Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain

David Beetham,Stuart Weir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134864119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Democratic Institutions and Practices is the second study carried out under the Democratic Audit of the UK. This volume explores the formal institutions and processes of the liberal democratic state: including the executive, elections, parliament and the civil service.

Part 1

Elections and Mandates

Introduction

Free, fair and regular elections stand at the very heart of representative democracy. They embody the two basic principles of the Democratic Audit—popular control of government and political equality in the exercise of that control. In the first Audit volume, The Three Pillars of Liberty, we assessed Britain’s arrangements for elections against international human rights standards (DA Volume No. 1: Chapter 14). There is an overlap between those standards and the criteria we have developed for auditing conformity with the two principles of popular control and political equality. Thus, the first volume substantially dealt with some of the questions posed by the first two Democratic Audit criteria:

DAC1. How far is appointment to legislative and governmental office determined by popular election, on the basis of open competition, universal suffrage and secret ballot; and how far is there equal effective opportunity to stand for public office, regardless of which social group a person belongs to?

DAC2. How independent of government and party control and external influences are elections and procedures of voter registration, how accessible are they to voters, and how free are they from all kinds of abuse?

We found that national elections in the UK largely met international human rights standards, being held at regular intervals by almost wholly secret ballot, and being free of bribery, intimidation and other abuses. However, the informal and archaic nature of some of the rules and practices governing British elections means that damaging defects can prejudice fully free and impartial elections. Our first concern is that the ballot at national and local elections alike is not wholly secret, since the authorities have unexamined access to voting papers and counterfoils which identify each voter (DAC1); we assess the implications of this lapse in Chapter 4, pp. 80–1. Further, the registration system for voters is obsolete. It dates back to 1918 and needs to be adapted to the needs of a more mobile and pluralist society. Between 2 and 3.5 million people eligible to vote are disenfranchised at any one time and progressively fewer eligible people are being registered. Members of certain disadvantaged groups—inner-city residents, especially those in insecure rented accommodation, black people, the homeless—are more likely to be unregistered, which points to structural inequalities in the operation of registration procedures. A report by a Home Office working party in February 1994 dismissed proposals forreform, largely on the grounds of the likely cost (between £4 and £12 million), which might seem a small price to pay for a more inclusive suffrage. Ministers were said to be considering the report in the period before the 1997 election, but failed to come to any conclusions (DA Volume No. 1:281–287). Most convicted criminals and homeless people are denied the vote and the effect of Home Office guidance deprives compulsorily detained mentally ill patients in hospital of the right to vote, not on grounds of competence but simply for bureaucratic convenience. Defects in arrangements for postal and proxy votes go unremedied, thus denying some elderly, sick and disabled people a full opportunity to vote. The absence of a constitutional right to vote in Britain means that these and other excluded people have no remedy in law. Electoral registration officers are servants of the Crown and are thus formally independent of government, but they depend on the Home Office and local authorities for their funding. To this extent, then, they are not wholly free from ‘government or party’ interference (though the remedy of judicial review exists in cases of blatant reluctance to promote registration by local authorities) (ibid. 286–288).

The informality of the voting system is open to abuse. The most serious problem has been the absence of strict rules governing the descriptions of candidates and parties on ballot papers. In the 1994 Euro-election, an official Liberal Democrat candidate lost to the Conservative candidate in a Devon constituency by 700 votes, while a previously unknown candidate, standing as a ‘Literal Democrat’, polled over 10,000 votes. But the courts found that there is no requirement in British law that the party description ‘be true, fair or not confusing’. So a political party was deprived of a seat in the European Parliament and a majority of voters of their choice of candidate. Britain has no laws requiring political parties standing for election to register and also has no Electoral Commission, as in other European democracies and Commonwealth countries, to resolve such anomalies. Home Office officials were supposed to find a solution in meetings with the ‘main political parties’ but no proposals emerged before the 1997 election. The same ‘Literal Democrat’ stood as a candidate in Winchester, making the final result desperately close for the eventual Liberal Democrat victor. The government is legislating to introduce the registration of political parties and to prevent misleading descriptions on ballot papers. But generally the process for considering electoral problems and reforms does not lie in an impartial Electoral Commission, a constitutional court or Parliament, but with the curious Speaker’s conference procedure—a private meeting of the leaders of parties represented at Westminster, impartially chaired by the Speaker. The reasons for their recommendations are not usually published and the recommendations are not binding on government (DA Volume No. 1:281–282). We concluded that UK elections required more certain constitutional protection than a single statute—the Representation of the People Act 1983—especially as it is silent on significant issues.

