Dispatch Box
Issue 19 | December 2014
The Newsletter of the Department of Government
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A lso
Simon Hix
Michael Bruter
Sarah Harrison
Tony Travers
Ben Lauderdale
in this issue
...
BritGov @ LSE
Past and upcoming events
Staff News
Katrin Flikschuh
Christian List
Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey
Lea Ypi
Chun Lin
Student News
and Accolades
LSE Government student
Michael Farqhar wins
prestigious AGAPS PhD
dissertation Award
GV314 student research
group gets a mention in
Political Insight magazine
Welcome to New Staff
Alexandra Cirone
Mark Hill
Sebastian Koehler
Suhjin Lee
Nicola Mastrorocco
Lukas Obholzer
Johannes Olsthoorn
Christian Schuster
Stephane Wolton
LSE Government
Britain: Political Science Disneyland!
Innovating in Electoral Research
Inside the Mind of the Scottish Voter
The Scottish Referendum and the Future of the Constitution
Forecasting the 2015 British General Election
Head of Department’s Message — Simon Hix
Researching and teaching politics
in Britain has never been so much
fun.
Disneyland” … except even better,
as all the rides are free and there are
no queues!
We saw a very close referendum on
Scottish independence, and with the
highest turnout (85%) in any election
in Britain since universal male suffrage in 1918. The UK Independence
Party won the European elections in
May 2014 – the first time since 1910
that an election was not won by Labour or Conservatives – and have
gone on to win a seat in Westminster for the first time. We now have
more charismatic politicians outside
Westminster (Salmond, Farage and
Boris ) than inside. We are witnessing a re-alignment in the British party
system, with deeper divisions within the Conservatives and Labour on
the two dominant issues of the day
(Europe and immigration) than between the two parties’ leaderships.
Most commentators are predicting
another hung parliament after the
general election in May 2015. We
might even have a “people’s constitutional convention” soon after the
election (of randomly selected people, following the Irish and Canadian
models), to work out how to balance
further devolution for Scotland with
the growing “English problem”.
Let me elaborate on one of these exciting rides: the European elections
in May 2014. The headline result,
of course, is that UKIP won. But, all
across Europe we saw a collapse in
support for mainstream parties and
a rise in support for populist parties on the radical right and left. At
one level these parties are very different: contrast Eurosceptic protest
parties (UKIP, True Finns, Beppe
Grillo in Italy) with radical right anti-establishment parties (the French
Front National, Danish People’s Party, Dutch Party for Freedom, Austrian
Freedom Party), nasty extreme right
movements (Greek New Dawn, Hungarian Jobbik), and even new radical
left parties (Greek Syriza, Spanish
Podemos). Yet, most of these parties have a common support base,
driven by a growing economic and
cultural divide between wealthy and
globalised urban elites (in financial
services and creative industries)
and lower income (white) voters in
post-industrial cities and increasingly
poor rural communities.
And on top of all that we face a possible referendum on UK membership of the EU in 2017 if not before.
For political scientists like me, who
study parties, elections and institutional reform, Britain is like “poli sci
This divide is most strikingly illustrated in the similar voting patterns
in Britain and France in May 2014.
London and Paris – the quintessential wealthy, global and multi-ethnic
cities in Europe – voted more like
each other than like the rest of Britain and France, respectively. UKIP
1
Staff News: Highlights
Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey is advising the ongoing
review by former Federal Reserve Board Governor,
Kevin Warsh (pictured below) on the potential publication of Bank of England MPC meeting transcripts.
The Warsh Review is in response to a request by Andrew Tyrie (Chairman, Treasury Select Committee)
for the Bank to follow the example of the US Federal Reserve in publishing the verbatim policy meeting transcripts. Professor Schonhardt-Bailey’s recent
book, Deliberating American Monetary Policy: A Textual Analysis (MIT Press, 2013), has examined the effect that publication of meeting transcripts had on the
Federal Reserve FOMC meetings in the early 1990s.
The British Academy has elected four Fellows from
LSE, two of whom hail from the Department of Government. Professors Katrin Flikschuh and Christian List
have been honoured in 2014, along with Jeremy Horder
(Law) and Dimitri Vayanos (Finance). Each year, the
British Academy elects into its Fellowship UK-based
scholars who are highly distinguished academics and
who are recognised for their outstanding research
and work across the humanities and social sciences.
