Erik Asplund, Toby James and Alistair Clark audit the additional costs countries are facing to run safe and accessible elections during the Covid-19 pandemic. They argue it is vital that election management is sufficiently well funded during this crisis to maintain voter participation and trust in electoral outcomes.

Picture courtesy of the Republic of Korea National Election Commission

Money matters for elections. Those candidates and parties who have most in their election treasure chest are able to invest more on the campaign trail. But less well-known is that money also matters for the smooth running of elections.

Elections are not cheap. They involve employing thousands of temporary staff, hiring premises and producing huge volumes of election material. The difficulty for democracy is that, as recent comparative research on the funding of elections shows, electoral officials often face challenges receiving sufficient funds. Focus groups of electoral officials reveal that common problems include little awareness of the need for investment in election funding, so proactive lobbying by election administrators is often needed. Short-term responses to election funding make elections more expensive because it leaves contractors with a stronger bargaining position, leading to higher prices. Procurement and administrative processes do not fit with the political realities of snap elections. Meanwhile, unforeseen costs rack up because of unexpected events but rising expectations from citizens about quality of service.

The rising election costs because of Covid-19

Elections have often seen rising costs, but these financial challenges have increased in scope due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is primarily because of costs related to risk mitigation measures, which include both health and safety and special voting arrangements. Countries that have held national or subnational elections during the pandemic, including Australia, the Dominican Republic, France, Mongolia, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and the USA, have purchased personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face shields, medical gloves and protective clothing for polling officials and sometimes masks and/or vinyl gloves for voters. These have often been acquired at very short notice in accordance with guidelines provided by health authorities. For polling stations or voter registration centres, electoral management bodies have also needed hand sanitisers, sanitising tissues, contactless thermometers, plexiglass screens and tape rolls. Some countries have also seen increased use of special voting arrangements which includes early voting (South Korea), postal voting (Styria/Austria, Bavaria/Germany, several states in the USA and Poland), mobile box voting (Singapore) and proxy voting (France) in order to reduce crowds on election day and so lower the risk of infection. These arrangements, including additional staff, facilities and materials, have undoubtedly increased the cost of elections in each country.

Costs are notoriously difficult to extract on the running of elections, leading to alternative measures being used. However, raw costs are still illustrative and important. Table 1 provides a summary of some of the publicly stated estimates of the additional costs for running elections, converted to US dollars. It shows a considerable hike in the investment needed – which varies according to the extent that additional measures are necessary (and purchasing parity).

Jurisdiction	Additional costs cited	Estimated additional cost quoted (US dollars)	Voting age population	Additional cost per voter ($)
Australian Capital Territory	Early voting; staff hours; public information campaigns	$1.6 million	283,162	5.65
Canadian province of Saskatchewan	Face masks and thousands of litres of hand sanitiser and disinfectant	$0.3 million	815,000	0.38
Indonesia	Health measures	$ 98.8 million	191,671,984	0.52
South Korea	Personal protective equipment	$ 16 million	43,814,504	0.37
Sri Lanka	Hand sanitisers and additional works	$32–37 million	15,262,770	2.26
Uganda	Train polling officials; temperature checks; hands sanitisers	$14.6 million	17,110,660	0.85
Ukraine	Unspecified	$46 million	35,723,124	1.29
USA	Postal voting; in-person voting; online registration; public education	$2 billion	255,152,703	7.84

Source: Authors, constructed using media reports and EMB data

Ahead of 3 November 2020, there has been considerable global interest in the US Presidential elections. Here, state election commissions are facing shortages of funds to recruit additional poll workers and purchase election materials. Meanwhile postal voting, which is an important safety measure to help reduce crowds on election day and thereby the risk of infection, can cost more. Recent primary elections in the US state of Kentucky were held both in person and through postal voting. State officials are estimating that the cost of running them may have been US $12 million instead of US $9 million, with the increased costs associated with extra staff needed to count votes as well as materials needed (postage and printing). Election boards in Georgia and Ohio – both of which reported increased election expenses during primary elections – are also seeking additional funds for forthcoming elections including the November Presidential election. The Federal coronavirus stimulus legislation (CARES Act) has earmarked some funds for US elections and the US Congress has set aside US $400 million for the election in a bill passed in March 2020. But the Brennan Center has since advocated for more funding (quoted in Table 1). Also the US $3.6 billion election package which is part of a larger economic bill has come to a standstill in the US Senate.

