Labour strongholds. The North West reflects our earlier observations of a general development in favour of Labour. It is one of only two regions displaying a positive net swing towards the party coupled with a mediocre overall volatility and a very low accumulated negative swing. Conversely, the Tories score their third worst net swing with a −7.6% swing. With Labour being responsible for a slightly larger number of vote changes and its positive net balance, the party was able to profit from the decline of the Conservatives. Accordingly, the North West’s numbers currently point to a high significance of committed party loyalists and a neglectable role of the “available” electorate. Wales remains an anchor of stability in British politics, at least along this chapter’s indicators. It displays the lowest number of vote changes in the whole UK and surprisingly shows a pattern somewhat comparable to those in the southern regions (Curtice and Steed 1999b: 403). Accordingly, the Tories hold a moderate to fairly high positive net swing (+8.2%), although their accumulated swing is far lower than for any other region, while Labour’s results are quite negative, with its vote losses outnumbering its gains by 17 percentage points. While these numbers seem to contradict the region’s general uncompetitiveness, it becomes more obvious once we take my earlier indicators into account. Although Labour lost massively, the vast amount of former Labour voters never considered the Tories as an option. Accordingly, the overwhelming majority of the “available” electorate decided to support third parties which, coupled with Labour’s initial extreme dominance, allowed the party to retain its grip, in terms of seat returns, on the region. Scotland finally displays some interesting results that point to a significant decline of both major parties. The overall amount of vote swings is just mediocre despite the large vote losses of both parties and highly negative net results for Labour and the Tories. Both parties score a negative swing that is 85% higher than their respective vote gains. As we have already seen, the Conservatives’ decline in the region was a more prolonged and gradual one, while Labour faced fewer but more severe defeats. In summary, the region had never been characterised by a huge “available” electorate or high volatility. A large part of the vote changes took place in upset elections and were usually directed against both major parties. Still, the events of 2015, 2017 and 2019 might point to a general increase in volatility although this would hardly be of any help to the two major parties considering how heavily have suffered in the region so far (Tronconi 2006: 160). Having analysed my three indicators estimating the performance differences between the regions, I will now summarise my major results before moving on to calculating the competitiveness potentials of the UK party system. The north of England clearly displayed the strongest pro-Labour bias in the country. The accumulated swing vote deviations and the swing vote reliabilities both count in favour of the party, but only the North West shows a strong enough bias to provide Labour with a reliable (although in its extent rather mediocre) electoral advantage, meanwhile the other two regions’ biases are converging around zero. Accordingly, Yorkshire with its quite low additive overall swing and balanced additive swing vote deviations

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for both parties comes closest to pattern 4 of all regions. The North East displays a mixture of the second and the first pattern. As we saw, Labour has been in some longterm decline in the region, but the region’s just average additive swing vote deviation makes clear that these losses are far more in line with the national developments than in Scotland or Wales. Also, Labour’s fairly good vote gain numbers underline that despite its descent the party still remains able to mobilise a good amount of swing voters thereby justifying a mixed classification between patterns 1 and 2. Finally, the North West shows the typical pattern of a long-term vote surge, delivering fairly reliable, although often very low, additional vote gains (pattern 1). The south shows no strong bias against or in favour of the Labour Party, which is somehow surprising, having already seen so many indicators going against it. The number of occasions of considerably better or worse vote swings than nationwide is only slightly skewed in a negative direction and the overall extent of the bias is almost negligible. There is a certain difference between the East and the other two regions. It shows remarkably higher numbers on all swing vote indicators while the other two display fairly low results even compared to the rest of the kingdom. This indicates that the two most southern regions are closer to patterns 4 and 2, while the East displays a mixture of patterns 1 and 3. Still, since Labour’s loyalist base is now so weak in the south these patterns hardly make any difference for party competition. The numbers for the Midlands have started to diverge more significantly from each other over the latest elections. While the additive swing vote deviations are fairly close and display a small negative bias, its extent as well as the accumulated swings deviates to a mentionable degree. Therefore, the East Midlands display the highest amount of insignificant swing vote deviations and somewhat higher accumulated swings, while the West Midlands have smaller accumulated swings and show a clearly higher prevalence of significant swing vote deviations (which are tilted towards underperformances). This tells me that, at least for these indicators, the East Midlands represent a classical “campaign” region since the swing is usually close to the national one and the accumulated swings are moderately high (pattern 2). The West Midlands on the other hand are less campaign sensitive, at least for the Labour Party, instead the region seems to have a higher number of committed loyalists combined with a slight general bias against Labour. Since the fairly low but stable deviations are coupled with quite low accumulated swings, we see a greater prominence of the fourth pattern with some consistent bias against Labour rather than the second. All in all, this is rather bad news for the party since it cannot expect large seat gains in the south and already controls too many constituencies in the north and Wales to create the gains necessary to replace its Scottish losses and accumulate enough English seats to overtake the Tories. Accordingly, its best chance to secure a parliamentary majority lies in scrapping together seats in the (at least once) fairly balanced and competitive Midlands. This, however, is not made easier if the regions are slightly biased against the party and show little to no inclination to overperform. London’s results are to some degree problematic. The region increasingly displays the support pattern of a traditional Labour stronghold, and we already know that it is not very campaign sensitive in the sense that its results are detached from the national electoral outcome. Despite that the capital still scores the third highest overall swing

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vote with Labour accounting for a significantly larger proportion than the Tories. In addition, there is almost no difference between Labour’s accumulated positive and negative swing vote which underlines that in the long run, irrespective of the large bias towards the party, it still loses support at the same level as it gains it. This speaks against the first pattern and rather for the third pattern despite its outcome now often being detached from the rest of the country (Denver 2018: 17). Conversely, the results during the 2010s have shifted the bias extent and reliability clearly in favour of the first pattern. In summary, the capital lies somewhere between the first and third patterns. However, since it has also swung decisively in favour of the Tories in the past, it is too early to conclude that it is becoming a reliable Labour stronghold. It rather seems that it now contains a very significant number of potential swing voters who are strongly biased in Labour’s favour but might be convinced by the Conservatives under certain circumstances. The results for the Celtic fringe offer some surprising observations because Labour fared much worse than previous indicators might have suggested. Even though Wales and Scotland had clearly been Labour strongholds, the vote swing patterns show no structural advantages at all. The bias reliability is close to being equal and therefore highly unreliable, further supported by the perfect balance of the bias extent indicator for both regions. Finally, the fairly negative accumulated swing vote in case of Wales and highly negative one in case of Scotland indicate that, measured over 70 years, the regions’ performance developments were very unfavourable compared to the party’s strong baseline support.19 While Labour holds, and in the case of Scotland held, a very high number of party loyalists in the regions, the small numbers of swing voters seemed far more reluctant to support the party. Accordingly, the patterns for the swing vote developments almost perfectly resemble the second one, albeit being overlaid by a highly skewed distribution of loyalist support and in contrast to earlier indications of the fourth pattern. Since the patterns of support for the Conservatives are far more uniform, despite their generally skewed patterns of seat returns, I will limit my remarks to significant deviations from our observations for Labour. There are only two regions that show a mentionable vote swing bias towards the Conservatives. The East has a +10.7% net swing deviation and delivered better swings on all but six occasions. I can therefore say that the Tories have not only a fairly large and faithful base of loyalists but also a strong appeal among potential floating voters. The interesting point about the situations in which swings turned out worse is the average vote share the Conservatives held in the East. Five of the six setbacks took place when the party secured a regional vote share of at least 52%, which somehow indicates that, at this point, the proportion of non-loyalists within their electorate is so high that it becomes difficult to maintain stable support in cases of national vote losses or to gain significant new support in cases of national success. Combining this information with our earlier observations, 19 It

is important to note that the disastrous performance in Scotland in 2015 (a 19.1% worse swing vote than UK-wide) does not seriously distort the general trend if we consider that it only outweighs Labour’s two exceptional vote surges in 1979 and 2010 (an accumulated 17.3% better swing than nationally).

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I can say that the East belongs to the first category with some far less prominent additional indications of the third pattern. The second positive case is the East Midlands displaying a bias reliability and accumulated net swing even better than for the East. Accordingly, the party always overperformed in the region, except in October 1974, 1992, 1997 and 2005. Although the outcomes of these elections were very different, they have one feature in common: all of these weaker performances happened when the party lost support in the region, indicating that when the Tories are on a winning streak their campaign machine strongly delivers, but when they are unpopular there is a chance that they end up even worse than nationally. The fact that three underperformances took place in the 1990s and 2000s also suggests that, although the party’s general standing in the region has improved, this came at the expense of a lower reliability of positive results. Therefore, the region has shifted closer towards the third pattern, delivering (fairly) more decisive results based on larger turnovers of swing voters than immediately after the war. However, the numbers presented here also indicate that the region’s outcome is increasingly decoupled from the national trend. In summary, this points to a combination of patterns 1 and 3 with the Tories so far not being able to turn the region into a reliable stronghold. The opposite is true for Scotland and the North West, which exhibit a clear decline in both loyalist support base and swing voter mobilisation. The only times the Tories fared better in Scotland than the rest of the country was when they suffered a fall in their national vote share (in February 1974, 1992 and 1997).20 In the North West, the negative net swing is far lower, and the party fared “only” worse in two-thirds of the elections. The few, more encouraging results cluster around the serious defeats of February 1974 and 1997. This is understandable if one looks at the general Conservative support level in the region. In the 1950s, the Tories had very strong support in the North West, scoring considerably higher vote shares than in the Midlands or the neighbouring North East and Yorkshire. This initial support must have come largely from loyalists because otherwise the party would not have shown such weak swing performances at the time. However, the number of these strong supporters eroded over the 1950s and 1960s so that the Tories started to consistently score lower swings than in the UK as a whole. But when faced with serious setbacks, their loyalist base was strong and large enough to dampen the vote losses and carry on less harmed than in other, more competitive regions. However, even though the results are a bit less severe the region displays, like Scotland, the typical features of pattern 1.

20 This

pattern was obviously defied in 2017 (for reasons I already laid out).

Chapter 7

Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

7.1 Still Enough—Competition Under Exceptional Mobilisation In this chapter, I will turn to the final step of assessing the party competition potentials of both major parties. I will do so by testing several electoral outcome scenarios to (1) measure changes in seat turnovers over time and (2) establish a result base to evaluate the different parties’ chances of winning majorities in the future. In general, I will assess the competition potentials by looking at how the actual outcomes of elections would have changed following “typical” party performances and the exhaustion of the whole “available” electorate. This will not be entirely different from the seat prediction models used in pre-election polling, but instead of national uniform swings or sociodemographic group-specific swings, I am going to calculate four different swing scenarios independently for every region based on the actual results of the 20 researched elections. These four swings are: (1) the maximum regional swing towards the individual party, (2) the maximum regional swing against the individual party, (3) the average regional swing towards the individual party and (4) the average regional swing against the individual party. These vote swings were used to readjust the actual electoral results of the two major parties and afterwards I calculated the seat changes under the new vote distributions. As I have indicated before, it is not my goal to “predict” real-world changes in voting behaviour and how they would accurately translate into specific seat flips, such analyses typically discount the independent explanatory value of the regions because it is considerably lower than traditional sociodemographic indicators (Johnston et al. 2005). Therefore, my calculations do not strive to match the accuracy of typical seat predictions based on pre-election polling. Instead, my calculated vote changes will be based on the actual results scored by the British parties in the past. Such an assessment will allow me to illuminate whether the general competitiveness of the party system (its “average” and maximum potential) is sufficiently elastic for

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_7

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the electoral system to produce frequent government changes and provide clear cut majorities under optimal vote swing conditions.1 This, however, requires me to lay out how and why I have chosen the specific swings used for my notional calculations. First, I decided for a procedure in accordance with the focus of my study by using territory-specific vote swings based on the parties’ electoral performances in the different regions (calculated in Chap. 6.6) since the situation of party competition in the regions can be quite disparate. Second, I had to decide whether to use the absolute or relative changes in the vote. Again, I opted not to weight vote swings by the number of votes cast. This procedure generally adds more electoral significance to constituencies with smaller electorates and/or low turnout and thereby tends to overestimate mobilisation power (Johnston et al. 2001: 41–42 and 46–47), but is also more sensitive to the general structure of support and electoral mobilisation than a weighted swing. Third, I implemented the calculated swings as uniform swings between both major parties. While this was a realistic phenomenon in some elections of the 1950s, it is a highly hypothetical scenario under today’s increasingly diverse party system. If this procedure is so obviously detached from electoral reality, why have I decided to adopt it anyway? The main reason lies in my general and specific research interests. While I generally want to assess how prone the political system is to institutional failures, at this point I want to specifically investigate how strongly the territorialisation of party support has turned into a liability to the system of government. As I have pointed out earlier, the electoral system has the specific purpose of ensuring stable parliamentary majorities as well as regular majority turnovers, but depends in its workability on the patterns of electoral support and vote swings provided by party competition. It is quite obvious that the existence and electoral success of third parties is in general detrimental to the goal of securing clear parliamentary majorities because every seat won by them increases the likelihood of a hung parliament (Curtice 2010a: 627–629, 2015b: 34–39). Accordingly, any calculation recognising and implementing changes in the third-party vote will tend to, at least at some point, increase the parliamentary representation of third parties, unless they constantly lose votes over time. It would also dampen the general likelihood of seat turnovers because the most common competition scenario in individual constituencies remains the Labour-Conservative contest (Curtice et al. 2010: 397; Johnston et al. 2017: 64). Since the uniformity of the swing between first- and second-place contenders determines the elasticity of the electoral systems’ vote:seat translation, the use of a uniform swing between Labour and the Tories maximises the 1 There

is one important aspect in which I decided against assuming an application maximising competition elasticity, the distribution of vote swings in individual constituencies. It is fairly obvious that seat turnovers would be maximised if vote swings only took place in the constituencies with the lowest majorities and only to the extent necessary to flip them (Johnston et al. 2001: 13-17). This is extremely unrealistic since parties would need to have full control over the distribution of their vote gains. In addition, this exercise would create a purely situational instead of a strategical analysis because calculating the vote gain pattern depending on how it would be most effective under the current vote distribution would give complete precedence of individual campaign performances over long-term limits of mobilisation and support distribution.