Our warm congratulations go to Katrin and Christian!
Chun Lin, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, has published her new book China and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, History, and
Contemporary
Politics
(Palgrave,
2013),
to
great acclaim. The book has been commended for its theoretical sophisication and analytical power, described by Lisa Rofel as “a ringing
political manifesto for a reinvigorated socialism.”
Lea Ypi, Associate Professor in Political Theory, has
received prizes from both the Philosopher’s Annual and the British Academy. Dr Ypi’s article, ‘What’s
Wrong with Colonialism’ (Philosophy and Public Affairs 41, 158-191) was chosen as one of the ten best
articles in Philosophy in 2013, to be included in the
Philosopher’s Annual alongside other articles of
exceptional merit. She was also awarded the Brian Barry prize, jointly with Dr Helder De Schutter
(Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), for their essay ‘Mandatory Citizenship for Immigrants’. The Brian Barry Prize for excellence in political science research
will
be
awarded
annually
from
2014.
Continued from page 1 ...
won 17% of the votes in London while FN won 17% of the
votes in Paris, compared to UKIP winning 27% in the rest
of Britain and FN winning 25% in the rest of France. So,
the phenomenon of UKIP is not unique. What is perhaps
unique, however, is the combination of the rise of UKIP
with so many other political and constitutional challenges
that the UK currently faces. This makes British politics so
interesting, and is the running theme of our new online
open-access course in British Government (GV311), led
by my colleague Professor Tony Travers. Lectures for this
full-year course are open to the public and loaded online. Check out the course, come along to the lectures, or
watch them online as we count down to what could be the
most exciting and closely fought election in British history
on 7 May.
Talking of the election, another LSE colleague, Ben Lauderdale, together with Chris Hanretty (University of East
LSE Government
Anglia) and Nick Vivyan (University of Durham, PhD from
LSE Government Department) have pioneered a new
method for forecasting the general election, combining
census data on the socio-demographic make-up of each
Westminster constituency and the latest national and constituency-level opinion poll data. Follow their forecasts on
electionforecast.co.uk.
We are also launching a new LSE UK Elections Blog in
December, building on our very successful British Politics
and Policy blog (blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy). The
new blog will provide a platform to promote the work of Ben
and his colleagues, as well as to present the approaches
and predictions of other forecasting teams (such as Steve
Fisher at Oxford and Will Jennings at Southampton). We
will also be inviting leading scholars and commentators
from the LSE and across the UK to contribute regularly to
the new blog. So, the conclusion? Watch this space!
2
Innovating in Electoral Research — Michael Bruter
W
hat will your face betray
when you will be in a polling
booth, casting your vote in May?
What will go through your hearts and
minds as some of you vote for the first
time? And will the way the ballots have
been designed influence your vote in
ways that you do not even suspect?
Those are some of the questions
that our ECREP team will continue
to explore in May 2015 through our
study of the British General election.
Breaking new borders in electoral
research
With the elections fast approaching,
electoral research in Britain will be
speeding up and become increasingly exciting. While the study of electoral behaviour has boomed since
the 1960s, it has gone through its
various fashions and periods. The
1960s and 1970s were the decades
of political sociology where scholars would go through great lengths
to try and predict citizens’ votes according to who they are. The 1980s
and 1990s were dominated by political economy and intense research
on the impact of economic factors on
both the individual vote and overall
election winners. The 2000s have,
without a doubt, been the decade of
“contextual” studies whereby political behaviouralists have tried to systematise our understanding of how
social, political, and anecdotal externalities (a financial crisis, a scandal,
a particularly good or bad speech)
can change the course of an election.
In many ways, my team (which currently includes Sarah Harrison, Sophie Lecheler, Eri Bertsou, and
Soetkin Verhaegen) is hoping to
help making the 2010s and 2020s
the decades of electoral psychology.
