Crisis is a much overused word. Yet if there is not a crisis of British democracy, there is certainly some cause for concern. For some of us, at least, have apparently lost interest in voting. The statistics are relatively familiar. It all began at the last general election when just 71.5 percent turned out to vote, the lowest proportion since 1929. Then throughout this parliament both local and parliamentary by-elections have failed to evince much interest. In local elections, for instance, only around three in ten voters have been inclined to vote, whereas previously the figure has at least usually approached four in ten. Meanwhile whereas one in three had typically made it to the polling station in previous Euro-contests, in the 1999 European elections, less than one in four did so.
Now the polls are telling us that turnout could well fall yet again in the forthcoming general election. In a recent MORI poll 67 percent said that that they were ‘certain’ or ‘very likely’ to vote in an immediate election, ten points down on the proportion who gave the same answer in February 1997. Equally, ICM have reported a five point drop in the proportion saying they are absolutely certain to vote. If these figures are any guide to what will happen when the election is eventually called then turnout will fall below 70 percent for the first time in a general election since 1918.
Low turnouts are a challenge to any democracy. Elections are meant to register the popular will. They can hardly do so if many people stay at home. Elections should also help to educate people in the rules and mores of democracy. If people are not taking much notice of what is going on, elections are unlikely to have that effect either. Meanwhile low turnouts can reduce the authority of government as those in power are unable to claim that they represent the majority will. But before we despair about the future of British democracy, perhaps we should ask why people have lost interest in the polls. All too commonly it is assumed that low turnout reflects voter apathy or even cynicism. It might. But it is far from being the only possible explanation. And some of the other explanations are perhaps rather more benign in their implications.
Before we assume that voters have lost the motivation to vote, we should ask how much encouragement they have been getting to do so. There is good reason to believe that in recent years they have not been getting as much encouragement as they often have in the past. We can identify two conditions that ought to encourage voters to go to the polls. First, voters should believe that there is a significant difference between the proposals being put forward by the main protagonists. And, second, voters should think that the outcome is likely to be reasonably close. What both conditions have in common, of course, is the message that going out to vote could make a difference.
Yet in recent elections voters have, if anything, been getting the opposite message. ‘New Labour’ may been an effective means of rebranding Labour in a form that more voters found acceptable. But at the same time many voters also picked up the message that, as a result, there was not much difference between Labour and the Conservatives any more.
The British Election Study found that in 1997 just 33 percent of voters believed that there was a ‘good deal’ of difference between the parties. The last time the figure was that low was in the early 1970s. And in 1970, at 71.9 percent, turnout was indeed almost as low as it was in 1997.
It might be thought that the electorate will see more of a difference between the parties this time around. At least both Labour and the Conservatives agree that the former are promising more government spending than the latter. But it is far from clear that so far voters think this means there is much of a difference. ICM recently found that while 44 percent of voters think that Labour would increase public spending, as many as 38 percent also think the same of the Conservatives. And of course in one crucial sense voters are right. Even now Labour and the Conservatives are not, in fact, arguing about whether to increase spending but rather by how much to do so.
Meanwhile, never has British electoral politics been as one sided as it has been over the last nine years. The Conservatives have been consistently well behind Labour in the opinion polls ever since the pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 – other than just nudging ahead in one or two polls conducted in the immediate wake of last September’s fuel crisis. Never before in the history of opinion polling has one party been so consistently ahead of the other. Even Michael Foot was ahead of Margaret Thatcher for a while. And big opinion poll leads tend to depress turnout. The 1983 election, when the opinion polls were also reporting double digit leads during the election campaign, was also notable for its low turnout, with just 72.7 percent voting. So, unless Labour’s double digit poll leads suddenly disappear, there does indeed seem little chance that voters will flock to the polls this time around.
But it would be a mistake to lay all the responsibility for the low turnout at the door of the parties and the pollsters. For there is also evidence that voters have become disengaged or even disillusioned with the political process, and that this is also one of the reasons why some at least are staying at home.
Britain might have been hit by industrial unrest and high inflation at the time, but back in 1973 as many as 48 percent of us said that the system of governing Britain either could not be improved at all, or, at most, could only be improved in small ways. But by the mid-1990s that figure had fallen to just 21 percent. Equally in 1974 as many as 39 percent of us were prepared to say that, irrespective of party, governments could be trusted to put the needs of the nation above those of their party ‘most of the time’ if not indeed ‘just about always’. By 1996, however, that figure had fallen to just 22 percent.
Note that on both measures the low point of our trust and confidence in British democracy occurred in the middle of the last Conservative government, a government that was not only highly unpopular, but also became mired in perceptions that it was sleazy. The election of a popular Labour government determined to end sleaze might have been thought likely to reverse that decline. Indeed, for a while it looked as though it was doing so. According to the 1999 British Social Attitudes survey the proportion thinking that the system of governing Britain needed little or no improvement was back up to 48 percent. Trust in the willingness of British governments to put the nation’s interests first did not recover quite so strongly, but at 33 percent immediately after the 1997 election, it was at least back to the level it was prior to the election of John Major’s disastrous second administration.