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FPTP’s ability to produce seat changes. Therefore, the elimination of the volatility of the third-party vote maximises the ability of the electoral system to “manufacture” clear majorities and puts a stronger test on the probability of electoral system failures. I will limit my calculations to applying positive swings in cases where the party under consideration achieved no absolute majority. Likewise, I will only apply negative swings in cases where the party has secured an absolute majority or no party achieved a majority. This handling will lead to two different calculations for each election and each type of swing (maximum or average). Of particular interest will be the three elections of February 1974, 2010 and 2017 as none of the parties managed to win an outright majority. In these cases, I will test both positive and both negative swings for the two parties. The notional election results will be labelled according to the actual elections on which they are based. This means it is necessary to contrast, for example, the notional “results based on 1966” with the actual result of 1970 since 1970 was the “real” election for which the outcome was based on the results of 1966. The critical lynchpin for classifying my results will be whether the tested swings are strong enough to change the majorities in the HoC. While it is fairly predictable that the maximum swing towards or against a party will almost always deliver a success if the initial voting result was fairly tight,2 it is far more insightful to see whether it guarantees the same in very disparate situations, while the same applies to average swings in close elections. I will also look more closely at the different regions to identify potential long-term trends in nominal seat returns. In a last step, I will further discuss whether and how the majority situation in England would change under the notional results since this is, as I have argued earlier, a crucial aspect of British party competition as long as the devolution question or territorial government structure in general remains unsettled. Maximum swing votes against the parties: Table 7.1 displays Labour’s seat returns assuming a maximum swing against the Tories. The first quite obvious observation is that the Tories would have been (often soundly) defeated by Labour under the notional vote distributions on every occasion except one. The more interesting point is therefore the development of these majorities for Labour, and minorities for the Tories, instead of their frequency. Until the February 1974 election, notional Tory returns would have been on average around 200 seats lower than under the actual election outcomes, but the differences declined significantly afterwards. From 1979 to 2017, they amounted to only 142 seats. By looking at the regional distribution of the returns, we can also easily identify the reason for this decay in the massive decline of Labour support in the south of England coupled with the increasing safeness of Tory-held seats in these three regions. Turning back to Labour’s notional results, we can quickly see that it would have managed to secure clear majorities in almost every election scenario although the decisiveness has considerably declined. Until the Thatcher era, Labour would have always scored over 450 seats under a landslide against the Conservatives (at an 2 Bingham

Powell (2000: 10) shows that a loss of over 5% is already large enough to displace the whole government in almost half of all cases, irrespective of the voting system.

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7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

Table 7.1 Labour seat returns under a maximum swing against the Conservatives 1951

1955

1959

1970

Feb 1974

1979

1983

1987

1992

2010

2015

2017

2019

GL

90

84

79

90

83

73

55

53

60

56

59

64

62

E

36

40

39

40

43

24

16

14

20

14

19

27

13

SE

35

35

31

33

41

19

10

10

17

22

22

30

18

SW

32

30

28

26

26

13

7

9

14

14

14

21

14

EM

38

37

37

34

34

28

24

23

29

29

27

30

21

WM

42

41

38

41

49

42

31

35

45

40

37

39

25

YH

45

41

42

44

43

41

38

39

44

42

43

44

40

NE

31

29

27

30

30

30

28

28

28

26

27

28

26

NW

64

58

60

70

70

64

56

62

62

62

62

65

63

W

31

29

30

34

34

29

27

29

32

33

33

35

32

S

46

44

44

52

49

52

50

54

55

44

2

27

4

England

413 (254)

395 (256)

381 (256)

408 (256)

419 (259)

334 (259)

265 (262)

273 (262)

319 (263)

305 (267)

310 (267)

348 (267)

282 (267)

UK

490 (313)

468 (316)

455 (316)

494 (316)

502 (318)

415 (318)

342 (326)

356 (326)

406 (326)

382 (326)

345 (326)

410 (326)

318 (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

average of 482), but since 1979 the numbers would have hardly ever exceeded 400, reaching an average of just 380 (excluding the special result based on the latest election). Such a decline of 100 seats should be deeply worrying for the party. Although Labour would have only lost a single election, majorities were down to 30 seats or less on three occasions (1983, 1987 and 2015), hardly resembling decisive knockouts. Mirroring the strengths of the Tories, Labour’s major weaknesses can be found in the south of England. Even under these optimal circumstances, the party would almost always fail to secure more than 20 seats in the South West and the East, while barely crossing this threshold in the South East. In addition, today Labour would only be able to pick up around ten seats less than in the post-war period in the East Midlands. Another problem can be observed in London. Irrespective of the expansion of the party’s support in the capital, the notional results suggest that the positive outcome of this development is very limited. Labour struggles to extract the same ratio of seats from the capital as it did in the 1950s and 1970s. In 1970, it would have won a stunning 90 out of 92 seats, but today the party would only secure between 70 and 80% of the capital’s seats, instead of almost 100. The last point to note is that there is almost no positive long-term regional development for Labour. The only mentionable increase in seat returns took place in Scotland. However, the Scottish seat reduction of 2005 and the nationalist surge of 2015 annihilated this small improvement. Obviously, the results for the latest election deserve some special considerations. To understand the underlying factors of Labour’s potential defeat (and current support structure problems), it is instructive to contrast the outcome with the (fairly) comparable notional result based on the 2015 election. Most of the regional numbers are within a margin of four or less seats with the exception of three regions: the East and

7.1 Still Enough—Competition Under Exceptional Mobilisation

131

both Midlands. It is especially the devastating collapse of the Labour vote in the West Midlands that kills the party’s prospects of securing a majority. The party’s minority shares in the Midlands have now fallen to such abysmal levels that it is no longer competitive in most constituencies even under the most favourable campaign conditions. But what should be truly worrying for Labour is that this is not the outcome of just one exceptional election, but rather of its creeping long-term decline in both Midlands. As long as Labour is unable to find a strategy to reverse this, it seems almost certainly doomed to become a long-term minority party. Before moving to the analysis of major landslides against Labour, we have to look at the majority situation in England. Labour’s initial returns in England would have been strong, always delivering clear-cut majorities. But starting in 1983 the situation became more worrying. Here the party’s mediocre UK-wide majority would have translated into a wafer-thin English majority of just four under the notional results. The 1987 numbers would have been slightly better, but also only yielding a mediocre majority of twelve. This indicates that Labour might even struggle to secure an English majority under a huge vote swing should a third party deliver a strong performance. Turning now to the scenario of an unpreceded punishment of Labour, Table 7.2 shows us the respective seat returns for the Conservative Party. Compared to the numbers for the Labour Party, Tory victories would be clearly less decisive. However, the decline of Tory seat returns over time would also be less pronounced than Labour’s. Their average from 1950 to October 1974 would have been 455 Table 7.2 Conservative seat returns under a maximum swing against Labour

GL

1950

1964

1966

Feb 1974

Oct 1974

1997

2001

2005

2010

2017

73

73

66

64

59

34

27

41

43

31

E

37

40

39

42

42

52

52

53

55

54

SE

60

61

60

69

70

74

73

77

80

79

SW

41

42

41

43

41

38

37

41

46

50

EM

28

33

28

35

33

25

29

31

39

39

WM

31

45

37

39

34

27

31

37

50

47

YH

35

34

29

34

30

22

24

23

35

29

NE

16

17

13

19

14

4

5

4

12

17

NW

68

60

48

52

45

19

25

30

41

37

W

13

14

14

16

13

9

11

17

21

20

S

68

57

54

61

46

25

23

23

24

38

England

389 (254)

405 (256)

361 (256)

397 (259)

368 (259)

295 (265)

303 (265)

337 (265)

401 (267)

383 (267)

UK

470 (313)

476 (316)

429 (316)

474 (318)

427 (318)

329 (330)

337 (330)

377 (324)

446 (326)

441 (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

132

7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

compared to 386 seats for the time afterwards, reflecting a fall of about 70 seats compared to Labour’s over 100. Accordingly, today both parties would have equal potential seat returns in cases of unprecedented landslides, indicating a complete erosion of Labour’s initial advantage. Looking at the regional developments, we find some positive and some negative patterns for the Conservatives. The negative cases are clearly Scotland, the North West and the North East. While the Tories would have swept Scotland in elections based on the 1950 and February 1974 results, in the 1990s they would have barely managed to secure a meagre third of its seats and just less than half after the Scottish seat reduction. The North Eastern trend is fairly limited in extent but mentionable because of the region’s results for the other competition indicators. The Conservatives had the potential to swing half of the region’s constituencies until the 1970s, a significant amount compared to its small support base. This amount, however, practically dissolved during the New Labour era, although the latest two elections underline Labour’s increasing vulnerability in the region. The most worrying development for the Conservatives is clearly the North West. Until 1974, the Tories scored an average notional return of 55, while the post-1980s number was just 30. Conversely, notional results were fairly stable over time in the three southern regions of England simply because the strong underlying Tory support remained stable or sometimes even increased until the 2000s. Therefore, the Conservatives would have won almost all seats in the earliest and the latest elections, with small exceptions for the South West. The reason for this becomes obvious if we consider Labour’s support in the region. Today, Labour’s vote shares in the South West are so low that the notional vote swings often outnumber them in individual constituencies. As a result, my calculated swing towards the Tories is, in a number of cases, capped at a point at which it remains too low to outmatch the LibDem vote. Interestingly, on a closer look the Greater London trend turns out to be misleading. While the absolute numbers suggest a considerable decline, this is not the case. If we take the region’s constituency reductions until the 2000s into account, we end up with almost exactly the same seat ratios in the earliest and most recent phase. The party’s majority situation in England can be quickly summarised. Irrespective, of how the Tories would have fared in the UK, they would never come close to losing their English majority. Accordingly, and proving my point made in Chap. 6.2, the major difference between both parties, concerning seat returns, lies in the ability to secure UK-wide and English majorities. While the Tories clearly have an edge in ensuring a commanding position in England, Labour had an advantage in securing UK-wide majorities. However, Labour’s UK-wide advantage has evaporated since the end of the 1970s and eventual landslides would currently end in far more equal national results than 70 year ago (Curtice 2017, 2015a; Johnston et al. 2017; Harrop 2015). Maximum swing votes towards the parties: Next, I will look at the maximum positive swing, meaning the highest swing ever experienced towards a party. The calculated results for these swings have been smaller

7.1 Still Enough—Competition Under Exceptional Mobilisation

133

than those for the negative ones and are therefore a more realistic indicator of the actual maximum number of floating voters an individual party can mobilise. I start with the maximum positive swing towards Labour (Table 7.3) since its swings are more decisive than those for the Tories. As suspected, Labour’s seat returns ended up broadly the same as under a landslide against the Tories. In general, they would have been around 10 seats lower than under the previous scenario. Looking at the regional and temporal location of major differences, we can quickly identify the South East as the major source of these small deviations. The region alone accounts for 37% of the overall and 63% of the positive difference between both scenarios, although it just represents 4.8% of all constituencies won by Labour. This tells us that the Tories hold a significant number of seats by margins of slightly above 20% (Labour’s strongest swing in the region had been 10.4%) which would swing should Labour ever manage to top their currently best performance in the South East. From the temporal perspective, the first period is characterised by larger differences between both calculations, either indicating a growth of Conservative support in the second period or a shift in the patterns of Labour support. For the second case to be true, Labour voters must have shifted from a rather uniform distribution among the majority of constituencies to a more skewed one. My previous indicators for the South East implicate that the second option carries more explanatory weight. Accordingly, today’s considerably lower vote shares and partly more skewed distribution would allow the party to claim a small number of seats by moderate to high swings but also bar it from making significant gains, unless the swing reaches unprecedented levels. As we have seen already, the decisiveness of Labour’s victories significantly changes between the pre-Thatcher era and the time afterwards. Again, Labour would have scored over 400 seats in all notional elections until 1979 and over 470 on Table 7.3 Labour seat returns under a maximum swing towards Labour 1951

1955

1959

1970

Feb 1974

1979

1983

1987

1992

2010

2015

2017

2019

GL

85

82

78

89

82

71

53

49

57

55

58

63

59

E

36

40

39

39

43

23

12

14

18

14

18

22

12

SE

31

25

22

24

31

15

7

8

12

20

18

23

16

SW

32

31

30

26

26

13

7

9

14

15

15

22

15

EM

38

36

32

34

34

27

23

23

29

28

25

26

20

WM

40

38

37

40

47

38

31

33

44

40

36

37

24

YH

45

41

42

45

44

42

38

39

44

42

44

44

40

NE

31

29

27

30

30

30

28

28

28

26

27

28

26

NW

63

58

60

70

70

64

56

62

62

62

62

65

63

W

33

32

34

35

35

31

29

33

33

35

34

37

35

S

45

43

44

52

49

52

50

54

55

44

2

27

4

England

401 (254)

380 (256)

367 (256)

397 (256)

407 (259)

323 (259)

255 (262)

265 (262)

308 (263)

302 (267)

303 (267)

330 (267)

275 (267)

UK

479 (313)

455 (316)

445 (316)

484 (316)

491 (318)

406 (318)

334 (326)

352 (326)

396 (326)

381 (326)

339 (326)

394 (326)