We want to put the spotlight on the
rather under-captured role of emotions, memory, personality, and the
trigger of psychological mechanisms
on a voter’s ultimate choice. In every
election, between 20 and 30% of voters will end up voting in a way that
LSE Government
they were not expecting themselves
a week before the vote. In fact, in
a recent (November 2012) Irish referendum, it was over 70% of voters
who either changed or made up their
minds within a week of the ballot.
How can we understand this deviation between an “intended” vote and
an “actual” vote without looking into
the role of voters’ psychology? Context could explain a one-off change,
but not a phenomenon which is virtually systematic. And what about
the fact that over 60% of Brits say
that they are actually feeling happy
at the moment they cast their vote,
and 28% of them have already cried
during or because of an election?
Our contention is that important
elections are a moment that matters much more in the “average”
citizens’ lives than we, political scientists, tend to assume. Indeed, we
are even suggesting that this is why
they keep voting in large numbers
after all despite feeling quite cynical and disappointed with politics;
think of the recent Scottish independence referendum for example.
Pioneering research methods
The questions that we are raising
are ambitious and require methodological innovations. In a unique
experiment, we filmed the shadows
of voters when they stand in the polling booth and cast their vote. We
are now preparing a new collaboration with specialists from computer science, marketing, and political
communication to put together instruments which will enable us to automatically code facial and bodily
expressions and emotional response
in political and social sciences.
In another innovative part of our research, we ask hundreds of voters to
keep election diaries where they record their thoughts and discussions
about elections throughout a campaign, and we are planning a new
generation of family video diaries to
capture the same. And at the same
time, we have also partnered with
election observers who, throughout
their day in polling stations, record
their impressions on our behalf – how
do people seem when they come to
vote, with whom are they coming,
what sort of questions do they ask?
Do they smile? How do they dress?
And of course, we use more traditional instruments like interviews, family
focus groups, and even panel study
surveys (now in their 6th year) to get
new insight into voters’ psychology.
We basically try to use multiple methods – both quantitative and qualitative, both self-reported and externally
Figure 1
3
captured, to try and fully grasp what
elections represent in citizens’ lives
and what goes on through their minds
when they stand in the polling booth.
What is the point of breaking
walls? Three examples of recent
findings
While we believe in the need to innovate both analytically and methodologically in our quest to better
understand the mind of the voter, we
are not simply interested in the “beauty of the art” of social science research or in an exercise in style. The
whole point of breaking walls in theoretical models and the methodologies
employed is to come up with important new findings which do not only
have implications on our scientific
understanding of electoral behaviour
but also have important implications
on the way elections are and should
be organised. In this final section, I
will take three examples of some of
the findings that we have come up
with over the past few months of research and which will give a good
sense of where we are trying to go
next in our future investigations.
In the first instance, let us go back
to the 2010 UK General elections.
Among the many aspects of the vote
that we looked into at the time, we
considered the idea that using postal voting from home might lead to
fundamentally different electoral
Figure 3
LSE Government
Figure 2
circumstances compared to voting in
person in a polling station. We thus
compared the voting experience of
people voting using the two modes,
and saw how it varied depending on
the generation voters belong to. We
found that people who vote in person
at the polling station tend to have a
far more positive voting experience
which makes them more likely to vote
again the following time, they tend to
vote more sociotropically (i.e., according to what they believe is best
for the country rather than what they
believe is best for themselves) but
most strikingly, we find that in the
case of young voters, after you have
controlled for their background and
voting intentions three weeks before
the vote, going to the polling station
makes them far less likely to vote for
radical parties like UKIP or the BNP.
For 18-25 year olds, the difference is
enormous as they are indeed twice
as likely to vote for such a party if they
vote by post (after all the controls are
included in the model). Among 25-45
year olds, proportion voting for parties like UKIP or the BNP is also increased by nearly 50% when they did
not go to a polling station in person.
However, for over 45s the difference
disappears altogether (figure 1).
As a second example, let us consider the question of internet voting
in elections. Many decision-makers
have considered whether generalising the possibility of e-voting would
encourage citizens in general – and
young citizens in particular – to vote
as it would make the “cost of voting”
lower. It would also take
voting into a territory which
is admittedly a very natural one for young citizens.
