The changing electoral market in Britain

The underlying purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the country’s electoral marketplace is more open than it once was and that, consequently, the competition for votes between parties is also more extensive. We begin with a consideration of how the electoral marketplace came to be relatively ‘closed’ in the first place, which entails an account of the historically derived linkages between parties and social groups in Britain, as well as the social psychology of fixed political identities. Following this, we examine how the electoral market began to open up after 1970, through a review of the widespread evidence of growing electoral instability since then. In truth, there never was an entirely closed electoral market in the UK, but since 1970 the evidence of significant electoral change suggests that the scope of competition has increased in line with an expansion of the market for ‘available’ votes.

How parties compete (2)

This chapter argues that ideological strategy provides us with a useful baseline in understanding party competition, although it is far from the whole story. Using manifesto data, we demonstrate that parties have carved out enduring core ideological territories for themselves, and although they move within these territories, there is seldom any leapfrogging past each other. We also show that the main parties tend to emphasize and vary their appeals more in respect of the main left-right dimension than any other, but looking at British party competition in two dimensions is also useful in so far as it shows the curvilinear space in which the bulk of the electoral market is situated and within which the main parties generally compete. We confirm the importance of ideological appeals in a series of multivariate models of voting behaviour.

The Red-Green Alliance

Since its foundation in the early 1990s, the Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) has been almost continuously growing in electoral support and even became an important support party to Denmark’s centre-left government between 2011 and 2015. Despite this remarkable breakthrough, we know surprisingly little about the Red-Green Alliance. How ‘red’ and how ‘green’ is the party really? And to what extent has the combination of the two contributed to the party’s breakthrough? In this chapter, we analyse the party and its development over time alongside two primary dimensions: ideology and organization. We argue that both dimensions reflect political parties’ goals and competitive advantage in the electoral market, and thus, they are crucial for a party’s electoral success. Drawing on a multitude of data sources such as election surveys, press releases, and organizational data, we show that the combination of the two has played an important role in the party’s rise and success.