314 (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

134

7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

three occasions, while the Conservatives would have never exceeded 450 under their respective notional returns. Taking the earlier results into account, it is quite obvious that the regional distribution of both parties’ support is critical for these differences in earlier seat returns. Regions with significant numbers of seats not controlled by Labour typically displayed either high average vote shares for the party combined with a very uniform distribution (East, East Midlands and West Midlands) or a lower vote share combined with a higher deviation (South West, North West and Yorkshire). These combinations allowed it to extract additional gains at maximum efficiency by strongly limiting the extent of “wasted votes” (Johnston et al. 2001: 95–102, 2012; Borisyuk et al. 2010a; Rallings et al. 2004, 2008; Johnston 2002; Rossiter et al. 1999b). In addition, the Tories’ initial support base in some regions (especially Wales and the North East) was already so weak that even a landslide hardly allowed the party to win half of these regions’ seats. With Labour support eroding to comparable levels, especially in the south, its major advantage in seat returns vanished during the 1970s and 1980s, although the aforementioned authors agree that Labour continued to be favoured by the geographical distribution of its vote until 2015. Labour’s results in England remain largely in line with the UK ones, but the small decline in returns is enough to pull its English returns based on the 1983 election below a majority, and down to a majority of just four for 1987. When looking at the source of these shortfalls compared to the first landslide scenario, it is fairly easy to, again, single out the South East and the South West as main origins. This confirms my earlier suspicions that Labour gains in the south of England are a top-up on victories achieved elsewhere rather than a way to win elections. The low amount of overall seat returns coupled with the significant differences in seat returns between both calculations shows us that these regions only start to deliver more than a handful of seats once Labour has almost completely exhausted its electoral potential in all other regions. Taking a further look at the result structure before the notional election based on the 1983 outcome, we can see that the notional returns for 1979 seem to indicate the absolute bottom of what Labour has to secure in terms of seats in the southern regions as well as the capital in order to win an English majority. However, when looking at the results since then, we can also see that Labour continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel in the south and would have only barely managed to outscore the weak results for 1979 (except for the 2017 results). While the capital’s falling returns can (in part) be explained by the boundary revisions that saw its parliamentary weight drop by over 30%, the two other regions have been growing while Labour’s support fell to critical levels. Although slightly less accentuated, Labour’s potential seat returns in the East Midlands also dropped by around a quarter between the pre-Thatcher era and the post-1970s. The comparison for the maximum swing vote towards the Tories (Table 7.4) ends up quite different. The most striking dissimilarity between the two scenarios is the more significant decline in seat returns for the Conservatives under the positive swing vote scenario. Accordingly, the average decline for the Conservatives is 22 seats per

7.1 Still Enough—Competition Under Exceptional Mobilisation

135

Table 7.4 Conservative seat returns under a maximum swing towards the Conservatives 1950

1964

1966

Feb 1974

Oct 1974

1997

2001

2005

2010

2017

GL

69

70

63

62

56

34

25

38

41

29

E

36

39

39

41

42

46

47

53

55

54

SE

59

61

60

69

70

73

73

77

80

78

SW

40

40

40

42

40

36

33

36

46

50

EM

24

30

24

33

28

23

26

31

38

38

WM

31

45

37

39

34

27

31

37

50

47

YH

28

33

25

29

26

20

21

23

35

28

NE

14

13

9

12

8

1

1

4

10

10

NW

63

54

40

46

40

14

16

22

39

31

W

13

11

8

14

11

4

7

11

19

18

S

61

50

45

50

38

13

15

16

16

30

England

364 (254)

385 (256)

337 (256)

373 (259)

344 (259)

274 (265)

273 (265)

321 (265)

394 (267)

365 (267)

UK

438 (313)

446 (316)

390 (316)

437 (318)

393 (318)

291 (330)

295 (330)

348 (324)

429 (326)

413 (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

election, while it is just nine for Labour.3 Looking closer at the location of these differences, I cannot identify clear long-term trends, but only regional concentrations. These concentrations are located in the North West (-60), Wales (-32), the North East (-39) and Scotland (-85). The huge difference in Scotland is obviously a result of the distortive Labour collapse in 2015. The Tories’ best performance in the region was an increase of 13.16% in 2017, while Labour’s 17.76% loss in 2015 was over one third larger, the biggest difference between any of the regional swings. Coupled with the Conservatives’ low support base in Scotland, it is understandable that their seat returns drop by over 20% under such a considerably smaller swing. The interesting, although not overly surprising, point is that the seat losses are concentrated in regions in which the Tories either experienced a significant electoral decline or have always been in a very weak contender position. This leads to the crucial question whether the party’s returns in its strongholds are large enough to reliably provide it with a majority or if it needs additional gains in these electorally difficult areas. When looking at the nationwide results, we can see that the Conservatives would have managed to win an overall majority under all notional elections except for the ones based on the 1997, which they would have also missed under the first landslide scenario, and the 2001 outcome. However, the 2001 calculations were already extremely tight for the first scenario and they would therefore lose their majority under almost every swing vote lower than the maximum swing 3 Even

this is a significant improvement due to the Conservatives’ exceptional results in 2017 and 2019. Based on the study’s initial results until 2015 the same numbers would have been 29 to nine.

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7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

against Labour. All in all, the general impression up to this point is that the Tories do not necessarily need the high returns in “electoral deserts” indicated in the scenario of a maximum negative vote swing against Labour to secure an overall majority. However, since I have only analysed the two landslide scenarios so far, I will have to keep this problem in mind when looking at the average swings. Looking at the party’s English results, we see no formal change since the Conservatives would have been able to cling to its majority in England in every notional election, although the returns based on the 1997 and 2001 results would have edged towards a critical threshold. Accordingly, majorities would have declined to just ten and nine, although the majorities for all other elections remained more than safe, always being larger than 50 seats. In comparison with Labour, the Tories would again fare much better in England, despite their larger fall in English seat returns under a smaller swing vote. However, it remains to be seen whether this effect will hold under further swing vote reductions. The geographic location of the losses indicates that this might be the case.

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal Campaign Performances After having looked at the scenarios indicating a maximum volatility, I will now investigate how the parties’ more typical or “realistic” electoral performances would translate into parliamentary compositions. In order to do so I have added the unweighted vote swings of the various regions for all elections in which the party under consideration improved its national vote share and divided the final result by the number of such “successful” elections (ten for the Conservatives, nine for Labour). The resulting average was then applied to the actual results of every election in which the respective party failed to achieve a parliamentary majority. This process was then repeated for the “unsuccessful” elections to calculate the average swings against each party. There were a number of problematic issues that had to be resolved in the process. First, as I have shown in Chap. 6.6, the direction of regional and national vote changes has not been unidirectional in a number of cases, meaning that, while a party was able to increase its national vote share, it simultaneously lost votes in some regions or the other way around. Since this is part of the regional biases towards individual parties I discussed in the same chapter, I included swings contradictory to the national trend in my calculations to estimate the “real world” average, instead of a formal average which would either include all positive or negative swings in the calculation (irrespective of the national trend) or just those in which both national and regional outcomes were unidirectional.4 Second, there was one case (Labour’s 4 Proceeding

otherwise would have discounted the effect of typical overperformances in individual regions. For example, the East delivered positive swings towards the Conservative Party on twelve instead of ten occasions, but these two additional positive swings were very small, because the national swing was going heavily against the Conservatives. Accordingly, the average for all twelve

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal …

137

Scottish results) in which this handling actually produced a negative average swing for “successful” elections. The reason for this was the 2015 election, which qualified as a nationally “successful” election, but also saw a massive vote share drop of 17.8% in Scotland. I dealt with this problem in two ways. First, I adopted the same calculation procedure as for the other regions, meaning that a small negative swing was used to simulate the notional “successful” election results. Second, I calculated an additional positive average swing by adding up all of Labour’s vote share increases in Scotland and dividing them by the number elections in which Labour was able increase its Scottish vote share. Accordingly, two different numbers for the notional Scottish seat returns of the Labour Party will be given. Having outlined my general calculation procedure, we can now look more closely at the actual results. Like in the preceding chapter, I will start by analysing the average vote swings against both parties, which should be less restrictive and based on larger swings than the average ones towards both parties. Again, I will begin with the Labour Party and then evaluate the results for the Conservatives. Average swing votes against the parties: The most striking general observation for Labour is how badly the party would fare under average swings since the dawn of Thatcherism (Table 7.5). While it would have secured a UK-wide majority in all elections before Thatcher (except for 1959), it would have failed to do so in every single one of them since 1979. But it is not only Table 7.5 Labour seat returns under an average swing against the Conservatives 1951 1955 1959 1970 Feb 1979 1983 1987 1992 2010 2015 2017 2019 1974 GL

63

56

51

62

61

49

32

29

41

44

46

55

52

E

17

18

13

12

17

11

4

4

8

7

8

10

6

SE

15

11

9

12

10

7

2

2

6

8

6

14

8

SW

16

12

9

12

9

6

4

1

7

8

6

10

7

EM

26

25

23

24

26

19

13

14

18

22

17

21

11

WM 34

35

31

34

38

31

26

29

30

29

27

27

19

YH

40

37

35

40

39

38

35

35

36

36

35

40

30

NE

27

26

25

27

26

27

25

28

28

26

26

27

21

NW

51

48

48

59

58

54

43

50

58

57

57

62

50

W

29

27

28

32

25

22

23

25

28

27

28

32

25

S

43

40

43

47

44

49

47

53

53

42

1

17

2

Eng- 289 268 244 282 284 242 184 192 232 237 228 266 204 land (254) (256) (256) (256) (259) (259) (262) (262) (263) (267) (267) (267) (267) UK

361 335 315 361 353 313 254 270 313 306 257 315 231 (313) (316) (316) (316) (318) (318) (326) (326) (326) (326) (326) (326) (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

would have actually been lower than the average for the North West, which only delivered positive swings in eight elections, but these were higher in those fewer cases.

138

7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

the fact that Labour would be unable to do so, it is also the significant difference in the decisiveness of the results. In the first period, no result other than the shortfall of one in 1959 would have been close (a majority of ten or lower) under the notional results, while three (1951, 1970 and February 1974) would have been clear-cut victories with majorities of above 30. In the second period, however, just one election (1979) would be a close plurality, while four would end up as clear failures. Therefore, the results shift not just from narrow wins to close failures, but from decisive victories to clear losses. If we compare these results with the ones of the actual elections, the differences become even clearer. The closer notional elections based on the 1955 and 1959 results did not result in Labour landslides because the Tories had managed to crush Labour in terms of seat returns in the actual previous elections. Conservative majorities had been close to 70 and over 100 in 1955 and 1959, respectively. Accordingly, Labour was facing the gargantuan task of stealing at least 40 to 50 seats from the Tories, without losing a single one of their own, just to secure a tiny majority. The difficulty of accomplishing this becomes obvious by taking a further look at the results for 1979. The parliamentary situation was almost exactly the same as in 1955 (1955: 345 to 277, 1979: 339 to 269), but the vote shares and their distribution had significantly changed. As a result, instead of securing close to 60 additional seats (as under the notional results based on 1955) Labour would have ended up with just slightly above 40 gains under the calculated results based on 1979. The regional distribution of Labour’s seats between both elections shows us that the critical shortcomings are mostly located in the southern parts of England. Hardly surprising, the party failed to return the same numbers of seats in the East, South East and South West they would have captured in the 1950s. But these losses in themselves would not have been crippling without simultaneous shortfalls in London and the East Midlands. Although the losses in London were hardly the party’s fault, but rather an inevitable consequence of its declining population, Labour failed to consolidate its support in the other regions of the kingdom. The East Midlands’ changes again seem rather small, around 25 seats in the pre-Thatcher years compared to 17 based on the post1979 results, but the critical point is that the region’s returns were reliable and stable over the 1950s and 1970s. Afterwards, they still remained fairly reliable and stable but on a lower level, which is, as I have outlined, the worst possible development of electoral support and corresponding seat returns in almost all cases. The regional developments after 1979 indicate a further deepening of destructive trends. The collapse of seat returns in the south stagnated to some degree at the levels of 1979 with only the East experiencing another small decline. The West Midlands saw another small fall in 1983 which marked its new average. Again, the capital’s and Scotland’s developments seem crucial. London displays its largest decline in seats under the notional calculations for the two major defeats of 1983 and 1987. This indicates that although Labour generally has a high potential for large seat returns in the region, it cannot fully rely on securing them, as it could so far for the North East, Wales, the North West, and with some exceptions Yorkshire, and it will be heavily defeated on the national level should it fail to do so. This is also the reason why London was critical in dampening the decisiveness of the actual 2015 defeat and

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal …

139

would be so for my notional results based on the 2015 outcome. While my notional UK returns are close to the ones for 1983 and 1987, Labour would have missed a majority by a stunning number of around 85 seats if the capital’s returns had ended up in the same way they did in the 1980s. The second major problem for the party is obviously Scotland. The 40 to 50 seats Labour regularly secured were crucial in ensuring its victories, under the notional results, in the pre-Thatcher period. Had Labour only managed to win a single constituency, as they did in 2015, the party would have also lost their majorities in the notional elections based on 1955, 1970 and February 1974, while the remaining victory in 1951 would have been achieved by a razor thin margin of seven. Today Labour is in deep trouble reaching a parliamentary majority even including its former Scottish returns of 40 to 50 seats, without them the party is beyond hope unless it delivers overwhelming performances. The reason why it would almost constantly fail under average swings lies in the broad absence of any form of seat return consolidation. When looking at the changes in the average seat returns for the regions (divided in the two aforementioned phases), we can see that Labour was only able to improve its standing in the North West (by a single seat). All other regions either display a decline or stagnation in potential seat returns. Taking a closer look at the latest results, we can discern some further details about the problematic nature of Labour’s support structure. What meets the eye are the similarities between the notional seat gains for 2015 and 2019 as well as 2010 and 2017. Compared to the original outcomes Labour would have gained between 25 and 30 seats in the notional elections based on 2015 and 2019 while the same numbers would be around 50 for those based on 2010 and 2017. While the party secured broadly comparable UK vote shares in 2015 and 2019 (difference of around 1.5%) they were highly disparate for 2010 and 2017 (11%). Still, despite its much higher support base and comparable seat numbers in 2017 the party would have been unable to extract more seats from an average mobilisation outcome than in 2010. What this tells us is that both the party’s own support structure and the vote split between the others parties do not help the party at all with its seat returns. With the Tories’ current support levels Labour is simply hamstrung and beyond its own abilities to defeat them. The party will only have some (albeit still limited) chance to overcome the current Tory hegemony once the Conservatives’ base line support drops below the 40% margin again. One last aspect to discuss before moving on to the notional English results is the problem of hung parliaments. Under an average swing against the Conservatives, five out of the seven notional elections since 1979 would have produced a hung parliament (1979, 1992, 2010, 2015, 2017), while the one based on 1987 would have produced a Conservative majority of just two and 2019 one of just six. This is a highly disturbing outcome indicating how close the UK has edged towards a structural institutional dysfunctionality which has mostly been avoided by chance so far (Curtice 2010a: 635–637, 2018: 41–43; Curtice et al. 2010: 412–418). The major point of employing a plurality voting system is that it should guarantee a decisive parliamentary outcome, even in case of fairly equal vote shares between the two major parties or limited vote swings (Curtice 2018: 41–42). My numbers for