Indeed, when citizens are
asked whether they think
that it would be a good idea
to allow voting on the internet as an alternative. Yet,
our mass experiment with
young people aged 15-18
in six different European
countries shows that in fact,
when young people vote on
the internet, this actually
ends up having a negative
impact on turnout over time
(figure 2). This is undoubtedly largely due to the fact
4
that young people voting on the internet have very significantly more
negative perceptions of the voting
experience than those who go to a
polling station as illustrated by figure 3. So in fact, it is not a case of
most people not voting because it is
too “costly” to go to a polling station
on election day (it may be to some
people but not to most) but rather a
case of people accepting to handle
that cost when they derive some positive emotions from the act of voting.
Those positive emotions are very
significantly undermined when the
polling station experience is replaced
by internet voting, thus leading
young citizens not to see why they
should bother to go and vote next
time, while those who experienced
the “true” polling experience get attached to the act of voting and repeat
it, typically with positive anticipation.
Finally, let us consider some of the
key results of our “visual experiment”
where we filmed the shadows of
dozens of voters while they were in
the polling booth casting their vote.
Here, we will not talk about the intriguing result of our coding of the
emotions displayed by voters, which
shows how we “feel” differently depending on whether we are given
paper or electronic ballots, and how
the ballot itself is designed, although
readers are most welcome to discover more on this in our publications. A very simple result, however,
is that the type of ballot that we receive also has a very strong impact
on how long we think about our vote
before casting it. In the case of our
experiment, people using a Direct
Recording Electronic voting machine
of a type used in many US counties for the November 2014 Midterm
Figure 4
Elections spent an average of 20
seconds thinking about their vote
before casting it. By contrast, on average, participants given a UK-type
paper ballot (with a list of names and
a need to tick that of the candidate
one wishes to vote for) this thinking
time increased by 50% to 30 seconds
on average. Finally, when participants were given French type paper ballots (one pre-printed ballot for
each candidate, the voter chooses
one and puts it in the envelope without writing anything), this thinking
time altogether tripled to a full minute on average (figure 4)! Of course,
such additional thinking time before
finalising one’s voting decision (and
of course in all cases, all information and candidates choices were the
exact same) is not neutral and will
impact both voters’ electoral choice
and how they feel about the election.
All in all, our team is striving to break
some new analytical and methodological borders in our understanding
of how voting works and what it
means to citizens. Only by asking creative questions and trying to use unusual means to answer them can we
point out to some crucial paradoxes,
such as the fact that explaining how
someone intends to vote is not nearly the same thing as explaining how
the person has actually voted at the
end, or that young people are both
less likely to participate in elections
and more enthusiastic than the rest
of the population in their hopes and
expectations of the voting process.
As part of this quest, the Scottish independence referendum of September and the British General election
of May 2015 as well as the European elections of May 2014 and the
US Midterm elections of November
enable us to test many fundamental questions and consolidate an
immense wealth of quantitative and
qualitative data aimed at understanding, ultimately, the mind of the voter.
Undergraduate Research Published in British Politics
LSE
Government
undergraduates
conducting
empirical
research
as
part
of
their
studies have been featured in Political Insight, the
Political Studies Association magazine (December 2014).
The article, ‘If Kirsty Calls: Political scientists and the
broadcast media in Britain’, was written by Professor Ed
Page and reports on the students’ examination of the pros
and cons of researchers engaging with the media. The
‘LSE GV314 Group’, comprising staff and students in the
LSE Government
Department of Government, includes Niovi Antoniou, Juliana Apopo, Jessica Austin, George Edwards, Stephanie
Gale, Mark Heffernan, Chloe Kiliari, Shreya Krishnan, Debbie Mantzouridis, Sophie Moon, Catherine Rawsthorne,
Naomi Russell, Alice Stott and James Yarde. Excitingly,
the research has now been published in full (British Politics, Vol. 9, 4, 363–384), and can be viewed as an online advance publication at palgrave-journals.com/bp.
5
Inside the mind of the Scottish voter — Sarah Harrison
On 18 September, 84.6% of Scottish voters took the direction of
their polling stations to decide
whether or not Scotland should
become an independent country.
This is about as “big” a question
as it gets for any polity, and in the
Scottish case, it was also the first
time that teenagers aged 16-18
were invited to participate in a vote.
