With the UK facing one of the most important elections in
decades, the focus should be on the clear programmatic differences
between the main parties, rather than weekly polling outcomes.
Lea Ypi
If I were to give unsolicited advice to media pundits preparing to
comment on the upcoming general election it would be the following:
let’s try not to embarrass ourselves again this time. The one lesson to
learn about making predictions in the current political environment is
that such predictions are about as reliable as turning to the horoscope.
Consider how badly some of the predictions made during the 2017 general election
have failed. An initial 20-point poll lead for the Tories over Labour
led the vast majority of commentators to warn that, thanks to Jeremy
Corbyn’s leadership, Labour was at risk of being wiped out. Yet far from
that being the case, Labour’s proportion of the vote grew by almost 10
per cent, the biggest swing since Clement Attlee in 1945. Can we avoid
making the same mistakes this time?
To ask commentators to stop
making predictions, discuss opinion polls, draw inferences from leaders’
average ratings and compare voter turnout would be like asking doctors
to stop diagnosing their patients. It would be to deprive political
‘science’ of its scientific status and political debate of its claim to
rigorous academic standards.
The turn to opinion-poll analyses
and leader’s satisfaction ratings in political discourse has its
roots in a number of approaches that have sought to make politics
amenable to accurate prediction. Inductivist approaches based on looking
for regularities in survey data are one form. Deductivist approaches
that seek to model political behaviour on axioms derived from economic
theory and assumptions of fixed preferences are another. Remove data
sets, regression analyses and average voter preferences from the study
of politics and you will have suddenly killed not just a few doctoral
projects but an entire discipline.
Median voter
The theory of the median voter, an imaginary character that is
neither left nor right, neither obsessed with politics nor indifferent
to it, is at the heart of the mainstream study of politics. Pioneered by
the political scientist Anthony Downs in his ground-breaking 1957
book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, his method is announced
in the title. The underlying assumption is that the political forum is
like the marketplace, that citizens are like consumers and that public
opinion is the aggregate of private preferences. Just as there is demand
and supply in the market, there is a demand-side of politics, embodied
in voters’ preferences, and a supply-side that the main parties seek to
capture and translate in public policies.
According to the economic view of politics, the latter is like
shopping. Choosing between more or less public healthcare or between
minimal and more extensive taxation is equivalent to choosing between
vanilla and chocolate ice-cream. The overall expectation is that in the
race to capture the median voter, parties will converge in the centre.
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Polly Toynbee
Columnist for The Guardian
The focus on data analysis, electoral performance, opinion polls and
voter preferences that dominates the contemporary study of politics has
its roots in an effort to analyse economics and politics as neutral
scientific objects. Questions of value are often sidestepped to focus on
measurement. This attitude trickles down from academia to political
institutions, from think tanks to polling agencies, from media analysts
to PR firms.
Yet just as the economic reality of the 2008 financial crisis challenged the
neoliberal economic orthodoxy, political reality is challenging the
orthodoxies of political science. Far from being only mildly interested
in politics, citizens are deeply passionate about it. Far from
disappearing, partisanship has become more relevant than ever. Far from
converging in the middle, mass parties have become more ideologically
aligned. In the UK Labour has swung to the left, the Tories have swung
to the right, and the Liberals are trying to capture a vanishing centre.
Collective action
The time has come to think about politics not as a science, but as an
art—the art of governing. Politics, as the former German chancellor
Otto von Bismarck famously said, is ‘the art of the possible’. The
dominant trends in political analysis discourage that approach: they
insist on the regularities of past individual behaviour rather than the
possibilities of future collective action.
Changing course requires thinking about democracy not as the
aggregation of fixed preferences, but as the process through which
citizens develop their views in communication with each other. This
means thinking of parties and movements not as trolleys of shopping
items but as nurseries of political commitment.
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Focusing on the median voter tells us very little about what shapes
citizens’ political views. Average percentages of voting intentions week
in week out tell us very little about how citizens exercise their
political judgement. If we only focus on individual preferences, we end
up taking the status quo for granted and undermining a future-oriented and value-laden idea of political change.
The upcoming general election is one of the most important in
decades. It happens to be also one of those rare occurrences in liberal
democracy where there are clear programmatic differences between the
main political parties. Is it too much to ask that we focus on the
difference between ideas, rather than the fluctuation in numbers? This article appeared on the London School of Economics British Politics and Policy blog
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