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7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

the Labour Party indicate that neither of these are reliably the case when Labour is challenging a Tory government. Instead, it seems that Labour’s support distribution is highly problematic and makes it difficult to produce clear parliamentary results (Curtice 2017: 16–19). Looking at Labour’s English results, the picture remains bleak. Like for the nationwide numbers, the party would have failed to win even a single English majority and only managed to score one English plurality (2017) since 1979 but also missed one under the tight results based on the 1959 outcome. The numbers show that Labour has serious troubles raising its English seats above 250, which practically locks it from achieving an English majority. Again, London seems to play a crucial role in this respect. This has two reasons. First, the region has been the one delivering the party’s highest seat returns in England under the notional results until 1979. Accordingly, the region’s seat returns laid the foundation for a potential Labour success in England. Since 1979, it has been overtaken in this aspect by the North West but remains important to the party’s English results because of its still high number of seat returns and its fairly solid reliability. Second, Labour’s first failure to secure an English majority (notional election based on 1959) was already accompanied by the lowest seat returns ever scored in the region before the Thatcher years. Later on, the party would have never secured an English majority without winning at least 60 seats in London. This is reinforced by the 2017 result, which is the only more recent outcome close to an English majority, with London delivering the biggest seat increase in England and seat numbers close to the 1950s and early 1970s. In summary, although its seat return ratio was never particularly overwhelming in favour of Labour, London’s significant parliamentary representation seemed to have helped in tipping the balance in England as long as the party was just able to avoid defeat in the capital. Conversely, below average performances in London seem to almost inadvertently block Labour from scoring an English majority. While the numbers for the Tories (Table 7.6) also have some positive and some negative indications, the overall results are somewhat better than for Labour. The party would have failed to secure a majority under an average swing vote during the three New Labour elections, with all of them ending up as decisive defeats. The worst numbers are obviously those for the calculations based on 1997 and 2001, handing the Tories less than 240 seats. The remaining results, however, and this is somewhat surprising compared to earlier indicators, are much better than Labour’s. Accordingly, the Conservatives would have secured 370 or more seats on five occasions, something Labour would have never achieved under average notional results. The only elections not ending in clear knockouts (or defeats) are those based on the 1966 and, to a far lesser degree, the October 1974 results, for reasons I will now further illuminate. The smaller factor that sets both elections apart from the more successful ones are the weak returns in the North West. As we have already found out, the Tories faced their most serious electoral decline in England here and they fared comparatively poor in the region under the results based on 1966 and October 1974. However, the more accentuated characteristic connecting those mediocre performances and the major defeats around the millennium is the spuriousness of Conservative losses. While weak Labour results have been mostly a consequence of the

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal …

141

Table 7.6 Conservative seat returns under an average swing against Labour 1950

1964

1966

Feb 1974

Oct 1974

1997

2001

2005

2010

2017

GL

64

61

52

52

49

25

22

31

37

26

E

36

39

37

40

39

42

43

48

53

53

SE

57

60

59

68

67

69

63

72

77

78

SW

37

38

38

40

40

32

30

31

45

49

EM

20

26

19

30

27

21

19

28

36

37

WM

27

40

30

33

27

20

22

30

45

40

YH

22

28

19

23

21

13

15

17

28

25

NE

9

10

6

8

7

1

1

2

5

6

NW

54

46

34

40

35

12

12

18

30

27

W

10

8

6

11

10

2

5

7

17

14

S

38

27

23

25

20

0

3

1

1

17

England

326 (254)

348 (256)

294 (256)

334 (259)

312 (259)

235 (265)

227 (265)

277 (265)

356 (267)

341 (267)

UK

374 (313)

383 (316)

323 (316)

370 (318)

342 (318)

237 (330)

235 (330)

285 (324)

374 (326)

372 (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

party’s structural long-term decline in the three southern regions and the Midlands, Tory failures display different underlying patterns. Accordingly, the Conservatives have only three regions (the East, South East and with some exceptions the East Midlands) that would have been encapsulated from significant losses in all of these five mediocre to weak elections. In the rest, shortfalls are spread out fairly evenly and by “evenly” I mean that they do not reflect clear long-term regional patterns. Only the North West and Scotland display signs of long-term decline with the North West’s exceptionally low notional returns during the New Labour years constituting a fall to between one-third and half of the already weak returns of the 1960s and 1970s. The major conclusion drawn from these distributions is that the Tories only fail to secure a UK-wide majority in cases of widespread shortfalls across England as a whole, instead of particular regional vulnerabilities. Again, I will take a further look at the possibilities of hung parliaments before moving on to the Conservatives’ English results. This time the outcome is very different from the one for the average swing against the Tories. Accordingly, we can find only one situation that would have ended in an unclear parliamentary composition. The notional results based on the 2005 election would have produced a hung parliament, with the Tories winning 285 and Labour 276 seats. This is not too surprising since the actual 2010 election also resulted in a hung parliament and my applied average swings lay between the actual 2010 swings towards the Tories (+3.7%) and against Labour (-6.2%). Comparing the results for both parties we can come to a crucial conclusion. Based on the post-war election results, we have seen

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7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

a significant increase in the likelihood of hung parliaments in general. From 1950 to the end of the 1970s, there was a certain chance of elections resulting in unclear majorities. My notional results showed, in addition to the actual hung parliament of February 1974, two very close races in 1959 and 1966, but these were restricted to situations of very specific vote swings. Since 1979 this likelihood has massively increased. While one of my ten notional cases for the pre-Thatcher era would have produced a very narrow plurality (one seat short each), six out of 13 of the latter ended in an unclear majority situation, while the 1987 and 2019 results for Labour ended in wafer-thin majorities of two and six. Although just two of the actual elections since 1979 produced a hung parliament, the decline of the electoral controllability of the British government as a result of changes in party competition becomes apparent if we take another aspect into account that coincides with this trend: the duration of government survival. Between the end of the Peel and Wellington administration in 1830 and 1979 a governing party ruled for more than ten years in a row, or more than two full terms, respectively, only two times. However, since 1979 every governing party has ruled for more than ten years, although the current Tory government failed to secure a parliamentary majority twice. This is reaffirmed by my calculations, the Tories would have only beaten Labour (but then decisively) in the two situations where they already held a plurality beforehand, while Labour would have failed to achieve any clear victory at all. While this does not inadvertently lead to the establishment of nearly “invulnerable” governments, it certainly underscores that the Thatcher era saw the rise of electoral trends that increasingly impede on the controllability of British governments. Returning to our initial observations, we can therefore record that, although my notional results indicate even more problematic outcomes than have actually occurred since 1979, they are hardly any better in terms of government control. As I have intensively discussed, while long-term periods of single-party rule are in itself already a challenge to majoritarian democracies (McGann 2004: 70–71; Lijphart 2012: 30–31; Mair 2009: 288–289), frequent hung parliaments are its death knell because they hand the final decision over government formation back to the politicians who should be subject to it (Farrell 1997: 13). In addition, while prolonged single-party governments “only” impair the aspect of popular control, hung parliaments tend to damage the general functionality of the political process of majoritarian democracies because they influence not only the creation of government but also the way the executive will work and how it can be evaluated by the public (see Chap. 2). Another potential problem is the fact that five out of the six notional hung parliaments would have occurred when a Conservative government was challenged by Labour, which indicates that the source of the problem is not the FPTP system in itself, but the electoral backing of both parties (Curtice 2018: 42). The support and mobilisation potential of the Tories seem to be distributed in a pattern that either sees them getting clearly defeated or winning a comfortable majority. Accordingly, the FPTP voting system seems to perform fairly well whenever the Tories are not controlling a majority, fulfilling the purpose of producing clear cut majorities. Conversely, Labour’s support and voter migration seem to be spread out in a highly problematic fashion that tends to produce too few seat swings to end in a clear Labour victory and

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal …

143

too high swings to preserve the incumbent Tory majority. Such a cause is difficult to actively counter because the electoral system itself cannot overcome certain problematic regional voter distributions, unless the whole electoral system is changed, while parties have limited abilities to actively steer the general geographic spread of their support. Before moving to the next scenario, I will take a brief look at the Tories’ Englandwide results. Again, the overall seat returns for the Conservatives in England remain highly reassuring for the party. There are just two elections (1997 and 2001) in which they would have failed to make the necessary gains for a victory, which is hardly surprising since their UK-wide returns would have already been below the numbers necessary for an English majority. All other elections, with slight exceptions for 2005, would have ended in very safe majorities or blow-out victories. Taken together, the Tory results not only display clearer UK-wide outcomes, but also reliable English majorities, or in a few instances a fairly clear lack of, a combination that is practically absent in Labour’s case. Average swing votes towards the parties: Having finished my observations for the average swings against the major parties, I can now look at the notional results in cases of average vote swings towards them. These swings are even smaller than the average ones against them, although the 2017 election flipped that characteristic for the Labour Party. Since actual electoral vote swings are typically a combination of the swing against the incumbent government party and the swing towards the major challenger, I will focus my attention on the differences between the notional results presented in the last segment and the ones given in Tables 7.7 and 7.8. The first noticeable impression of the Labour results is once again their fairly large overlap with the previous ones. All election outcomes deviate by no more than twenty seats. This is hardly surprising considering that most regional swings show differences of just 1–2% between both scenarios, with the exceptions of London, Wales and Scotland. Eventual disparities in the seat returns for these three regions are, however, also limited because they either have been or became dominated by Labour, preventing the party from extracting larger numbers of additional seats, especially in more recent elections. Only London displays differences of up to nine seats, indicating that very strong swings towards Labour would have been enough to turn a significant number of seats in the earlier elections of the 1950s to the 1970s. The overall changes between both scenarios are enough to turn the outcome of three fairly close elections (1959, 1979 and 1992). The change in 1959 is hardly surprising since Labour only needed to wrest a single seat from the Tories to gain a majority. However, it is instructive to look at the differences in the changes between the outcome based on the 1959 election and the differences for the 1979 and 1992 elections. For 1959, Labour would have scored an additional twelve seats in London and the East, compared to the scenario of an average swing against the Tories, while the numbers for the latter two elections would have been only seven and four respectively. Other than that, there is only a single case for these two elections where Labour would have gained more than three seats in another region (the East Midlands in

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7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

Table 7.7 Labour seat returns under an average swing towards Labour 1951 1955 1959 1970 Feb 1979 1983 1987 1992 2010 2015 2017 2019 1974 GL

67

63

58

71

67

53

37

36

43

E

23

22

18

13

20

14

6

5

10

SE

16

11

10

12

12

7

2

2

6

SW

18

14

9

12

9

7

4

3

9

EM

30

27

23

26

27

20

16

15

22

WM 35

35

33

34

38

31

27

29

YH

42

38

37

40

39

38

36

NE

27

26

26

27

27

27

25

45

50

58

53

9

9

11

7

8

6

14

10

9

6

10

8

23

20

22

12

31

31

28

28

19

36

39

37

38

42

34

28

28

26

26

27

23

NW

54

48

51

60

58

57

44

53

60

60

58

62

52

W

29

27

28

32

27

24

24

26

30

29

28

34

30

S

40 (35)

38 (34)

40 (38)

45 (44)

41 (40)

46 (44)

43 (41)

52 (51)

53 (50)

41 (41)

1 (1)

14 (8)

1 (1)

Eng- 312 284 265 295 297 254 197 207 248 248 241 274 218 land (254) (256) (256) (256) (259) (259) (262) (262) (263) (267) (267) (267) (267) UK

381 349 333 372 365 324 264 285 331 318 270 322 249 (313) (316) (316) (316) (318) (318) (326) (326) (326) (326) (326) (326) (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority. In the case of Scotland, they denote the seat returns for an average swing including the outlier results of 2015

1992). This indicates that the party can less rely on the exceptional turnovers it once, at least theoretically, scored in these regions and that it has been unable to find other competitive regions to compensate for this decline. Also, I have to add that the positive changes observed before are almost entirely the result of the somewhat distortive overwhelming performance in 2017. This performance was so strong that it pushed the average swings towards Labour by a full percentage point in almost every region, while the average swing against the Tories obviously remained the same, inflating Labour’s otherwise more moderate average performances which helped them to cross the line in a number of very close contests (under my first calculation without the 2017 and 2019 results the difference between both scenarios would have been 1959: +4, 1979: +6 and 1992: +6, instead of +18, +11 and +18). Looking at the differences between the two Scottish calculations we can see that they are almost negligible, except for three elections. Only the outcomes based on 1951, 1955 and 2017 change by more than three seats and the temporal location of these results strengthens my assumption about the high competitiveness of Scotland in the early post-war years. Finally, the slightly lower seat returns would further depress the party’s already weak majorities for the notional results based on 1979 (majority of five) and 1992 (majority of three). When looking at the general regional differences among the secured seats, we can see that only four regions display deviations that are not completely negligible (with Yorkshire and the Humber being a borderline case): London (+60), the East Midlands (+24), Scotland (-26) and the East (+32). Distribution over time reveals that in the