As part of our “inside the mind of a
voter” project, our team conducted a mass survey of Scottish voters
on the night of the referendum, and
tried to better understand what this
momentous occasion had meant to
Scottish voters. We asked a number of innovative questions, from the
types of emotions that voters had
felt when they stood in the polling
booth, to whether the perceived historical nature of this referendum had
predominantly made it more worrying or more exciting in their view.
We also had questions pertaining
to the motivations of the voters, but
also on the main perceived qualities
and downsides of Scottish and British people, trust and distrust in institutions, and even the type of animal
voters would refer to if they were
to characterise the Referendum.
With our data freshly collected, we
wanted to share some of our first
findings with you. I will speak of three
crucial aspects of our results: what
Scottish voters told us is “wrong” with
the UK, their images of Scotland and
Britain, and finally what we uncovered about the historic and projective
nature of the referendum in their view.
The UK in question? Worries,
distrust, and concerns about the
state of the Union
Much has been questioned in the
media as to whether the Scottish referendum decision would hinge predominantly on what could be “right”
about an independent Scotland, or
on what is possibly “wrong” with current British society and institutions.
With Michael Bruter and Eri Bertsou,
we have devised some innovative
LSE Government
questions aimed at capturing levels of distrust in institutions such as
the Westminster and Holyrood Parliaments. We measured distrust in
a projective manner, focusing on
three theoretical components: competence (the fear that an institution
may be incapable of taking the right
decisions), ethics (the fear that an
institution may be incapable of taking a decision for the right reasons),
and congruence (the fear that outcomes might betray the representative preferences of an individual).
In our survey, we found that overall,
levels of distrust in the British Parliament (Westminster) were much higher among the Scottish population
than distrust in the Scottish Parliament (Holyrood). Distrust of the competence of Westminster stands at
58% (only 36% for Holyrood), distrust
of its ethics at 60% (for Holyrood, it
is 34%), and distrust of its congruence at 63% (36% for Holyrood).
In other words, the Scottish Parliament seems to have been partly spared the high levels of distrust
than many citizens feel towards their
political institutions, including, in the
Scottish case, the British Parliament.
Scottish voters feel worried that the
national Parliament is neither sufficiently competent, sufficiently honest, or sufficiently in line with their
own preferences to be trusted with
the conduct of their political affairs.
While Scottish voters still think
that
democracy
generally
works well in the UK (52% vs
21%), they worry that the country is not heading in the right direction, and a greater proportion fear
that their children will live a less
happy life than theirs rather than
the other way round (31% vs 24%).
Finally, while a majority of Scottish
voters think of the UK as a whole
as a serious and perseverant country, a majority of respondents also
describe it as snobbish, selfish,
and intolerant. By contrast, Scotland was primarily seen as a downto-earth, honest, and brave nation,
albeit a loud, impatient, and sometimes aggressive one by the members of her own national community.
Images of Britain and Scotland –
Open-ended answers
Here, let us present some results
from the open ended questions about
voters’ associations with the Scottish, British, and European flags. For
the purposes of those variables, respondents were asked to mention
the first three words that came to
their minds when they saw each of
the three flags. We excluded strictly descriptive references to the related community (e.g. “Scotland”
when seeing the Scottish flag) in order to focus on connotations instead.
The Scottish flag spontaneously elicits the largest proportion of positive
connotations (figure 1.1). For 28% of
respondents, the flag is associated
6
with pride while only 3.5% associate pride with the Union Jack. Another 10.7% of respondents associate the
St Andrew’s Cross with other positive adjectives (respect, emotion, etc), 9.5% to home, and 3% to freedom.
By contrast, the UK flag leads to significantly more contrasted references (figure 1.2). While 43.6% associate it
with the concept of Union, to a large proportion of respondents, it simply evokes negative adjectives (18.8%
while it is only 3% for the Scottish flag), and 18.3% associate it with England rather than Britain or the UK.
Only 3.5% of respondents associate the flag with pride.
Finally, the European flag is in many ways the most polarising of the three, with large proportions of both negative (28.5%) and positive (18.1%) references, as well as
objective references such as the Euro, EU policies, etc
(figure 1.3). On the whole, it is the most heterogeneous in
terms of the connotations voters associate with it, which
range from genuine enthusiasm to outright hostility.