In this volume, we concentrate on parliamentary elections, leaving out of the reckoning local and Euro-elections. However, the UK Parliament fails to satisfy our first Audit criterion, since the second chamber, the House of Lords, is not subject to election at all. Its lack of democratic legitimacy prevents it from fulfilling its function as a check on the House of Commons effectively (see Chapter 14). In the absence of any electoral process for the House of Lords, our analysis is confined to electionsto the House of Commons.

We apply parts of DAC1 and DAC2 (above) and the remaining three Audit criteria on the electoral process:

DAC3. How effective a range of choice and information does the electoral and party system allow the voters, and how far is there fair and equal access for all parties and candidates to the media and other means of communication with them?

DAC4. To what extent do the votes of all electors carry equal weight, and how closely does the composition of Parliament and the programme of government reflect the choices actually made by the electorate?

DAC5. What proportion of the electorate actually votes, and how far are the election results accepted by the main political forces in the country?

We give most emphasis to DAC4. In Chapter 3, we examine Britain’s existing voting system—the plurality-rule (or ‘first-past-the-post’) system—and assess in detail how far it satisfies the principle that citizens should possess votes of ‘equal value’. We also analyse the parties’ election strategies and consider how they affect the equality of the ballot, and discuss the range of choice and information which is made available to citizens at election time (DAC3). We do not seek to analyse one significant issue in depth—that of the principle of equal opportunities to stand for public office, ‘regardless of which social group a person belongs to’ (DAC1)—since we have decided to leave aside the question of the social composition of public life for another report. However, in Chapter 3, we check briefly on whether women and people from the ethnic minorities have an ‘equal effective opportunity’ to stand for election to the Commons. In the same chapter we also consider the question of turnout and how far election results are accepted by political forces in the UK (DAC5). In Chapter 4, we assess those questions of the independence of elections from government and party control which were not dealt with in the first Democratic Audit volume, in particular the secrecy of the ballot and government influence over electoral boundaries (DAC4). In Chapter 5, we consider the idea of the electoral ‘mandate’ and how far government programmes reflect voters’ choices (DAC4); and the opportunities afforded to the electorate to vote directly on measures of constitutional change (DAC6; see p. 12).

We are unable exhaustively to explore all the issues raised by these criteria, several of which demand a book in their own right. Apart from the decision not to analyse how far membership of the House of Commons is effectively open to people from all social groups, the most notable omission is the influence of the media on elections, and the range and choice of information available during elections, which we treat very briefly in Chapter 3. We have sought funding for research into the complex issues raised by the interplay of the state, politics and the media, and media influence upon public opinion and voting intentions. We have left the question of opinion polling during elections to one side, as this was adequately dealt with by the Hansard Society Commission on Election Campaigns (1991).

Finally, we are aware that Britain’s plurality-rule, or ‘first-past-the-post’, election system has caused widespread disquiet over the past 25 years. Before the 1997 election the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties pledged themselves to give the electorate a choice between the existing system and a ‘single proportional’ alternative in a referendum and an Electoral Commission has been established to choose that alternative. In September 1997, the Democratic Audit published Making Votes Count (DA Paper No. 11), an important study of how alternative systems might have worked under British conditions in 1992 and 1997. The study is based on major surveys in which people ‘voted’ on the appropriate ballot papers for the main alternative systems. We followed this study up by examining how a mixed system—of the alternative (or supplementary) vote, with an additional member top-up—would work in British conditions (Making Votes Count 2, DA Paper No. 14). We briefly discuss the implications of change in Chapter 3.

3

The Other National Lottery

The Political Effects of Westminster Elections

We always come up against the problem of the current electoral system in which the gambling, betting and sporting instincts of the nation seem to have found their characteristic political expression.

(Egon Wertheimer, Portrait of the British Labour Party, 1929)

If we had voting like last night, there would be a Labour government with a clear majority, able to do what it wished, without let or hindrance.

(John Major, on the Wirral South by-election loss, Independent, 1 March 1997)

Voting is the only political act most British citizens undertake. More than four out of five people report that they have voted at least once in general elections and some two-thirds in local elections. By contrast, only about one in eight has ever joined an organised group and fewer than one in ten has attended a political rally (Parry, Moyser and Day 1992:44). In practice and principle, therefore, free, fair and regular elections stand at the very heart of representative democracy in this country. They are the key controlling device which citizens possess over the elected governors of the nation, their legislation and their policies.