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal …

145

East Midlands the positive effect would have been continuous, typically delivering Labour between one and three additional seats in almost every election, indicating a continuous small advantage for the Conservatives in a few highly marginal seats. For London, the trend is quite different. While the early elections would have always provided the party with at least four additional seats per election (but often even more) until February 1974, the effect stalled afterwards. This probably results from the changing support patterns of both parties in the capital. Initially, both parties held reliable majorities which required them to score very high vote swings to flip larger numbers of seats (which seldom happened). But the initial majorities were only high enough to encapsulate constituencies from “average” swings; as my numbers show, strong campaigns would have delivered large amounts of them to both parties. Today, seats in the capital are either easier or harder to flip. A certain number of constituencies is therefore quite competitive, indicated by the strong average minority vote shares of both parties and the amount of seat changes under average vote swings, and can be won by both parties with weak to moderate efforts. Conversely, the rest is now often so safe that even very strong swings are too weak to flip them, which limits the marginal utility of better campaign performances. The same should be mostly true for Scotland. Although the difference between the two average vote swings is significant (4.4%), the corresponding seat changes remain minimal. Thanks to the Conservatives’ quick decline and the fairly strong regional segmentation of the Labour support (see Chap. 6.4), Labour would have often failed to reap significant benefits from stronger swings. The numbers for the East once again confirm our earlier findings. Typically, Labour would have gained three to four more seats in the first time period but only one or two in the latter period underlining the party’s significant decline in its regional minority support. Finally, there are a few interesting differences concerning Labour’s overall results in England. While the changes in seats would have been enough to give the party a slight English majority in 1959, there would be almost no effect since 1979. In all cases, except for the notional election based on the 2017 results, Labour would have failed to secure an English majority. Since Labour would have already been just one seat short of an English majority under an average swing against the Tories even this exceptional case looks rather grim. The seven seats increase between the two scenarios amounts to the lowest difference among all notional elections which means that the party only profits from better “average” performances if it starts with very low seat and vote share numbers. If it starts from a better position, like in 2017, it will make considerably fewer gains from performance improvements, unless they amount to a landslide. Accordingly, the very limited overall progress compared to earlier calculations neither modifies my previous conclusions about Labour’s competitive decline in England nor about its weak overall standing in the largest part of the kingdom. Conversely, the results for the average swings towards the Tories (Table 7.8) significantly differ from those for the average swing against Labour. First, the Tories would always fare worse under the average swing towards them than under the former scenario. Second, while the difference between both calculations for Labour was only 14 seats per election, the respective deviation for the Tories would be 30

146

7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

Table 7.8 Conservative seat returns under an average swing towards the Conservatives 1950

1964

1966

Feb 1974

Oct 1974

1997

2001

2005

2010

2017

GL

54

53

42

46

43

15

15

24

30

23

E

36

39

33

38

35

39

39

46

53

53

SE

56

58

56

66

67

64

57

71

77

78

SW

37

37

34

40

40

30

26

29

43

48

EM

17

20

18

28

24

19

18

23

35

35

WM

23

37

27

31

25

18

19

30

43

40

YH

21

24

16

23

18

8

9

13

23

22

NE

5

9

4

7

5

1

1

1

3

5

NW

47

37

28

36

34

12

11

15

26

24

W

7

7

6

9

8

1

3

6

9

9

S

36

26

21

23

19

0

2

1

1

15

England

296 (254)

314 (256)

258 (256)

315 (259)

291 (259)

206 (265)

195 (265)

252 (265)

333 (267)

328 (267)

UK

339 (313)

347 (316)

285 (316)

347 (318)

318 (318)

207 (330)

200 (330)

259 (324)

343 (326)

352 (326)

Note Numbers in parentheses denote the respective number of seats necessary for a majority

seats. When looking at the differences between the applied average swings, we can see that they are also more meaningful than those for Labour’s calculations with only one region displaying a difference of less than one percentage point while five differ by more than two percentage points. However, despite these dissimilarities the overall electoral outcome would hardly change at all. The election based on the 1966 results would flip from a slim Tory majority to a narrow Labour majority of six. In addition, the previously stable notional outcome for the October election of 1974 would turn into a minimal majority of one basically mirroring the outcome of the original election with switched party positions. When looking at the regional distribution of the shortfalls between both calculations, we can see that the major differences are located in the regions with only mediocre seat returns, with the exception of London. Therefore, the biggest shortfalls take place in London (-74), the East Midlands (-26), Yorkshire and the Humber (-34), the North West (-38) and Wales (-25). The numbers for the North West and Wales should be hardly surprising at this point, I already outlined that the Tories managed to extract far more seats in Wales than their actual support suggests, indicating that they hold many seats by very narrow margins they would miss when scoring weaker swings. The same basically applies to the North West although the effect results from the Conservatives’ prolonged decline in the region which would make them lose some seats earlier under lower swing votes. Therefore, the major difference between both regions is the inverted temporal development. Conversely, the outcome for the East Midlands can be explained by its very nature as a battleground region. With

7.2 Broken Beyond Repair?—Competition Under Normal …

147

both parties holding small victory margins in many seats, it has to be expected that even comparatively small swing adjustments lead to fairly large seat change. Still, the decline of the marginal utility rate since the 1990s supports our findings that the region is becoming more and more biased towards the Tories. The London results are heavily influenced by the 2017 election outcome. The Conservatives’ overall performance in 2017 was so strong that it increased their average performance in every region, except London and the South East. Quite to the contrary, results in the capital were so disastrous that they depressed the party’s average score in the region by a half percentage point, leading to the largest gap of any region between the swings against Labour and the swings towards the Tories. Therefore, the seat differences in the capital should be far more pronounced than those in the rest of the country. Yorkshire and the Humber is a quite surprising find in this particular aspect. While the numbers stayed fairly stable for the elections before the New Labour era, with the exception of the notional 1964 election, the difference slightly increased afterwards especially when the Tories considerably under- or overperformed. This reinforces our earlier observations of a highly segmented electorate since the number of seat flips remained fairly stable irrespective of the outcome of the underlying election, unless one of the parties achieved an exceptional performance. The distribution of these changes between higher and lower average swings underline why the electoral outcomes of both parties’ electoral results are so different. The Tories’ support pattern allows them to recruit additional seat gains across the whole country, although mostly in England, in a fairly uniform and linear manner once they have crossed a minimal vote swing threshold. Accordingly, their support pattern harmonises with the vote to seat translation mechanism of the voting system, either leading to clear cut majorities or decisive defeats. Labour instead has a gradual vote to seat function which delivers additional seats in certain regions and almost nothing in the rest of the country, either because there are almost no seats left to win or because the party’s general support is too low to yield significant returns, unless the swing crosses a critical (usually very high) margin at which the returns increase exponentially. While Labour always had a more skewed support distribution than the Tories, its minority backing in the 1950s was strong enough to lower this crucial margin to a level typically achieved by average campaign performances.5 Today, however, it is far more likely that Labour ends up reaching a just plurality unless it manages to cross a now considerably higher crucial threshold by an overwhelming campaign performance. 5 To illustrate the problem, let us assume that the gap in the vote:seat translation lay between a swing

of 1 to 3% in the 1950s. Since the gap was located at such a low swing, it was fairly easy for the party to cross it with a moderate performance and thereby secure stable and large enough majorities. However, the significant fall in Labour’s minority support shifted the gap from 3 to 5% by the 1990s. This makes it much harder to cross the gap because the volatility of the electorate in favour of the two major parties has hardly increased at the same rate that Labour has lost support. While volatility has significantly increased in general, it overwhelmingly favours third parties (Dunleavy 2005: 505509; Curtice 2010a: 626-629). As a result, eventual swings in favour of Labour tend to fall right into the described gap far more often than they did in the 1950s delivering hung parliaments instead of clear majorities.

148

7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

Looking at the Tories’ results in England, we can see that changes are mostly in line with the general differences between both calculations, which is not overly surprising considering that non-English seats have become largely irrelevant to their national results. Accordingly, they either manage to secure a safe majority of the English seats or decisively fail to do so. The only change can be seen for the calculation of the notional election based on 2005. In this case, both parties would have failed to secure an English majority with Labour trailing the Tories by 17 seats. The reason for this change is twofold. First, my previous calculation already resulted in a hung parliament, under which the Conservatives managed to retake the majority of English seats by just twelve. Any erosion of their seat numbers would come from England because their Celtic returns were almost non-existent. Second, my calculation scenario ended up delivering the LibDems 58 seats, basically the same number (57) they won in the actual election of 2010. This indicates that the Liberal seats were quite safe, and the simulated swing was only large enough to flip battleground constituencies between Labour and the Conservatives (Curtice 2010a: 628–629).

7.3 Conclusion My empirical analysis revealed several important patterns and trends in regional party support. Starting my reflection of these trends with some general remarks, we saw that both parties and regions had and to some degree continue to have individual and very distinctive patterns of support. For the parties, the respective electoral structure has been both a benefit and a liability depending on the timeframe and basic conditions of the elections. The Tories’ general pattern is one of fairly homogenous support and vote swings, but also of lower constituency majorities and higher performance dependency. Labour, on the other hand, could initially rely on exceptionally strong support in a fairly large number of electoral bastions, receiving more territorialised vote swings and “wasting” fewer votes in contests it could not hope to win (Johnston 2002; Johnston et al. 2001: 12–18). The benefits corresponding with these very general characteristics were as follows: The Conservatives were much more likely to secure stable majorities when they won an election (meaning they secured the largest number of seats) and much less likely to produce ambiguous parliamentary results whenever they lost an election. Their uniform vote swings and evenly distributed support base simply made it unlikely to swing constituency numbers that would produce a hung parliament; thus, they either almost completely failed to capture any seats or their vote swing was large enough to provide them with a stable majority. However, this also meant that securing the larger swing vote of both parties would not necessarily lead to a Conservative victory, understood as winning the most seats. Conversely, Labour had more difficulties in achieving safe majorities. Its skewed support and heterogeneous vote swings made seat returns less predictable. Accordingly, the party was, although counterintuitively, actually more dependent on its electoral performance than the Tories. The coordination of vote increases was critical to the party’s success since support levels

7.3 Conclusion

149

could vary significantly between individual constituencies. In order to reach a seat majority, it often had to overcome larger majorities in certain constituencies than the Conservatives, especially after 1979. As Johnston (2002: 12–14) and Rossiter et al. (1999b) outline, Labour was strongly disadvantaged in early post-war elections through the gerrymander bias (the efficiency of its vote distribution) while today’s bias is largely a result of reactive malapportionment (the distribution of the thirdparty vote and abstentions) which conversely favours Labour. Despite this the fact that its skewedness of support in the 1950s and 1960s was mostly a result of gigantic majorities in some seats and its comparatively high minority support in a significant number of constituencies allowed Labour to regularly overcome the problems associated with its more regionalised support distribution. Its highly skewed support and mobilisation potential was also a major competition asset at times. Specifically, it provided the party with a comparatively large number of safe havens that would even withstand the worst defeats. In particular, the challenge by the Liberals and the SDP in the 1980s could have ended far more precarious had Labour lost more seats to the third-party alliance (Curtice and Steed 1999a: 336–352). By the 2000s, these numbers have considerably equalised, with both parties holding a comparable minority and majority vote plus a fairly homogenous support distribution, while the only mentionable difference remains the moderately higher skewedness of Labour support in seats it wins (Curtice 2018: 37–41). Still, the latest two elections might indicate another shift from the pattern established during the Thatcher era towards a clearer single-party dominance since the Tories’ support structure begins to more closely resemble that of the 1950s. However, the general trend of equalisation has different implications under the current regional competition structure than it would have had under the structure of the 1950s which I will outline in some more detail in the following. When looking at the general developments of party competition, we could identify the following trends: (1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

In general, most regions have become less competitive and more dominated by a single party, a long-term trend already observed for the 1970s and 1980s (Dearlove and Saunders 2000: 175–183; Madgwick 1994: 301–302; Bogdanor and Field 1993; Curtice and Steed 1999a: 338, 1999b: 394–395), or remained uncompetitive if this was already the case in the 1950s. This has led to an erosion of the initial regional diversity in party competition since regions are now either strongly dominated or moderately competitive while simultaneously favouring a specific party in terms of seat returns and electoral support. The increasing disparity between the minority and majority support of the two major parties in the different regions means that the final electoral outcome is largely determined by how they fare in the still fairly competitive regions of the Midlands and London (Curtice 2018: 31–33, 2010a: 629–632). Scotland has become the electoral liability of the political system of the UK since only one specific competition configuration (a Labour domination) is

150

(5)

7 Unequal Chances—Party Competition in the Era of Territorialisation

beneficial to the workability of the Westminster-style of government (Curtice 2018: 34–36, 2017: 14; Harrop 2015: 5–6). To a certain degree, England has become detached from the electoral outcome of the UK as a whole.