A historic and projective vote
A vast majority of Scottish voters considered the
September referendum to be a historical vote. 52% of
them considered that it made the opportunity more
exciting, 25% that it made it more worrying, and 24% a
mixture of both. Citizens also considered this referendum
to be both more exciting and more worrying than a
General Election. Apart from being historical, however,
Scottish voters also approached the referendum in a
highly projective way.
A large proportion of voters tried to understand how the
rest of the country would vote before casting their own
ballot (63%). At the time they were in the polling booth
ready to cast their vote, 82% claim to have predominantly
thought of their responsibility to society, and 60% say
that they were also predominantly thinking of their family.
Indeed, 41% of voters of voters say that when they decided
how to vote, they were predominantly thinking of what
would be best for the generation of their children (this is
an unusually high proportion) while 48% thought of the
present and 10% of their ancestors. As for the referendum
itself, we note that it evokes overwhelmingly positive
references, such as freedom, choice, vote, debate, and
decision. Clearly, the very concept of presiding over one’s
own destiny through a referendum has been perceived
as a characteristically positive experience by the vast
majority of the Scottish people.
Conclusions
While the media primarily focused on the question of whether Scotland would vote for independence or not – obviously a question of extreme
importance for the nation – our research delves deeper
into the roots of the psychological and identity mechanisms that relate Scottish voters to their political systems.
It is clear that the invitation to participate in such a momen-
LSE Government
SCOT FLAG 1st word
Pride
Saltire
Positive adjectives (respected, cool, emotive, etc)
St Andrew
Home
Freedom
Negative adjectives (shame, bigots, trouble, etc)
Independence
UK
YES
28.0
28.0
10.7
10.7
9.5
3.0
3.0
2.4
2.4
2.4
UK FLAG 1st word
Union
Negative adjectives (betrayal, arrogance, bully boys, anger, etc)
England
Postive adjectives (hope, better together, strength, dynamic etc)
Unity
Pride
43.6
18.8
18.3
12.2
3.5
3.5
EU FLAG 1st word
Negative adjectives (liars, corruption, betrayal etc)
Don't Know, nothing, no idea
Positive adjectives (diversity, unity, utopia etc)
Euro
EU flag
28.5
28.0
18.1
13.1
7.5
Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3: First words spontaneously associated
with the Scottish, British, and European flags (open ended)
tous vote (well-illustrated by record turnout) captured the
imagination of many Scottish people and forced them to
think about their relationship to inter-related political communities – Scotland, the UK, and the European Union, each
with their own values, perceptions, and vulnerabilities.
The critical interest of unravelling those psychological,
political, and identity mechanisms is that beyond the end
of a specific electoral chapter, it allows us to dissect the
ties, and narratives of love, interdependency, and resentment between the Scottish polity and the United Kingdom.
This knowledge will be crucial to any decision-makers who
would like to replace uncertainty about a continued Union
by a rethinking of the desired modes of coexistence between the United Kingdom and each of its sub-components.
Even more importantly, perhaps, what our ECREP research
shows is that understanding those ties is not only a critical
need when national unity is being question, but a question
of everyday relevance, in any political system keen on
safeguarding its legitimacy in the eyes of its own citizens.
Sarah Harrison is Research Fellow in the Department of
Government and is part of the project “Inside the Mind of a
Voter” (ECREP), with Professor Michael Bruter.
7
The Scottish Referendum
and the Future of the Constitution
Tony Travers
Scotland’s referendum was
remarkable political event.
a
For
most
politically-interested
people in Britain, the vote was
the most exciting and engaging
electoral occasion of modern times.
For once, the result mattered. If the
Scots had voted ‘yes’ the United
Kingdom would have changed
forever. As it is, the ‘no’ vote has
triggered a series of shocks which
will affect politics in Westminster,
Holyrood and, indeed, Wales and
Scotland.