This chapter examines how well elections perform their controlling role in the light of the two principles of democracy—political equality and popular control. Ultimately, it is through the ability of citizens to retain or dismiss their elected representatives in regular elections, and the political parties for which they stand, that the principle of popular control over government becomes practical politics. In the UK, the role of elections is particularly significant since constitutional accountability is based primarily on the electorate’s ability to recall governments and replace them periodically, through Parliament, and on the existence of an opposition party able to pick up the reins of government. The ideas of an equal value for each vote, and an equal right to stand for election, are central to the principle of political equality; put at its simplest, this principle requires that every elector’s vote should count for one, and none for more than one. But it is also important that electors should have a range of choice at elections which broadly reflects their political preferences and needs—and that those choices are effective. Thus this chapter concentrates on two of the Audit’s criteria:

DAC3. How effective a range of choice…does the electoral and party system allow the voters?

DAC4. To what extent do the votes of all electors carry equal weight, and how closely does the composition of Parliament…reflect the choices actually made by the electorate?

Yet we also have to bear in mind other objectives and outcomes. In any parliamentary democracy, elections have to accomplish two tasks: to produce an elected assembly which is representative of the people; and a government which is both effective and accountable to the people’s representatives in the assembly. As noted above, the upper House of Parliament in the UK is not subject to election at all and is not intended to be representative. In elections to the lower House, there is a pronounced conflict between the two tasks of representation and government formation. The plurality-vote—or ‘first-past-the-post’—electoral system in Great Britain, originating in the Middle Ages, has survived in place on the grounds that it achieves strong government, even though it fails to represent the electorate’s votes for parties proportionately in the House of Commons. The use of the system is justified on the grounds precisely that it normally over-represents the leading two parties and so both gives the governing party a ‘working majority’ and establishes a clear alternative opposition party—in effect, a government in waiting.

In theory, Britain’s electoral system seeks to reconcile the idea of strong government with the principle that everyone’s vote should count equally, though, as we shall see, it gives far more emphasis to the first objective and neglects the second. The House of Commons, like similar assemblies in other liberal democracies, is supposed to represent the electorate in a ‘microcosmic’ sense—that is, to be representative of them as a smaller body may be representative of a larger one (Birch 1972:15–21). The crucial question, however, is what manner of representativeness is being sought. There are three ways in which the House of Commons could be made representative of the electorate:

• according to geographical distribution;
• according to each party’s share of the votes cast; and
• according to its social characteristics.

These three modes of representation are all important for the Democratic Audit. The first, because voters should not be privileged or disadvantaged just because they live, say, in the country rather than a city, or in one region than another; nor should Parliament be weighted disproportionately towards one set of geographical interests at the expense of another. The second, because elections nowadays are primarily about choosing a party or parties to form a government: votes should not be more or less effective according to which party people vote for, nor should their relationship to seats in Parliament be decided by arbitrary chance. The third, because a Parliament heavily biased towards one social group, or set of groups, or which excludes certain groups, will be limited in experience and probably more narrowlyfocused, and is more likely to suffer loss of esteem, trust or even legitimacy—especially among people who are excluded, and who may very well be disadvantaged and feel alienated from society as a result. These three dimensions of representation and political equality are plainly inter-related with each other and with yet another principle—that of ‘effective opportunity to stand for public office, regardless of which social group a person belongs to’ (DAC1). The third aim cannot be realised if this principle is not satisfied. But while we deal briefly with the representation of women and ethnic minorities in Parliament, we do not assess the issues of social composition and equal opportunities to stand for Parliament in this volume (for reasons already discussed; see p. 19).

We are therefore dealing with two questions. How does the current electoral system rate on the two dimensions of representation and political equality? And why does it fail where it fails? We begin with the rationale for the existing electoral system, based as it is on the idea of geographical equality—that all votes should count for the same, regardless of where people happen to live. This principle is evident in the work of the Boundary Commissions, four quangos charged with ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures, tables and boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• Part 1: Elections and Mandates
• Part 2: The Core Executive
• Part 3: Checks and Balances
• Part 4: The Balance Sheet
• Appendix: The Democratic Audit
• Table of cases
• Bibliography and sources
• Index