So what mandate does the new government have? K-punk (in a wider, very good post) quotes Melanie Phillips saying that “no-one voted for a hung parliament.”
Slavoj Žižek - click for credit
Before the election, there was a persistent rumbling around Gordon Brown’s legitimacy as PM (he didn’t win a general election) that seems strangely lacking around David Cameron – arguably less legitimate than Brown by the same arguments.
All of this demonstrates the dangers inherent in the way that the UK’s constitutional arrangements are reified into … well … a constitution. As the press coverage in the days following the election confirmed, our constitution appears to be whatever newspaper editors think that they would like it to be.
Dealing with this, K-Punk quotes extensively from an article by the Slovenian Marxist writer, Slavoj Žižek in which a similarly reified concept – the market – is debunked:
“Each individual perceives market as an objective system confronting him, although there is no objective market but just the interaction of the multitude of individuals – so that, although each individual knows very well that there is no objective market, just the interaction of individuals, the specter of ‘objective’ market is this same individual’s fact-of-experience, determining his beliefs and acts. Not only market, but our entire social life is determined by such reified mechanisms……”
Continuing….
“Prosopopoeia is usually perceived as a mystification to which naïve consciousness is prone, i.e., as something to be demystified…. Dupuy recalls how sociologists interpret electoral results: for example, when the government retains its majority, but barely does so, the result is read as ‘the voters prolonged their trust into the government, but with a warning that it should do its work better’, as if the electoral result was the outcome of the decision of a single meta-Subject (voters) who wanted to deliver a ‘message’ to those in power.”
This helps us to look at the 2010 election afresh and determine what we actually know about it.
We know that it returned 650 MPs, all of whom received the largest number of votes in their constituencies (though many failed to receive a majority).
We know that every vote that those MPs received was cast for slightly different reasons and with slightly different levels of conviction. Many voters hadn’t made up their minds until they lowered their pencil onto the ballot paper. The day prior to the election, ITV’s polling told them that 38 per cent of the voters said it was “quite possible” they would change their mind before voting. Other polls at over 2.5 million voters as ‘undecided’ at the same point. If we had an electoral system that allowed people to divide their vote up in some way, we may have got a very different result indeed.
We know that many votes were cast ‘tactically’ – not for a candidate but against them. We also know (and I can’t remember where I read this*) that a lot of ‘tactical’ votes were cast stupidly – people either believed in ropey statistics or just didn’t research it properly and ended up voting for the third-strongest party on the ballot in a quest to stop the bookies favourite.
We know that every MP will have slightly different levels of allegiance to their party leader. I suspect that Charles Clarke or Frank Field would be fairly relaxed about having David Cameron as a PM if the alternative were Gordon Brown. On a much larger and profounder scale, we know that many people who voted Lib-Dem may have changed their vote had they known for certain that the Lib-Dems would go into coalition with the Tories. We just don’t know how many.
And so on. The reified election results mask a much more complex set of factors in which preferences were weighted, outcomes gamed and errors were compounded.
The only thing we know for certain is that those MPs that were returned got more votes than their strongest rivals and that is the only legitimacy that the whole election campaign bestows. Strangely – and sadly – the bizarre way that the British discuss their constitutional settlement consistently serves to mask this fact.
It’s a shame, because it’s the most attractive and defensible aspect of our constitutional settlement such as it is. It makes the case for a greater focus upon individual elected representatives and candidates and for a greater measure of independence for them once they’re elected.
*Tim Harford’s More or Less podcast during the election highlighted the way that parties misrepresented previous electoral statistics to dupe tactical voters into making the wrong choice.
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And, from the returns I saw, an even larger number would’ve changed their votes if they knew the LDs would go into coalition with Labour. But no one knew what was going to happen, but it’s not like Clegg et al weren’t clear that it was possible, even likely.
Agree with you though, my local MP (a Tory in a 3-way marginal) got in partially through anti-Labour tacticals, partially through his personal strengths as a very strong centrist candidate, and partially because the anti-Tory vote was even more split (Labour candidate was terrible and disliked, Green candidate exceptionally good, LD candidate very good but coming from 3rd place despite dominance in LG).
Each individual elected MP knows their personal mandate is dependent on a lot of factors. Unfortunately, many of them are in such ‘safe’ seats that they tend to misinterpret that mandate significantly.
One thing I dislike about the current system, especially where it applies to the Tories although Labour’s not much better these days, is that in opposition, all they’ve got left as MPs are those from ‘safe’ areas where their party is fairly secure. They’re thus very prone to groupthink, to an extent can see that in Labour leadership debates now, they’re not looking at why they lost the central ground, they’re reacting to how they perceive it went badly in some ‘core’ areas. Including areas like Rochdale where they regained the seat.
Tories in opposition were terrible, all their MPs come from Tory areas, their policies were designed to appeal to Tory areas, they still don’t understand why they did so badly when the election was theirs to lose. Exacerbated given their policy process, which is very MP-centric.
Advantage LDs have, so few MPs they can’t dominate the policy process, so each area of the country is involved through sending reps to conference.
Ah well. Things might get better. Really hope things do get better, would be nice for voters to have valid alternative options next time.
(abnd I forgot to tick that little box below)
Yes. It’s one of the worst aspects of our electoral system that Labour would put someone like Margaret Hodge up in Barking in the first place. If they’d ever doubted they could lose the seat they wouldn’t have done (and they found themselves with the worst fight of all as a result).
What do you think to the idea of giving people 10/10ths as votes instead of single one Mat? I snuck that one in here, but I actually can’t think of any downsides yet – and I can’t remember anyone seriously advancing the idea before.
I’ve seen something similar before, although I can’t recall where, and it might’ve been “obscure academic paper number 534″. I donknow that, having gone through many many different systems, I’ve come down on preferential voting (ie number in order of preference) as the best method overall.
Biggest flaw I can see in splitting votes off, is that people do like to vote against just as much as they like to vote for; big thing in 2010 was the number of expenses tainted MPs that lost seats, against national trends, people do like to get rid of politicians they dislike.
Which means any system where you split your vote up and allocate it where you like will have a tendency, amongst some, of simply all (or as much as allowed) being allocated to one candidate anyway.
I’ll see if I can remember what the similar system I’m thinking of is called, then go read up, but it’s 10 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy on it.
Quite a few ‘expenses tainted’ MPs did better than expected though. For me, the interesting thing about that scandal was the way it reduced the number of incumbents on offer. In seats where Labour actually had incumbents, they generally did a lot better than the average swing. If there’d been more of them, perhaps we’d have had a slightly different result.