Dispatch Box Issue 19 | December 2014 The Newsletter of the Department of Government ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ 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
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