It seems that little has been done to rejuvenate the power balance between the two principal parties in Britain, Labour and the Conservatives. For many people, there is a risk that this will only fuel the impression that our politics is stagnant, repetitive and unresponsive to public opinion. The logical consequence will be increased calls for electoral reform, the likes of which have already been heard from the political class. However, the shape that any future reform may take should bear in mind the lessons to be learnt from the polling results.
On Friday morning's Radio 4 Today programme, Shadow cabinet minister Theresa May stated that “Labour has lost the election, they [the public] have rejected the Labour party. This is an historic result for the Conservatives.” In a certain respect she is not wrong: Gordon Brown's Labour party has been ousted from power. However, the results have certainly not been conclusive. Indeed, for many it may be rather surprising that despite pre-election
approval ratings showing 66% of the electorate to be dissatisfied with the work of the government and 59%
dissatisfied with the work of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, we are still looking at a hung parliament in which Labour figures as the second strongest party.
If Labour have lost, then who has won the election? This is unclear. One explanation was to be heard, again on the Today programme, from Labour Cabinet Minister Lord Mandelson, who claimed the results demonstrate that “the public don't want any single party to have a monopoly of power.” He too, is not entirely wrong: the electorate has not decided univocally which party should rule. In summary, people seem to have wanted change, but not known what that change should be.
These results illustrate a central weakness of representational democracy. Each individual has one vote to cast. This vote operates, on the one hand, as a mechanism of retrospective vertical accountability: the citizen can hold the incumbent responsible for their past actions. It can be assumed that the Labour decline has come as the result of this retrospective accountability vote against them, reflecting the negative popular opinion felt during their last mandate. On the other hand, however, the vote also constitutes a prospective granting of authority: the citizen can back an incoming politician and their party by giving them support to carry out their promises for the future.
In a two-party race citizens have one vote with which to simultaneously punish one party and reward the other. Yet if they do not support either party, their choice is compromised: they cannot punish both. In the absence of a much hoped-for three party race, the 2010 election has followed this pattern, and faced with the choice of punishing the Labour incumbent and granting authority to the Conservative opposition, or blocking the Conservatives from power and approving another Labour mandate, the electorate has faltered with uncertainty.
The choice facing voters was therefore constrained by a deficient political supply and by a compromised procedure.
As long as vertical accountability measures are tied to the granting of authority in this way, electoral choice will remain limited. At times when the political supply is deemed inadequate these problems are exacerbated and we are confronted with a hung parliament in which no party is clearly punished and no single party rewarded.
We must ask, first, how can the political supply be made more responsive to society's needs? And secondly, how can more efficient systems of checks and balances be established that enable granting of authority and holding to account of politicians without relying solely on the electoral system? The introduction of proportional representation may widen the political supply offer and improve the degree to which the British political system is deemed to be truly representative. Yet this institutional change will not be enough: it will have to be accompanied by the development of democratic participatory procedures to limit the perceived gap between parties and public, improving information sharing between citizens and politicians and making parties more responsive.
What form might these reforms take?