The coalitionable, inoffensive, Labour Party
How party strategy in European PR systems can tell us about Labour's victory, and a journey through the weird and wonderful operation of Britain's electoral system.
We hebben een serieus probleem
In the 1977 Dutch election, the Labour Party (frequently known by its acronym PvdA) won its greatest-ever haul of votes, and given the ultra-proportional Dutch electoral system, seats.
What followed would be the most protracted coalition negotiation in European history until the neighbouring Belgians infamous almost 2-year negotiation after their 2010 election.
Since the 1960s new left-wing competitors1 to the PvdA had emerged, taking increasing numbers of supporters. The PvdA responded by shifting to a strategy of polarisation, hoping to form a majority left-wing government for the first time in Dutch history.
Much has been said about polarisation in 21st-century politics, mostly about the US. At the end of the day, political competition is about how parties choose to try to divide electorates, and which issues they choose to fight elections on. Some polarisation is always necessary - you need issues that encourage voters to support you and which create divides with your opponent which are favourable to you, but polarisation also carries risks, for each action can create an equal and opposite reaction, polarising people against as well as for you.
The ideal political strategy is always to polarise people into your camp and depolarise your opponents, but this is easier said than done.
By 1977 the PvdA had shifted to a more left-wing position, in doing so it maximised its support to all new levels. It also principally took votes from its potential left-wing allies. While the PvdA had won, the median vote lay with the centre to centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal, who ultimately preferred a government with the secular right-of-centre VVD.
After some years of struggling a very similar outcome happened again in 1986.
The German scholar of party systems, Herbert Kitschelt2, in his book The Transformation of European Social Democracy3 describes the PvdA as having behaved rationally from one particular perspective - a strategy of seat maximisation. But by polarising elections, the PvdA had locked itself into a position of opposition because it was too far from the centre ground to hold the median voter in the Dutch parliament and hence decide the outcome of coalition negotiations.
To govern, the PvdA would need a type of strategy different from a seat maximisation strategy, it needed an office maximising strategy. This would mean potentially shedding votes, and thus, especially within the uber-proportional Dutch electoral system, seats, to the PvdA’s competitor parties in exchange for positioning itself somewhere where it could become an acceptable coalition partner to the parties of the centre-right which dominated Dutch politics.
And it worked, in 1989 the PvdA lost 3 seats, but the CDA-VVD alliance that dominated Dutch politics in the 80s lost its majority. GreenLeft, a new4 left-wing party doubled its representation to 6 seats and Democrats 66 also made gains. The PvdA had lost some seats but, in exchange, had expanded the overall size of the centre-left bloc, not quite enough to form a majority, but enough to force the Christian Democrats into a coalition.
In 1994 the strategy proved even more successful when the PvdA’s move to the centre allowed it to form a coalition with D66 and VVD, forcing Christian Democracy out of government for the first time since universal suffrage was introduced in the Netherlands.
And then eight years later the PvdA lost half its seats and came fourth. Oh dear.
I’m not just showing off, I promise I have a point
So apart from demonstrating my encyclopaedic knowledge of Dutch electoral politics like the extremely cool man I am5, what’s my bloody point?
My point is that political strategy in the UK has to be increasingly thought of in multi-party or multi-polar terms.
In a true two-party system vote maximisation and office maximisation are, more or less, the same thing.
But as voters’ behaviour has become increasingly multi-dimensional questions arise, more and more, of where you are winning votes, and who from.
In a PR system seat maximisation and vote maximisation are typically the same thing. In a FPTP system, they can be very different. But at the same time, a seat maximisation and office maximisation strategy typically coincide more, whereas in a PR system office maximisation is about coalition opportunities as well as seats. As Britain’s elections have become more fragmented, the tensions between these different incentives have grown stronger.
As many readers of this blog will know, once upon a time I was a paid propagandist for Britain’s electoral reform movement6.
My views on proportional representation are complex and lengthy, but fundamentally my opinion has long been that the UK has long since ceased to have a society simple enough to be properly captured by only two major parties. Brits have, by and large, responded by voting in ever more fragmented ways7.
They are driven increasingly by values, instead of demographics, and are less attached to parties. It is difficult to find concrete signs of consistent working-class voting patterns in Thursday’s election for instance8, and indeed the question of what constitutes the working class in 2024 is a subject that much ink can be spilled over.
The number of voters in this election voting for the main two parties has fallen to 57.4% of the vote, a record low. Fewer than 6/10 voters have voted for one of them. They remain the dominant two but are weaker than they were.
Is Tonty Blair behind this
One of the election results from the past that the 2024 election immediately brings to mind is the 2005 election.
This election was rightly seen as a major blow to Blair’s authority and helped shuffle him out of Downing Street before the term was up. He had won the election with the then-lowest percentage of votes ever.
However, Blair’s Labour Party had won a handsome majority in historic terms nevertheless. The party would continue to govern for the next five years, broadly unhindered9.