As we have seen in my analysis, the first trend has been the most obvious and the most problematic. While some regions were already dominated by a single party in the 1950s, for example the North East, Wales and the South East, the majority were either balanced and uncompetitive, like London and Scotland, or balanced to unbalanced but highly competitive, like the Midlands, the East and the South West.6 The critical difference compared to today’s competition situation is that although Labour and the Tories tended to win overwhelming seat majorities in certain regions, these majorities were seldom safe. Moreover, they often ended up being decisive because, as both parties controlled comparable general support, even mediocre swings would flip large seat numbers (Curtice 2018: 32). Today, however, the parties not only score more lopsided returns in most regions, but also by larger margins. It is both parties’ huge losses in the minority vote that make it so difficult to change existing constituency level majorities (Johnston 2002: 9). The occasionally even abysmal levels of minority support create several problems for the main parties in overturning incumbent majorities. As I have argued multiple times, campaigning in plurality voting systems is generally local because it is about winning specific seats by securing local majorities (Robertson 1976: 50–51). Accordingly, party strategists should funnel the vast majority of resources into typical target seats, but not into those without considerable chances of success (Fieldhouse and Cutts 2009: 368–369; Electoral Reform Society 2010: 42–46; Kraus and Weinschenk 2015: 139–144; Flanigan et al. 2015: 278–282). In the long run, this almost inadvertently leads to a structural decline of campaign potential in uncompetitive seats because of lower candidate profiles and visibility, less intensive contact between the party and potential voters, decreasing knowledge about local political orientations and demands, and the general decline of campaign infrastructure. Therefore, the less frequently these seats are actively contested the less likely it becomes that the contender party will be able to perform well enough to actually flip those seats. Conversely, voters in constituencies with large majorities and no clear contender face the problem of identifying the challenger most likely to defeat the incumbent, decreasing the incentives of strategic voting (Cox 1997: 77). While this was seldom a problem in the 1950s and 1960s, when both nationalist parties scored well below 100,000 votes and the only two nationwide third parties, the Liberal and Communist party, typically held less than 10% of the vote this has radically changed since the advent of third parties in the early 1970s, significantly increasing the number of contests without a clear main contender. Without discussing these aspects in more detail, it should have become obvious that there are factors independent of parties’ 6 By

“balanced”, I mean that both parties typically held comparable amounts of seats, while “competitiveness” describes whether the leading party had a significant advantage concerning the safety of its seats.

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rationality calculations that make it difficult to restore the competitiveness in these stronghold regions even if parties would actively invest larger amounts of resources to do so. The second result was quite interesting because today’s regional “homogeneity” is not really a new observation. However, the fact that this came about by various and sometimes largely different regional developments was somewhat surprising. Some authors argue that today’s visible north–south divide is a result of the economic and political changes or the further regional concentration of sociodemographic characteristics associated with the support of specific parties that took place during the late 1970s and 1980s (Johnston et al. 2005; Bogdanor and Field 1993: 216–27; Johnston and Pattie 1989: 62–68; Steed 1986; Budge 1996: 21). In these explanations, economic changes were further solidified by the sociocultural conflicts fanned by the Thatcher government (Webb 2004: 35–36). Accordingly, the electorate reaping the benefits of these developments and closest to the centre of political and economic power should be inclined to support the party establishing and preserving the current status quo. Conversely, the population of the regions suffering the most from the economic clustering and the demise of the classic heavy and light industry should lend stronger support to the party traditionally representing those at the economic and political fringes of the earlier centralist-unitarian state building project and the conservative revolution of the 1980s. However, while these considerations to some degree overlap with the regional developments, we could identify that they are not coherent with other electoral trends and therefore of questionable explanatory value. Without going into too much detail, I just want to name three developments conflicting with this explanation. First, as a large number of social scientists have pointed out, classical factors of long-term political alignment are of receding significance to voting decisions, which is also the case in the UK (Dalton et al. 2000; Dunleavy 2005; Dunleavy and Margetts 2005: 855–857, 2001: 296–300; Webb 2005: 774–775, 2004; for the respective counterarguments, see Mair 1997: 76–90; Mair and Bartolini 1990: 254–284). It therefore seems illogical that the Thatcher era and the subsequent New Labour administrations should have been able to activate some new and consistent factors of long-term political identification, although it might be possible that these eras have given rise to aspects shaping preference building in favour of one party. Instead, if we consider my remarks about the first national trend, both parties’ large losses in the minority vote could indicate that the strategic neglect of certain territories by the major parties led to concentrations of the decline in party identification with the minority party in such uncompetitive areas. The second trend raising questions about the viability of north–south theories is the development of the voting behaviour of different social classes. It has been a long-acknowledged fact that working-class support for the Labour Party, in the British context voters that hold occupations classified as C2, D or E, has been in steady decline since the 1980s at the latest, while the opposite has been the case for the middle and upper classes (social classes A, B and C1), especially since the New Labour era (Evans and Tilley 2012, 2011; Webb 2004: 33–39). In 2017, the traditional tenet of British voting behaviour research finally flipped. For the first time C2 voters

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were more likely to support the Conservatives, while both parties were practically tied concerning A, B and C1 voters (Curtice 2018: 39, Ipsos Mori, 20 Jun 2017: 7, Curtis, 13 Jun 2017). The same could be observed for educational backgrounds (Curtis, 13 Jun 2017, Ipsos Mori, 20 Jun 2017: 16). These numbers were even more sharply contrasted in the 2019 election when the Tories managed to also overtake Labour among D and E voters and further eclipsed it among those with the lowest educational levels (McDonnell and Curtis, 17 Dec 2019). Accordingly, those profiting the least from or most likely to fall victim to the economic and social modernisation since the 1980s are increasingly inclined to vote for the Tories. Conversely, Labour’s electorate is continuously becoming more metropolitan, intellectual and middle class, which hardly reflects those at the fringes or “left behind” by the developments of post-industrial societies and globalisation. A third aspect is more directly tied to the regional support patterns we observed. Therefore, while the Thatcher era had by far the largest impact on the translation mechanism between votes and seats its impact on electoral support alone was not that unparalleled. The break that had the longest lasting effect on both parties’ support patterns was the Liberal incursion during the February election of 1974 (Mitchell 2006: 164–167). On a very general level, the regional support reached in this election would also be secured by the parties in many areas by average performances during the 2000s. In addition, there were a number of regions that displayed a continuous decline of electoral support of a single party for the whole research period, or at least since the 1960s, basically defying the notion of a decay induced by the politics and economic developments of the late 1970s and 1980s. These regions were namely the North West and Scotland for the Tories as well as to some degree the South West for Labour. Besides these territories of unidirectional development, we also saw a number of regions which were to some degree sensitive to general nationwide trends but mostly displayed changes incongruent with the main argument of the modern north–south-divide thesis. These territories included Scotland, Wales and London for Labour and the South West, London and, to some degree, Wales for the Conservatives. Therefore, although my results clearly underpinned the ascertained north–south divide of today’s electoral support I found limited evidence that would back the arguments typically employed to explain it. However, I cannot and do not intend to answer the question of what is ultimately responsible for the changes leading to today’s north–south divide. Instead, I want to highlight its constitutional ramifications. With the central government increasingly devolving powers to territorial subunits, territorialised representation can turn into a considerable problem. The reason for this should be fairly clear at this point: With more autonomy rights, even if these are limited to certain regions, political problems increasingly turn into questions of how different territories are dealt with (Wyn Jones et al. 2012, 2013; Jeffery et al. 2016), how areas can protect their own interests against the central government and other regions as well as where the responsibilities and rights of the different actors begin and end. This is further aggravated if economically and socially diverse territories (Glennerster et al. 1999; Harari 2016; Harari and Ward 2018; Rhodes 2018) are clearly dominated by single parties because it increases the viability of shifting blame for unpopular political decisions or outcomes, especially

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in a polity whose political procedures have so far incentivised antagonistic interaction over negotiation (Flinders 2010: 287–290 and 301–309). A first, but very obvious glimpse of this problem became obvious during the massive conflicts between the central government on the one side and the English mayors as well as the regional governments on the other over local coronavirus measures in late 2020. Whatever the reasons for the outlined regional homogenisation developments are, their representational consequences will translate into political conflicts the more decentralised or “federalised” the kingdom becomes. Even if England continues to be exempted from the devolution settlement, the UK would face the problem of potential Labour governments (very) likely failing to secure majority support in England and having to rely on their Celtic support to effectively govern England (Bogdanor 2009: 104– 105). The problem would become even bigger if the English regions themselves were turned into political entities. As I have shown, competition is so lopsided in many of them that a national government would be facing a deeply split and, in electoral terms, largely immovable group of federal subjects. Although it is not clear whether there will be any further expansion of the devolution settlement, the general ramifications of territorial distribution conflicts have already entered British politics and will continue to burden it due to the inadequate procedural nature of the current settlement (Jeffery 2015, 2009a; McEwen and Petersohn 2015; Petersohn 2015). Whatever politicians will do to finalise the settlement, without certain considerations of the regional development of party competition, it will most likely create new or aggravate old institutional and legitimacy problems. The third observation is a fairly simple, but important deduction from the previous results. Since fewer and fewer seats are vulnerable to “realistic” vote swings (Curtice 2018, 2010a), it becomes more important, to swing a larger amount of those seats still sensitive to competition. This not only limits the number of, what would be called “ways leading to 270” in US presidential elections, but also demands a better geographical targeting of vote gains (Curtice et al. 2010: 396–398; Electoral Reform Society 2010: 42–46). Alternatively, the parties would have to secure even larger vote swings to compensate for the lower elasticity of individual seats. While the electorate became more volatile throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, this increase was typically not in favour of the two major parties, instead paving the road for the rise of third parties. The 2017 election seemed to mark a break with the trend of Labour and the Tories losing in favour of third parties (Dennison 2018; Denver 2018: 15–22) but might also be highly misleading. Therefore, the losses experienced by all four significant third parties (LibDems, SNP, Green Party and UKIP) might have simply been a consequence of the increasing general volatility, which conversely means that it will most likely be just a temporary concentration of the vote, with many swing voters eventually returning to a third party (Denver 2018: 9–13; Dennison 2018: 106–107). To some degree, this was already supported by the outcome of the 2019 snap election in which the four major third parties (LibDems, SNP, Green and Brexit party) increased their vote share by around 8%. A second problem concerning this point is that today’s vote swings are far less uniform between the Tories and Labour than they had been in the early post-war

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years. Accordingly, the growing volatility sometimes results in fewer seat changes than a lower but more uniform swing has in the past. Again, this can be observed quite well for the latest elections (Curtice 2018: 32–33; Curtice et al. 2016: 396–397 and 416–420, 2010: 387–400). Accordingly, the huge shift in the vote in favour of the major parties in 2017 (around 15%) had no comparable electoral consequences. My data shows that the number of very safe seats fell by just ten compared to 2015 which displayed the highest degree of safeness of all researched elections (Table 6.8) while the overall number of seats changing hands was just 64.7 The numbers for 2015 were not much better. While the swing vote towards all parties securing at least 1% of the vote amounted to a gigantic 17.7%, the number of seats changing hands was still only 110. Although this might sound acceptable at first glance we have to bear in mind that 50 of those seat changes took place in Scotland and were triggered by the SNP’s vote share increase of 3.1% (on the national level). Conversely, this means the remaining 14.6% resulted in just 57 seat changes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, largely resembling the overall seat volatility of 2017. In summary, the increased volatility of the vote has not helped raising the number of seat swings and has hardly improved the competitiveness of the British party system. It therefore seems highly unlikely that the individual parties can restore a significant amount of competitiveness by raising their performance efficiency through better targeting. This only leaves the option of improving the general vote swing, but as I have just discussed this did not help either in 2015 nor in 2017 and my calculations showed that especially Labour would struggle even under very uniform swings. In the end, only a simultaneous rise in the swing vote and a significant increase in the uniformity of the swing between both parties might help to overcome the low elasticity of today’s seat returns. The fourth trend is a result of the combination of earlier electoral developments with the political earthquake following the Scottish independence referendum. Following the Tories’ decline since the 1960s, Scotland has turned from a very balanced and (theoretically) competitive region into one largely controlled by Labour. However, as I have outlined, Labour never managed to completely dominate the region, like it did in Wales, the North East or later the North West. Instead, it was a combination of factors that allowed curtailing Scotland’s competitiveness. First, the long-term decline of the Tories made it difficult for them to win just a few Scottish seats even when Labour fared particularly poorly at the national level. Still, Tory support never completely evaporated and remained large enough to significantly split the non-Labour vote, making it more difficult for the SNP and the Liberals to effectively challenge Labour (Hassan and Shaw 2012: 34 and 206–211; Curtice and Steed 1999b: 416–418; Steed 1999: 324). Finally, in the later years, Labour’s support had been highly skewed as they held a considerably number of close to impregnable strongholds but almost no support in seats won by the third parties, especially the 7 Tellingly,

Scotland had the largest impact on these numbers. Here 20 seats changed hands and the number of very safe constituencies fell from 28 to just two. Accordingly, without Scotland the degree of seat safeness would have been the highest ever, while seat changes would have been the lowest since the 2001 election (Curtice 2018: 36).