British Government @ LSE held
a major event in July which
brought together academics from
England and Scotland to consider
the constitutional and electoral
consequences of the Scottish
referendum. At the time, it appeared
the Scots would vote decisively
to stay in the UK. But the margin
narrowed significantly in early
September before opening out
again on polling day. The 55:45 vote
in favour of remaining within the UK
was narrow enough to suggest the
possibility of a second referendum
remains very real.
A second event at LSE in late
September examined the outcome
of the Scottish vote and also
looked forward to the 2015 general
election.
During the period in
early September when the polls
narrowed, former Prime Minister
Gordon Brown intervened to
guarantee substantial devolution
of fiscal powers to Edinburgh. He
apparently did this with the full
support of David Cameron, Ed
Miliband and Nick Clegg. In the
period since the referendum, a
struggle has broken out between
the Westminster leaders about how
best to make good on the offer to
LSE Government
the Scots while also sorting out
wider constitutional issues. After
the referendum the government set
up a Cabinet committee, chaired
by William Hague, to develop
proposals.
There is a series of linked problems.
First, Labour appears less willing
than the Conservatives and Liberal
Democrats to give Scotland full
powers over income tax. Second,
a number of English MPs have
become restive about Scottish and
Welsh MPs voting on England-only
matters at Westminster. Third, some
MPs and many council leaders
are concerned there is no withinEngland devolution to match the
transfer of tax-raising and legislative
powers to Scotland and Wales.
Finally, it is increasingly obvious
Britain’s long-evolved constitutional
arrangements have failed to keep
up with an increasingly-federal UK.
Either Westminster delivers on
its tax devolution promise to the
Scots or another independence
referendum
seems
inevitable.
The UK is still under threat of
dissolution. As far as ‘English votes
for English laws’ is concerned, an
arrangement will have to be put in
place to allow English MPs a greater
say in England-only legislation.
The alternative would be some
form of English Parliament, though
such an institution would surely
be so powerful within the United
Kingdom that it would render the
UK Parliament redundant and thus
destroy the Union.
Allowing some form of devolution
to English local government,
particularly to ‘city regions’, might
help in terms of re-balancing
powers in favour of England. But
this relatively simple idea runs
up against the consensus for
hyper-centralisation
which
the
Conservatives and Labour have
long agreed on. There is very little
chance the Treasury would ever
allow sub-national elements of
England the kind of tax freedom to
be given to Scotland and Wales.
The United Kingdom’s organic
‘constitution’ is under massive
pressure. Developing a federal
settlement
will
be
virtually
impossible within a country where
one of its constituent nations has
a population five times bigger
than the other three combined.
Moreover, the majority of existing
British politicians resist virtually all
constitutional codification.
Making
decisions
about
the
future of the constitution is made
more difficult still by the fact the
traditional British political parties
are dying. They have few remaining
members and a decreasing vote
share. If they discuss constitutional
reform, it is in each case from a
position of weakness. Eventually
there will have to be some form
of constitutional convention to
redesign the rules of the British
State. Since the Enlightenment
Britain has not faced a revolution
or a catastrophic war-time defeat.
There has been no intervention
which has required the re-setting
of the constitution. The Scottish
referendum has shown how underpowered the UK’s constitutional
arrangements now are.
Wider
reform looks inevitable.
8
Forecasting the 2015 British General Election — Ben Lauderdale
Many commentators agree that
the 2015 British general election
is the most *unpredictable* election ever.
This is not exactly right: there are
broadly predictable features of the
UK electoral system that can help us
make sense of the likely outcomes
of the election next year. In the UK,
most constituencies tend to vote
roughly as they have done in the
past, even as parties gain and lose
share everywhere. There are a large
number of national polls that help to
identify the likely level of support
for the traditional major parties (the
Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats), as well as for relative newcomers (UKIP and Greens)
and regional parties that may play a
larger role next year in the past (the
Scottish National Party). In addition
to these polls of the entire UK (or
more precisely, the UK minus Northern Ireland) there are an increasing
number of individual constituencies
receiving publicly released polling.
These sources of data, plus constituency history, geography and demography, give a variety of clues about
the election.