When explaining this result the first thing one turns to is the Conservative score. The Conservatives won 32.4% of the vote that year. This was simultaneously their best vote share in 13 years, and then their 3rd10 worst vote share of all time. At the same time, they’d fallen back in marginal seats and piled on votes in safe seats, most of their gains coming from Labour losing more votes than them11.
One of the things about Blair and his 3 victories that I like to say is that while it’s true he was very capable of winning Labour votes he was even more capable of controlling the true deciding factor in who wins elections in Britain - how many votes the Conservative Party gets.
Where’s the post we’re supposed to get past first again
From a historical political perspective12, the Conservative Party is Britain’s most successful political machine. It has been in power more times than any other party and often for long periods.
First past the Post is a plurality system, which is nerd for ‘whoever gets the most votes, wins, regardless of how many votes that is’. Hence in UK general elections, the post that other parties need to get past to win is most frequently the Conservative Party vote in a constituency.
When we talk of tactical voting people generally mean voting for the anti-Conservative party best placed to pass the Conservative Party vote share.
So how many votes the Conservative Party wins and importantly where it wins is often the most significant determinant of the result.
In Labour’s time out of power, it gained votes in its first two elections. But the trouble with both these results is that Labour gained its greatest gains in vote share in parts of the country it already held. The anti-Conservative vote, such as it was, was also much more divided. Whereas under New Labour there was broadly a sense, even if it was fraying towards the end, that the Liberal Democrats were natural allies of the Labour Party, the Coalition government in 2010 changed that relationship, and the Lib Dems collapsed. The party’s vote had become more ‘inefficient’ in the political science parlance, that is to say, spread out in a way that made it trickier to win seats.
Jeremy Corbyn could be described as an equivalent of the polarisation strategy the PvdA pursued in the 70s and 80s in action. His gains were partly, but not entirely, built on taking votes from the Lib Dems, the Greens and the SNP. Again, he piled up votes in Labour’s safer areas. Yet 2017 should be considered an election of dual polarisation with Theresa May attempting to unite the Conservative and UKIP votes under one flag, and both sides also polarising through negative rejection of the other. It is an irony, of course, that despite her failure, May’s Conservatives also received a record number of votes that year.
And then came 2019. In the end, polarisation delivered Labour its worst seat share since 1935, narrowly winning more than 200 seats. However, its vote was only 3 percentage points below what Blair had won in 2005. Labour had not, fundamentally, lost because of a poor vote share. It had lost because so many voters had been polarised into the Conservative camp and away from a combined anti-Conservative camp by a mix of views on Corbyn and Brexit.
A chin that makes you go ‘yeah, ok, he’ll do I guess’
The major political talent of Keir Starmer is his almost unique ability to not inspire an emotional reaction in anyone halfway normal. He has years of approval ratings which can be broadly described as ‘fine’. The man, quite simply, does not look or behave or feel like he’s had a radical thought in his life13.
Such as anyone or anything could be described as polarising in British politics right now I dare say it’s the British Conservative Party, which has developed since 2019 an incredible ability to polarise most categories of British voters fully against it.
However, Starmer should not be ignored in the transformation of his party’s fortunes. Starmer Labour’s strategy has essentially been to spread out its vote across Middle England, to make its vote more efficient and more spread out even if that meant losing votes to left-wing competitors like the Greens in their safest seats. They have depolarised their party.
Starmer, has, once again, pursued a strategy whose logical endpoint is to create the circumstances in which the Conservative vote is most lowered, and where Labour’s vote is most efficient.
The assumption frequently behind criticisms of Labour not maximising its vote is that this is the only thing Labour has influence over in electoral contests. In this frame, the Conservative vote is treated as fundamentally an independent variable that Labour can’t influence. But electoral contests are relative, multi-dimensional things.
The circumstances have been created for record tactical voting between Labour and the Liberal Democrats because Starmer fundamentally is not a problem for Lib Dem voters. In a sense, the Lib Dems have been brought fully back inside an anti-Conservative tent, the years of the coalition and Corbyn conveniently forgotten.
Starmer is not scary14 and hence he can make centre-right or right-wing voters feel as if they have more licence to vote for another party, or to not vote at all. It cannot have escaped many right-of-centre voters that Starmer was on course for victory - after all the late Conservative campaign even made this its primary warning, but right-of-centre voters have clearly decided to ignore this en masse.
Yet, in all this, the fundamentally fragmented and dealigned15 nature of the UK electorate had been revealed. Voters will respond to events and move quickly against parties, almost regardless of what type of voter they are. Labour has won voters from the Conservatives and SNP but lost them to the Greens and independents.
In a dealigned world voters are more responsive to events, and one event which appears to have influenced this election is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
But volatility and depolarisation are a double-edged sword. I do not take the view at all that the next election must somehow be lost. As Tom Hamilton has pointed out the next election will hinge ultimately on whether Labour delivers for voters.