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LibDems (Niendorf 2015: 352–353; Mitchell and van der Zwet 2010: 717–722). This favourable concentration of the Labour vote, coupled with the spread and fragmentation of the non-Labour vote, enabled the party to control most of the region by rather average means. While I cannot say what kind of competition pattern will emerge once the major political reorientation that took place in wake of the 2014 referendum solidifies (Mitchell 2015; Henderson and Mitchell 2018), only a restoration of Labour’s control over the region would be helpful to national party competition. The first alternative of a nationalist dominance would create a number of problems. The SNP as a separatist party and the governing party of Scotland cannot be an acceptable coalition partner (Hayton 2015: 130–131). Even if all the specific policy and personal problems between it and the two unionist parties could somehow be overcome, major systemic problems would remain. The most obvious one is that the SNP would only become part of the government, or support a minority administration, in exchange for a second independence referendum, major constitutional or financial concessions towards Scotland, which the English public is unlikely to accept. The difficulty with financial concessions is that fiscal redistribution is a zero-sum game, meaning that Scotland’s gains have to be paid by England. This will be even less well received in England (Jeffery et al. 2016: 337–340; Henderson et al. 2015: 269–272; Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 9–22) if it is used to buy the support of an in England widely loathed separatist party. Constitutional concessions are likely to be equally problematic as Scotland’s powers are already quite extensive and because there have been no political compensations for its gains up until now. Moreover, the more constitutional privileges are bestowed upon Scotland without corresponding obligations, the more illegitimate these measures and Scottish political actors’ influence on national politics will be seen in England. This should also make clear why the current situation is so problematic and dealing with the SNP more difficult than in comparable situations in polities with weak or no elaborate form of decentralisation. In such situations, these parties should be more willing to join or support a national government in exchange for some kind of “home rule”, a process that can be well observed in the case of the Irish nationalists by the end of the 19th and early 20th century (Jalland 1980: 19–30; Morgan 1978: 28–29; Blake 1978: 15–18). First, under these conditions autonomist and regionalist parties have a far more legitimate claim to participate in the national government since “their” territories are influenced in the same way by national politics as all other regions and there is no other way to ensure an effective recognition of “their” regions’ interests (see the respective plans on how to deal with Ireland’s representation in Westminster after the establishment of Irish Home Rule, Jalland 1980: 20–21). Under the already highly autonomous and wide-ranging devolution settlement in the UK, this is hardly the case anymore. Second, there is a shift in bargaining power involved depending on the scale and depth of the already existing decentralisation settlement. In case of weak or no decentralisation, national parties have (if they act fast enough) far more leverage on regionalist and separatist parties since they can make a lucrative enough offer that only includes a mediocre amount of autonomy or decentralisation but still forces those parties to either accept a settlement well below their maximum demands

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or continue pushing for a parliamentary hopeless effort to achieve independence or a settlement close to it (De Winter 1998: 239–240; Meguid 2008: 243–246). In a polity with very extensive rights to self-governance, this bargaining power flips because the national parties have hardly anything to offer that could divide the supporters of the separatists (Jeffery 2011: 161). Instead, the depth of the settlement should increase the nationalists’ incentives to reject even lucrative offers because they have far less to fear from eventual government chaos, since their region will only be partially affected by it, and they could use it to strengthen their case for independence (Henderson and Mitchell 2018; Rokkan and Urwin 1983: 140–145; Hayton 2015: 130). Accordingly, in the British case the SNP faces much smaller consequences following negotiation failures than the unionist parties. Therefore, every seat won by the SNP is one lost for a stable government or a clear majority in the HoC. Should the nationalists continue to win around 30 or more seats, this would create a realistic chance of them holding the balance of power in Westminster in the near future. But even if they are pushed back, the alternative scenario is not much better from a systemic point of view. I outlined that the heightened salience of the independence question, as a result of the referendum (Mitchell 2015: 91–95; Henderson and Mitchell 2018), led to a Conservative resurgence in Scotland. Should the Tories manage to exploit unionist sentiments and somehow build on the positive public reception of their former Scottish leader Ruth Davidson (Henderson and Mitchell 2018: 120–122), they might be able to permanently push Labour aside and become the main representative of the unionist camp. The latest general election already gave some indication that the new Tory support in Scotland is, despite mentionable losses, fairly reliable while Labour is still in free fall. However, as my calculations have shown, the Tories are already in a position where both securing an English majority and winning a UK-wide majority typically coincide. Conversely, failing to achieve an English majority always results in a UK-wide Conservative defeat under my notional scenarios, even if they had won 50 seats in Scotland. In essence, this means that a larger Tory presence in Scotland would hardly change their chances of winning, and thereby not increase the vulnerability of Labour governments, but make it much harder for Labour to overcome an incumbent Tory government. Since lower vulnerability also means lower chances of government changes and thereby restricts the control of the government in majoritarian democracies, the consequences of a Tory dominance in Scotland would be a burden to party competition rather than a blessing. Conversely, the numbers for Labour showed that their notional seat returns in England heavily declined over time and that its returns from the Celtic fringe became far more crucial in securing parliamentary majorities than they had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Permanently losing the approximately 40 seats it has held in Scotland since 1964 means that the party would have to compensate them by gaining even more seats in England, where it has been struggling since the Thatcher era (Curtice 2017, 2015a; Harrop 2015). To do this, Labour has to win in the south of England (Diamond and Radice 2015, 2011, 2010; Radice 1992) since it will be impossible to secure almost every single seat in the Midlands with hardly any potential of additional seat gains in regions where it is already well positioned. But with its southern support being so weak that seat flips only begin to materialise with very

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large vote swings, it seems extremely difficult for Labour to scrape together enough gains in southern England. Accordingly, the only electoral scenario that would help preserve a less unbalanced national competition situation and minimise the dangers of hung parliaments is a return to Labour controlling the vast majority of the Scottish seats. The fifth general trend has, to some degree, to do with the interaction between the other general trends and the regional developments of the electorate’s size. As I have outlined in the beginning of my empirical analysis, the Celtic fringe’s representation in Westminster remained largely stable (McLean 1995) as did England’s parliamentary strength (Rossiter et al. 1999a: 192). The crucial developments therefore took place within England rather than between the different nations. The fall of the voting population in the north, but especially in the capital, coupled with the large increases in the southern and eastern regions of England had completely lopsided effects on the parties. The increasing regional homogenisation of voter support allowed the Tories to reap almost all of its benefits, while Labour had to carry most of the burdens of seat reductions or stagnations (although the boundary commissions still tended to protect those declining regions). As a result, my calculations show that the Conservatives will always win an English majority when they win the UK as a whole but oftentimes even secure an English majority despite failing to claim a parliamentary majority. Labour on the other hand would not have scored a single English majority under an average vote swing since 1979, except for one hypothetical election based on the 2017 results (Curtice 2017, 2015a). Accordingly, while in the 1950s and 1960s England swung with the kingdom as a whole, today it will far more often stay with the Conservatives no matter in which direction the overall vote goes. This does not mean that it is impossible for Labour to create an English majority, but it does mean that the party has to either frequently score knockout victories or chip away Tory support over three or four consecutive elections. Since there are no indications that landslide victories have become a more common phenomenon it is more likely that the average government duration, especially of Tory administrations, will increase. While this is in itself a problem for majoritarian democracies, it is further aggravated by two other problems resulting from the electoral deviations between England and the Celtic fringe. First, it is simply less likely that Labour will manage to extract the same number of seats from the Celtic nations as they did in the 1970s or 1980s. I have already discussed this problem for Scotland and even though the situation in Wales is less acute, it has not developed favourably (Bradbury 2015). The region was once Labour’s safest stronghold, but heavy losses over the years have reduced today’s support below the party’s average. Conversely, although the Tories did not fare particularly well in the region, they managed to strongly improve the effectiveness of their vote. Accordingly, if Labour is unable to durably reverse the negative pre-2017 trend it might face some major seat losses or at least a significant decline of reliability concerning its large seat returns. Second, even if Labour manages to secure UK-wide majorities through the Celtic vote, a more frequent dependency on it will inadvertently create legitimacy, and eventually even constitutional, problems. The more fiscal, administrative and legislative

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autonomy is granted to the Celtic nations, the less acceptable their Westminster influence will become unless the kingdom establishes a clear separation of powers between the central state and the subject nations, including specific recognitions concerning the governance of England (Jeffery et al. 2016; Henderson et al. 2015; Wyn Jones et al. 2013, 2012). I would emphasise again that this is not a specific problem of majoritarian democracies. Labour’s reliance on the Celtic vote would be unproblematic in a classical unitarian and centralist regime; however, in the case of a strongly devolved polity like the current UK it becomes a significant problem. The combination of the de facto territorial nature of government with the lack of an institutional and procedural separation of powers makes it only natural that MPs of the various nations are perceived differently. As long as central state decisions were uniform in content and binding for the whole country it made no difference which MPs’ votes decided government policy. But once laws regularly only apply to certain regions and the central state does not legislate for specific regions in many policy areas, these regions’ delegates will more actively be identified as “special interest” representatives or MPs safeguarding minority interests (Flinders 2014: 191–194). This is typically avoided by limiting the powers of the central state parliament to non-devolved policies or areas of obvious national interest, so that all MPs have the same legitimate interest in these issues. However, Westminster’s conscious decision to do exactly the opposite strengthens the perception of Celtic MPs’ participation in decisions that only concern the governance of England as being an illegitimate influence and dominance of “minority” interests over the UK’s majority population (Jeffery et al. 2016: 337–340; Henderson et al. 2015: 269–272; Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 9–22). This may not automatically turn into a constitutional crisis on the first occasion, but the structural development of Labour’s support in England renders the party dependent on the Celtic vote and could well become a common characteristic of Labour majorities in Westminster, making it a far more serious problem.

Chapter 8

Territorialisation as a Threat to Political Order

After having reviewed the most important developments of party competition, it is time to return to my initial problem and discuss the general conclusions I can draw from the British case for the study of potential problems of decentralisation for political order. In general, I argued that the main dangers of decentralisation lie in the potential incongruence between existing political institutions and those newly created by it. As the main driver of this incongruence, I identified the increasing territorialisation of both the de facto logic of governance (as a result of devolution) and of party competition. This ultimately damaged the general functionality of British government due to the lack of a formal recognition of these territorialisation processes in the procedural and institutional structure of government. The arguments I presented were mostly focussed on two different, but strongly interconnected problem dimensions, structural and affectual, which I will employ to summarise my final observations here. The first major challenge concerning the structural dimension was related to the development of party competition. Here, the most obvious and quite problematic general trend that resulted directly from increasing decentralisation was the rise of the separatist Scottish National Party (Gallagher 2009; Curtice et al. 2009: 17; Carman et al. 2014: 149–157; McCrone 2012) which conversely created one party competition-specific problem and one more devolution-related challenge. The party competition aspect was connected to the almost complete transformation of the local and with it the national competition structure (Curtice 2017, 2015a; Mitchell 2015; Johnston et al. 2016; Bogdanor 2016). Since the region was dominated by one of the two major parties, the rise of the separatists equalled an asymmetric shift in national party competition that strengthened the locally neglectable (Conservative) party against its main national competitor (the Labour Party). This is what usually has to be expected when such parties increase their support at the costs of nationwide parties since electoral support in regions with strong autonomist sentiment tends to be more lop-sided in favour of a single national party (Massetti 2011: 35–387; De Winter 1998: 240–241; Curtice 2015a: 43, 2017: 14). This trend was further aggravated in the UK by the general territorialisation of party support which saw © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Niendorf, The Devolution Gambit, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72523-5_8

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both major parties’ support concentrate in specific regions rather than remaining spread out in a more homogenous fashion. Due to this nationwide trend of electoral territorialisation, the elasticity of local majorities and therefore parliamentary composition heavily declined (Curtice 2020: 32–35, 2018: 31–33 and 41–42). With the general “freezing” of nationwide competition, the lop-sided shift in Scotland increased a national asymmetry that will be difficult to mend as long as the general territorialisation trend continues. While the consequences of such developments are potentially more serious for political systems with a majority or plurality voting system, they concern all democratic polities since this specific shift in competition structure leads to another institutional problem. This problem concerns the creation of stable national governments. As I have tried to outline at multiple points, the integration of separatist and more radical regionalist parties into national governments is highly problematic for a multitude of reasons (De Winter 1998: 238–241; Massetti 2011: 37–39; Elias and Tronconi 2011: 508–513). Since these parties have a lower acceptability as a coalition partner and usually draw significant support from one of the regularly governing parties, their rise increases the difficulty not just of creating single-party governments, but coalition governments as well. I also tried to argue that the more extensive decentralisation becomes, the less likely these regionalist or autonomist parties’ government participation will become and the less legitimate their political demands will be viewed by the majority population (Russell and Lodge 2006: 65–75; Jeffery et al. 2016: 337–340; Henderson et al. 2015: 269–272; Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 9–22). Therefore, increasing decentralisation, at least to some degree, lowers government stability as long as it is coupled with a growth of separatist or radical autonomist party support. The second problematic structural aspect related to the SNP’s rise lies in the institutional and procedural design of British devolution. The introduction of devolution lacked clear strategic thinking and was based on few (but usually overly optimistic) assumptions about its effects (Flinders 2010: 192–194; Jeffery 2009a: 91–99, 2009b; Mitchell 2002: 250–255). First, it was intended as a highly asymmetric settlement in which the central government would not only preserve its right to final intervention, but could also unilaterally modify the settlement in whatever way it seemed fit. In order to give this asymmetry full political weight, strict delineations of competences and conflict settlement mechanisms were excluded from it and instead a reliance on informal and behind-the-scenes negotiations was established (McEwen and Petersohn 2015; Jeffery 2009a: 304–305; Hazell 2007: 582–583 and 589–592). While this proved fairly workable as long as the devolved and national governments were controlled by the same party, the situation began to change with the rise of the SNP, the displacement of the New Labour in Whitehall and the increasing frequency of political crises (Brexit, Scottish independence referendum, breakdown of the Northern Irish coalition government, COVID pandemic). Accordingly, the actual workability of the initial settlement strongly depended on the outcome of the party competition structure. As long as party competition led to homogenous results (in terms of national and subnational government composition), the system worked fairly well. The moment these compositions started to deviate from each other and major political challenges arose, the less workable the arrangement proved to be. Since the respective