But the improvement has not held. The latest Rowntree Trust ‘State of the Nation’ poll conducted last autumn found that only 31 percent now think our political system is not in much need of improvement. The latest British Social Attitudes survey, to be published later this year, will confirm this picture. Meanwhile the survey will also show that the proportion who trust governments to put the nation’s interests first has fallen to a new low of just 16 percent.
Moreover, in 1997 at least, those who do not have much trust in government were less likely to go to the polls. Those with low levels of trust appear to be nearly 10 percent less likely to vote than those with high levels of trust. Rising levels of distrust do appear capable of eroding our willingness to participate in elections. Even so, we should again be aware of a relatively benign interpretation of what is happening. Perhaps voters feel that Labour has not avoided the problems of sleaze either. After all, the tag has been applied to a number of its difficulties, ranging from the Ecclestone affair to the circumstances surrounding Peter Mandelson’s second resignation from the cabinet. And recent NOP and Gallup polls have both found that more or less as many people now feel that Labour gives the impression of being sleazy and disreputable as consider the Conservatives do.
If this, indeed, is the explanation of the newly rising tide in disillusion then we might hope that the new laws on campaign finance will help to clean up political appearances. Even so, we should be aware that perhaps the reason why sleaze is in the news so much these days is not because politicians have become any sleazier, but because our expectations of politicians are rising. In the mid-1980s, for example, only just over a third of us felt it was important for MPs to be independent minded. By the mid-1990s that figure had risen to over a half. There have also been increases in the proportion believing that MPs should be well educated and that they should know what being poor means. And there is not a single quality that we are less likely to think is important now than we did before. Rising expectations of our democracy might be thought to be a good thing. But if they outstrip the ability of our political system to deliver then the result could well be disillusion. They certainly suggest that it will not necessarily be easy for politicians of any party to reach the public’s new standards.
We might also wonder whether a gap between expectations and delivery underlies another apparent political difficulty that has beset Labour. This is its apparent failure to promise, let alone deliver, as much as some of its traditional supporters would like it to. Even in 1997, the British Election Study found that working class Labour supporters were particularly likely to stay at home. Turnout also fell most in the party’s safest, most working class constituencies. And it looks as though this pattern of working class abstention was even more evident in the 1999 European elections. Although only noticed by the media more recently, the apparent tendency for core Labour voters to stay at home has been with us from the moment Labour was elected. This apparent disillusion could simply reflect Labour’s apparent timidity in the policy proposals that it is prepared to put forward. But perhaps there is a wider, more pernicious problem that faces future governments of both left and right. It could be that the advent of the globalised world means that the public no longer feels that governments have the ability to deliver what they believe they ought to be capable of delivering, and that people are not bothering to vote as a result.
There is indeed some suggestion in the latest British Social Attitudes survey that people feel that governments do not find it easy to fulfil their responsibilities. Twice as many of us believe that it should be the government’s responsibility to provide healthcare for the sick as believe that governments can easily deliver good access to healthcare for all. The picture is similar when it comes to jobs, inflation and providing a decent standard of living for elderly people.
However, there is no sign that those who think that it is difficult for government to deliver on its responsibilities were any less likely to go to the polls in 1997. If anything, the opposite seems to be true. Any apathy that has been generated by a belief that Labour has failed to deliver cannot be blamed on any wider impact of globalisation.
And one explanation that we can certainly dismiss is that falling electoral participation is part of some wider social process of disengagement. In the United States there has recently been a flurry of academic interest in the consequences of an apparent decline in the degree to which Americans engage in any kind of collective communal activity, be it something as simple as playing cards or something more substantial such as engaging in voluntary activity. But there are no signs of a similar trend in Britain. For example, the proportion of people saying they belong to such local organisations as a parent-teacher organisation or a neighbourhood watch scheme has, if anything, increased in recent years.
So, in the light of our analysis, what can be done about our falling levels of electoral participation? Some of the apparent remedies, such as a more popular Conservative Party, are hardly likely to recommend themselves to any Labour administration. But we can probably assume that British elections will one day be closely fought affairs once more and that this will encourage some return to the polls.
Governments can, of course, reduce the degree to which voting appears to be an imposition by making it easier to vote. Recent changes to the law on electoral registration will certainly make it easier for those who move home to do so, as will the introduction of postal voting on demand. The trouble is that the evidence of the experiments into the impact of different electoral arrangements conducted at the time of last year’s English local elections suggests that making it easier to vote has little impact on our willingness to do so. The only device that increased turnout was when the ballot was conducted wholly by post, a procedure that raises sufficient problems about the security of the balloting process that it seems unlikely that it can be deployed in a general election for the foreseeable future.
But there are two things that a Labour administration can do. It may be difficult to meet the public’s apparently rising expectations of their MPs, but it should not be impossible. And it is far from clear that governments are incapable nowadays of crafting promises that are both capable of enthusing the electorate and of being delivered. These, it seems, are the real challenges for Labour as it contemplates the possibility of a second term.