I would also say that where we’ve seen volatility of the kind we did last Thursday it’s almost quaint to imagine that an MP might be fully protected from losing their seat by something as minor as ‘having a large majority’.
A whole new world, with Keir Starmer
Yet Labour’s depolarisation strategy does carry dangers. Parties don’t polarise voters because they’re fools, to some extent polarisation is something you always want. You need to polarise voters into your camp so that they’ll vote for you. There are a number of ways to do that, from offering policies people like, to simply reminding people who your opponent is, but a total depolarisation risks rendering you in the position of the PvdA who essentially spent quite a long time failing to either seat maximise or office-maximise.
This is not necessarily because parties are stupid. They follow what can seem like rational incentives, and misjudge them, or are hemmed in by political and economic realities.
This is what James Kanagasooriam has called Labour’s sandcastle majority, but James’s point is not that this is a unique phenomenon for Labour, but that with the volatility of the electorate now at an all-time high, almost all political majorities can slip into the sea when the right tide comes in.
In a world of ever-increasing voter volatility and fragmentation, I feel it would be unwise to rule out the idea that these things can only affect parties pursuing certain types of strategy too. Corbyn, after all, lost 8% of the vote in 2019.
In the fragmented, volatile world we now find ourselves in, all things are possible. Jeremy Corbyn can run the Conservative Party surprisingly close. The Labour Party can win a 1997-sized majority while losing previously safe seats on a record-low vote share for a winner. Ed Davey can win more seats than Charles Kennedy on almost half the votes he won. The PvdA can be one of the top two parties in the Netherlands again.
Parties must also think about political strategy in a much more multi-faceted way. It’s not just how many votes they win, but where they win them, who from, and what are the effects on other parties within the system.
Those claiming to know with certainty what the next four or five years hold should be treated with cynicism16, the only certainty in the world of the dealigned, fragmented voter is uncertainty.
The Party of Radicals (PPR), the Pacifist Socialist Party (PSP), and the Communist Party (CPN) constituted a series of ‘New Left’ parties known as the ‘Small Left’. They’d eventually be joined by the Evangelical People’s Party (EVP). Democrats 66 also competed with these parties and the PvdA on left-liberalism from a more centrist economic position.
In my humble opinion as a het cisgender man on the internet, a total dreamboat by the by.
I know it’s not normal to cite books on the internet apparently, but this is available on all bad Amazons and probably some places that are significantly less evil. I will warn you, however, that hoo boy is this an academic book, you should really love reading party strategy being discussed using bits of algebra and uses of the word ‘rational’ for it to be a real page-turner. The particular section I’m referring to starts on page 149 of the paperback edition.
Itself formed out of a merger of the ‘small left’ parties in footnote 1.
My extremely uncool party trick is that if you name a random democracy I can tell you its political system and major parties off the top of my head. I am extremely lucky to have found my wife, as if she ever leaves me I will be doomed to loneliness.
Who, I still love and appreciate, but boy does knocking your head against a brick wall for more than half a decade get old after a while.
This 9 year old article is probably the best elucidation of this case that I ever wrote, though some of my claims have, I admit, not fully panned out the way I expected.
Deprivation and social class are not the same thing, but my friend Jacob Weinbren has produced figures on voting by deprivation decile. There is clearly some relationship between voting behaviour and deprivation, but it is complex, perhaps with the exception of the Conservatives and Lib Dems who just see their vote share rise as deprivation goes down. It should be said that just because someone is voting a certain way in a deprived area doesn’t necessarily mean that the person voting that way is deprived or vice versa. This is what stats weirdos, like I pretend to be, call the ecological fallacy.
I admit ‘broadly unhindered’ is a relative term in this case and I may A: have rose-tinted glasses from being relatively youthful at the time and B: be mentally comparing to the 5 years of utter hindrance we’ve just had, but I’m mostly referring to the ability for the government to pass its legislative programme rather than say whether it could keep the Prime Minister in office, or stop the economy from imploding through sheer force of will. Don’t @ me.
Now 4th
I should probably cite this, but I don’t have a better reference to hand than having an extremely vivid memory of Professor Colin Rallings telling me this during a political science lecture in 2008. If it’s wrong, then I apologise to Colin for not doing as much of the reading as I should have, and for being too lazy to look it up now. Trust me, bro.
Certainly not now, God not now.
This is even more impressive when you consider that he edited a Trotskyist magazine once upon a time.
I dare say that is the thing that some of his most radical detractors like least about him
Partisan dealignment is where people are less attached and loyal to parties than they’ve ever been before. Very few people will now simply vote for one party for their whole lives. This is different to fragmentation, which is people voting for more parties than before. Dealignment creates the circumstances for volatility, which is voters being more willing to change their vote between elections. This also makes voters more sensitive to events. Electoral Shocks - the Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World is, for my money, one of the most important books of recent years for understanding our current politics, and is very readable. Again it is available from bad Amazons and less evil booksellers.
Especially if their name rhymes with ‘Gatt Moodwin’ and they constantly talk about realignments but never dealignments.