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regional party systems continue to strongly deviate from the national party system in both party strengths and policy priorities (Carman et al. 2014; Curtice et al. 2009; Dunleavy 2005; Gallagher 2009; Jeffery and Hough 2009; Johns 2010; Johns et al. 2009; Wyn Jones and Scully 2006), it seems unlikely that the initial convergence of political interests during the early New Labour years can be restored in the foreseeable future. For decentralisation reforms in general, this indicates that such largely unregulated and informal institutional and procedural arrangements depend in their workability on the structure of party competition and should therefore at least in the midterm be supplemented by more explicit (especially conflict resolution) mechanisms in case that devolution itself or more independent long-term processes of political alignment lead to modifications of party competition. In the UK, however, this flawed design was squared by a second, ill-founded (affectual) expectation, the hope to quell regional political dissatisfaction through decentralisation. The major affectual expectation was that the settlement with the Celtic nations would be enough to pull electoral support away from the separatist movement, lower independence demands and, in case that proved impossible, the institutional design should at least constrain the separatists in case they took control of the regional government and thereby weaken their support once they proved unable to implement their wide-ranging policy plans (Mitchell 2002: 247–249; Flinders 2010: 135–139 and 191–194; Jeffery 2009a: 291–296; Henderson 2007: 162–168). However, hardly any of this came to fruition. Neither did political support for independence subside (it rather rose as a consequence of the independence referendum and the Conservative government in Whitehall), nor did the SNP’s general electoral strength wane, despite smaller momentary setbacks. Among the various reasons for this development, I only want to point out two. First, the excessive redistribution of legislative powers towards the regional parliaments meant that the actual impact of political decision-making on people’s life continuously shifted in favour of the regional parliaments while the influence of Westminster’s political decisions on the Celtic fringe progressively declined (McEwen and Petersohn 2015: 195–196; Bogdanor 2009: 111–114), despite the continuing lack of a formal separation of law-making powers and an institutionalised process of conflict resolution. Second, irrespective of the central government’s formal right to disregard or intervene with the devolved parliaments’ decisions it could no longer uphold the mirage of being the sole interpreter of the settlement (Rokkan and Urwin 1983: 124–154; Keating et al. 2003: 8–11; Keating 1998: 72–85; Hepburn 2011: 13–15). Devolution’s real-world operation, the narrative about the purpose of devolution pushed by the nationalists as well as the people’s informed or uninformed expectations about it would move public perceptions of the functionality of devolution and the legitimacy of the central government’s handling of it beyond London’s control. As a consequence, public political focus in the Celtic fringe shifted from the national to the regional arena making it more difficult for the British government to have an effective influence on people’s orientations towards the settlement. The ill-thought of design of devolution fuelled a second more broader national development concerning the affectual dimension that is also a more universal problem

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of decentralisation reform, a potential backlash of the majority population. During and after the initial devolution discourse, it was typically argued that England could not have a devolution arrangement similar to the Celtic nations since it would dominate the UK under a symmetric form of devolution or federalism (KcKay Commission 2013: 25; Bogdanor 2010: 160, 2009: 100–101; Hazell 2006a: 224). This argument, however, presupposed that England is a rather homogenous political bloc that would enforce a unified interest against the other nations, something that was always rather implausible taking into account England’s internal heterogeneity in political and economic terms (Morgan 2002; Morelli and Seaman 2007) as well the increasing territorialisation of electoral support we could observe. Instead, it should have been expected that under a comprehensive devolution arrangement including England, the largest part of the kingdom would either remain internally deeply divided or, in case of a split-up of England into multiple regions, that these regions would be dominated by different parties. However, the preferential treatment of certain parts of the country coupled with the dismissive attitude towards the rest led to a peculiar constellation. The fact that the more prosperous regions of England had to pay for the rest of the country while its poorer regions always fared worse than the Celtic fringe under the Barnett formula and often also had to pay for their special grants despite facing comparable financial and economic challenges allowed for the appearance of a general dissatisfaction with the current devolution settlement in England (Hepburn 2011: 8–9; Bryant 2010: 259–261; Jeffery et al. 2016: 338; Henderson et al. 2015: 272–273; Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 9–11). Unfortunately, the problem of dealing with English nationalism might not even be so much about creating more democratically accountable structures or ensuring political equality between the different nations rather than about accepting the legitimacy of a specifically “English” political community (Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 23 and 37–39, 2012: 31–34; Jeffery et al. 2016: 341–347; Morgan 2002: 807–808). The problem here is that the current institutional arrangement cannot accommodate such a demand since there is no workable mechanism to express any kind of English interests or even allow England to explore whether there are common interests between its different regions or not due to a lack of the respective institutional structure or procedural recognition of the quasifederal character of the kingdom. The lack of a forum to express or explore its distinct identity and corresponding demands inadvertently conveys the sentiment that England as a whole holds a lesser status within the union and that specifically “English” interests have a lower legitimacy than the demands of the other nations (Wyn Jones et al. 2012: 31–34). For nations engaging in decentralising reforms in general, this means that especially asymmetric approaches can convey negative public reception if they are designed in a too lop-sided way that favours certain regions in powers, resources and interest recognition over other territories. Specifically concerning the affectual dimension, asymmetric devolution proved largely inadequate to satisfy the demands in the Celtic fringe while it fired up resentment in both the more prosperous regions inhabited by the majority population as well as in those in a comparably precarious state as the Celtic nations (Morgan 2006: 203). Since similar developments (at least concerning the demands of minority populations) could also be observed over the

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last years in the second most prominent example of asymmetric devolution, Spain, it raises serious questions about how well this form of decentralisation is adjusted to solve such identity-related problems in general. What became obvious through the growth of English identity and nationalism is that the British devolution settlement also led to a more general unravelling of traditional unionist identity. This indicates two broader problems that once again every state engaging in larger-scale devolution or decentralisation faces. The first is a potential identity crisis created by the transformation of state government (Kenny 2015: 37–39; Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 13–42), while the second concerns a slow dissolution of equity and equality as major central state promises (Keating 2012: 217–219; Bogdanor 2009: 110–111). While the first problem seems to be specific to union states and hardly transferable to other types of polities, this is only a superficial difference. The backlash of parts of the majority population in the UK just latched onto an identity that allowed it to emulate its demands in a comparable identity framework as the Celtic nations did, while in other settings such backlashes would probably just reemphasise the general “national” identity held by the majority population. Of course, the identity crisis in the UK was not “created” by devolution, but more likely by processes of globalisation, a lack of an active reflection about the meaning of “Britishness” after the fall of the empire and the general decline of modern state capacity, but it still seemed to reinforce these processes (McLean and McMillan 2006; Jeffery 2009a: 305–308; Flinders 2010: 193–194; Morgan 2002: 807–808). As the respective research shows, besides a general political distrust, the supposed control of English politics by “outsiders”, either the European Union or the devolved (especially Scottish) governments, is usually identified as the main constitutional problem by these English “patriots” (Wyn Jones et al. 2013: 20–23; Jeffery et al. 2016: 341–343). This leads to the second aspect of a slow dissolution of political and social equity and equality among the state’s population due to devolution. As Vernon Bogdanor (2009: 110–111) pointed out, devolution in general undermines the social promise of equity and uniform service provision which was the major justification for initial centralisation attempts by modern nation states. This problem should become more pressing the more political rights, especially taxation rights, are devolved to the subnational level. In the British case, the lop-sidedness of the economy and the significant financial and social inequality of the different regions will make it almost impossible to find a devolution arrangement that could satisfy all parts of the country (Urwin 1982: 35–40; Morgan 2002: 798–800; Dearlove and Saunders 2000: 179– 180; Webb 2004: 35–37; Budge 1996: 21). The major problem here is the already extensive powers granted to the Celtic nations. If broadly the same powers would be given to England or its different regions, a competitive form of decentralisation would be almost unavoidable (for the problem, see Hazell 2006a; Morgan 2002; Russell and Lodge 2006). This would most likely either facilitate already existing inequalities due to the very different initial conditions of the regions or require even more comprehensive central state redistribution between the devolved subjects (Morelli and Seaman 2007). The alternative of a far less extensive settlement for England, as originally intended by New Labour (Flinders 2004: 135–137; Bogdanor

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2003: 232–234; Hadfield 2004b: 248–249), would most likely only aggravate existing grievances over England’s “lesser” status within the union. Also, if anything can be learned from the behaviour of the devolved parliaments and governments, then it is that they (especially in the case of Wales) tended to bandwagon on the demands of their brethren, over time demanding the same rights and powers for themselves (Flinders 2010: 187–188; Henderson 2007: 155; Jeffery 2009a: 293). While the original Acts of the Union had laid out the essence of the political union, the Beveridge Report and the consensus of the 1950s translated the classical centralist and unitarian understanding of the social contract into practice. With the obvious displacement of the older territorial agreement by devolution, no new comprehensive contract has followed. Instead, especially Scotland retained all her political rights in the Westminster system which were enshrined in the Acts of the Union and supposed to compensate for the unification of Scotland’s and England’s parliament (McLean 1995: 256–257). The various devolution acts introducing further power transfers to the Celtic nations would still not lead to the establishment of a larger framework outlining the character and the purpose of the changing union and its nations or the general relationship between the central state and its subjects (Jeffery 2009a: 305– 308; Select Committee on the Constitution 2015a: 28–30 and 71–88; Flinders 2010: 193–194). With this transformation no longer being guided by the evolutionary logic outlined by traditionalist interpreters of the constitution, like Burke, Bagehot and Dicey, but rather by active political engineering it was not surprising that it led to the rise of both Celtic and English nationalism as well as a decline of “Britishness” and attachment to unionism (as long as it is not a thinly veiled mantle for English nationalism). This is again a potential problem for all states engaging in decentralisation. If such a project has little to no connection to the previous social and political contract defining the state and also does not replace the older contract with something reflecting the current political realities more adequately, it is likely to be seen as a threat to political order rather than an evolutionary reaction to the changing social and political environment. Finding such a balanced solution concerning economic and political equity as well as formal rights and duties of the different parts of the country and then putting it into political practice is further complicated by the discrepancies in electoral support. If electoral support increasingly territorialises, it will become more and more difficult for the major parties to strike a balance between actively preserving comparable social and economic conditions in the different parts of the country (especially if these are further supplemented by regionally diverging social values) and the electoral pressures put onto them to serve their main constituents’ interests which are de facto divided among geographic lines (Jennings and Stoker 2016: 377–379). If parties start to largely represent either the more prosperous or disadvantaged parts of a country, they also have to, at the very least to some degree, push the specific interests of these regions over those of the electorate as a whole to protect their own electoral support. This is even further aggravated by the degree to which the practice of government in general has territorialised (Henderson 2007: 156–159; Hopkin and Bradbury 2006). The deeper and broader devolution becomes, the less

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the parties will be able to designate and design their policies in a purely “national” fashion. As a result, the coincidence of both forms of territorialisation forces the parties to territorialise themselves in the way they govern and try to garner electoral support. In the British case, the consequences of these developments became very obvious in the fact that future Labour governments would, as a result of the lop-sided development of electoral support, most likely have to rely on the votes of their Celtic MPs to pass legislation that primarily concerns England and try to further subsidise the Celtic periphery at the costs of England (Hazell 2006a: 225; Russell and Lodge 2006: 88). But their originally more diverse origin of support will also force them to balance the interests of their different electorates through a truly “unionist” programme that is acceptable and appealing to three of the four nations of the kingdom. This, however, will be extremely difficult, especially as long as they are pushed hard by the SNP which will always be able to promote “Scottish interests” more aggressively than Labour. Conversely, the implementation of such a truly “unionist” programme is, as outlined above, increasingly hindered by the consolidation of devolution itself (Bogdanor 2009: 110–111; Morgan 2006: 201–203; Flinders 2010: 394–395). The national government simply does no longer possess the political powers to ensure an equal provision of social services or public services in general. Although it might be questionable to which degree the British government was ever practically able to realise its central promise of equity, it has unquestionably given up a significant amount of powers to directly influence the equal treatment of all British citizens as a result of devolution. On an abstract and general level, national parties that could traditionally rely on strong support from cultural minority regions will under increasing decentralisation face a double pressure situation in which they have to pay even closer attention to those minority interests in order to fend of potential challenges by separatist or regionalist parties while simultaneously having to uphold a commitment to universalist values and policies to not lose support among the segment of the majority population that usually backs them (Mycock and Hayton 2014: 266–268; Jeffery and Hough 2009: 234–235). All these problems were strongly aggravated by the general government structure of the UK. Both territorialisation processes proved to be particularly damaging because they undermined the stability and the changeability of the UK government. The freezing of party competition we have observed makes it increasingly difficult to change parliamentary majorities, while the existence of a strong separatist party makes it more likely that electoral outcomes will end up in unclear parliamentary situations, especially when the Labour Party challenges a Conservative government (Curtice 2018: 41–43, 2020: 35–37 and 44–45). Due to the deep flaws of the current devolution settlement, such situations will inadvertently facilitate constitutional crises or at least lead to serious legitimacy problems for the respective government. Since the structures of political support are largely beyond the agency of individual political actors (at least in the short term), they have to use their existing agency in designing territorial governance to counter the potential negative impact of the frozen competition structure or at least prevent its intensification (at the

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minimum by starting to more consciously reflect the potential consequences of devolution reforms as demanded by the Select Committee on the Constitution (2015a: 28–30)). The only arrangement that can provide a comprehensive rethinking of the purpose of the union and a stable settlement of relations between the nations and the central state is a federal or quasifederal power sharing that is both beyond parliament’s traditional sovereignty and the agency of individual political actors to constantly renegotiate the settlement whenever it seems expedient (Jeffery 2009a: 308–311, 2015: 277–278). However, such a final agreement can only be successful if it incorporates the developments of party competition I have discussed throughout this study since the skewed distribution of party support might multiply political conflicts if it pits regions dominated by different parties against each other (Stolz 2018: 2). No matter which form of settlement the UK’s political elites will choose (but even if they decide to continue their piecemeal approach), all of them will have comparable effects on party competition and therefore require some active consideration of the increasing territorialisation of political support since the manifold challenges resulting from it are already highly problematic under the current arrangement (Bogdanor 2005: 84–85). None of the possible alternatives will be without the danger of aggravating existing problems if designed poorly (Bryant 2008: 664 and 680–681), especially in case of the legitimacy question, and all choices will constitute a further break with the UK’s old constitution, but at least politicians have a choice in whether they want to write the story of “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the “Revenge in the House of Usher”.

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