Bringing all of these sources of
information together requires
statistical modelling. In collaboration with Nick Vivyan (Durham,
LSE PhD) and Chris Hanretty, I
have spent some of the last year
developing a model for combining all of these types of information. We are posting updates of
these predictions daily on www.
electionforecast.co.uk. There is
information there about the probability of a hung parliament and
of Conservative and Labour majorities/pluralities. There are also forecasts of vote share for the entire UK
and for every individual seat.
One of the things we can see very
clearly in these forecasts is the disproportionality that results from the
UK’s single member district electoral
system combined with regional and
national parties with varying bases of
support. The figure shows our model’s estimates of the average number
of seats each party can expect over
the range of national vote levels that
currently appear likely. It is striking
how different these can be, even at
the same level of support. Labour
holds a small seats-votes advantage
over the Conservatives, requiring
only 34.8% of the national vote for
an even chance of having a majority,
versus 36.2% for the Conservatives.
This was a larger advantage until the
recent rise of the SNP, which due
to its regional concentration, is the
most efficient party at turning votes
into seats. UKIP is, among all parties, the one least likely to gain many
seats from a substantial vote share.
UKIP support is spread too evenly
across England to gain majorities in
very many seats, even if it is able to
maintain its current polling level. In
contrast, even if the Liberal Democrats end up with a lower vote share
than UKIP, they are almost sure to
end up with more seats.
Student Accolade
Michael Farquhar (LSE 2009-2013) has successfully defended his PhD thesis
“Expanding the Wahhabi Mission”, winning two prestigious, US-based PhD
dissertation prizes in the process.
The first is the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) award for best dissertation; the second
is an ‘honorable mention’ by the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) for best dissertation in
the social sciences.
The AGAPS evaluation committee characterised Michael’s thesis as a fascinating and richly detailed study, stating
that “the reader comes away from the work with a profoundly deeper, complex and contextualized understanding
of Saudi efforts to expand across borders, the influence of a Wahhabi mode of Islamic religiosity, and the ways in
which this has sometimes been contested - even by those who have studied and taught at IUM.”
His supervisor, Dr John Chalcraft, was delighted with the news and added: “Mike’s thesis is indeed a sophisticated
and subtle piece of work and makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how Saudi educational institutions
since the 1960s have developed and propagated Salafi-Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and beyond.”
LSE Government
9
We are pleased to introduce the following members of teaching
staff, who have all joined the Government Department in 2014.
British
Government
@
LSE,
affectionately known as BritGov, has
had an excellent term. Speakers
included Simon Hix, John Curtice,
Anthony Wells, Jane Green, Steve
Fisher and Ben Lauderdale, leading
seminars on LSE Autumn Elections
and Annual Conference Polling; David
Armitage, Jo Guldi, Simon Szreter,
speaking on ‘The History Manifesto’;
Diane
Abbott,
MP,
addressing
inequality in London; John Micklethwait
and Adrian Wooldridge on ‘The Global
Race to Reinvent The State’; and
Margaret Hodge, leading a specialist
seminar. Looking ahead to 2015, we
have some equally exciting events to
begin the new term.
Alexandra Cirone
LSE Fellow in Government
Lukas Obholzer
LSE Fellow in European Politics
Mark Hill
LSE Fellow in Government
Johannes Olsthoorn
LSE Fellow in Government
Sebastian Koehler
LSE (Post-Doctoral) Fellow
Christian Schuster
LSE Fellow in Political Science and
Public Policy
Suhjin Lee
LSE Fellow in Political Science
Stephane Wolton
Assistant Professor in Political
Science
Selected events include:
20 January, 2015: Recent Reform
Reforms to Parliament and other
key institutions, including issues
such as the number of MPs
and constituencies, changes to
Parliamentary procedures, and
reform of the House of Lords will be
examined.
Chaired by Gerry Stoker, Professor
of Governance at the University of
Southampton.
12 February, 2015: Defence &
Foreign Policy
Britain has in recent years been
involved in a series of international
interventions and peace-keeping
efforts. At the same time, the armed
forces have been reduced in size.
The complexity of the international
challenges facing the British
government has increased as its
resources reduce. This panel will
consider the options facing the postMay government and the costs of
sustaining an effective role overseas.
Panel members: Chris Brown, Michael
Cox, Toby Dodge
We look forward to seeing you there!
LSE Government
10