Beyond the USA, other election management bodies have also requested increased funding from central or local governments. For example, the Australian Capital Territory election commission has requested an extra AUD 2.3 million (US $1.6 million) to organise the 16 October 2020 ACT legislative assembly elections. Funds would pay to expand early voting arrangements from five early voting centres to 15 centres with extended staff hours for a period of 20 days as well as public information campaigns about the benefits of early voting. The Central Election Commission of Ukraine has requested from the government and parliament some UAH 1.252 billion (US $46,000,000) in additional funding to hold the October 2020 local elections. The National Election Commission of Sri Lanka believes that the July 2020 parliamentary election will cost between six and seven billion rupees (US $32–37 million) extra, in which 1 billion (US $5,332,530) will be spent on hand sanitisers and additional works. Rp 1.4 trillion (US $98.78 million) in extra funding has been requested for the the 2020 simultaneous regional elections in Indonesia. In Thailand, local elections scheduled for 2020 may suffer further delays as the funds earmarked to finance the election have been shifted to fight the pandemic.

South Korea provides an example that has already held elections during the pandemic from which we can draw considerable lessons. In April 2020, its National Election Commission (NEC) organised a parliamentary election that resulted in an historically high 66.2% voter turnout (with 29.12 million ballots cast). The NEC implemented a range of health and safety measures and expanded early voting arrangements in order to allow a larger number of people to vote before election day irrespective of their residence. Preliminary estimates suggest that the cost of the parliamentary national election was 226.7 billion Korean won (US $189 million), compared with the 203.4 billion Korean won (US $170 million) for the 2016 parliamentary election. The increased costs were attributed to 1) inflation; 2) an increase of eligible voters from 42,056,325 to 43,968,199; and 3) measures related to Covid-19, in particular personal protective equipment (PPE). Covid-19 measures alone came to 20 billion Korean won (US $16 million), which equates to approximately 9% of the total election cost.

Why investment matters

It is not just that costs are increasing, but that budgets are shrinking. The World Bank has issued ominous forecasts for economies around the world, suggesting that Covid-19 will spark one of the deepest recessions in years. In this context elections will be competing against many other services for funding. Elections are a necessary investment, rather than a cost, however.

Elections are essential for the democratic process. They are the opportunity for citizens to hold government to account and choose their own representatives. Many elections have understandably been postponed for public health reasons. There is a further risk, though, that elections will also be affected because of financial reasons. Bosnia-Herzegovina has already postponed local elections that were scheduled in October, owing to the failure of the government to pass the budget. Mongolian President Khaltmaa Battulga proposed to postpone the country’s parliamentary elections because he felt that ‘we are spending a lot of money on implementing the epidemic prevention measures.’

Even where elections are held, this might be under compromised conditions. Sufficient safety equipment might not be provided to guarantee the safety of election staff. Without sufficient interventions to reassure voters, turnout could be hit, especially amongst those with underlying health conditions. Evidence shows that there is a positive relationship between resourcing and election quality. Better-run elections are often those which are better resourced. Studies from the UK, USA and comparative research has established this link. When funding is cut, election quality is cut. Healthy and fair elections therefore require investment.

The costs of not investing in elections is therefore potentially much more substantial. When citizens feel that the electoral process has been unfair, their trust in government and states can be affected. This does not return easily. When political parties and supporters feel that the election has not been conducted properly, in more fragile situations, conflict and civil war can erupt.

It is therefore impossible to put a cost on democracy. Investment in elections is one area where budgets should not be slashed during or after the pandemic – and further funds will need to be invested following principles of sufficiency, transparency, sustainability, legitimacy and contingency to ensure voter and staff safety in a process conducted with integrity. The longer-term costs of not doing this will be much more considerable.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this commentary are those of the authors, one of whom is a staff member of International IDEA. This commentary is independent of specific national or political interests. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the institutional position of International IDEA, its Board of Advisers or its Council of Member States.

This post gives the views of the authors, and not the position of Democratic Audit.     

About the authors 

Erik Asplund is a Programme Officer in the Electoral Processes Programme, International IDEA. He is currently managing the Global Overview of COVID-19: Impact on Elections project. Other focus areas include Electoral Risk Management, Financing of Elections and Training in Electoral Administration with an emphasis on BRIDGE and Electoral Training Facilities. 

Toby James is a Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of East Anglia, UK. His most recent books are Comparative Electoral Management (Routledge, 2020) and Building Inclusive Elections (Routledge, 2020). He is co-convenor of the Electoral Management Network.

Dr Alistair Clark is Reader in Politics at Newcastle University. He has written widely on electoral integrity and administration, electoral and party politics. He is author of Political Parties in the UK, 2e (Palgrave 2018). He tweets at @ClarkAlistairJ. 

Clodagh Harris and Ian Hughes argue that, as established democracies face numerous short- and long-term crises, we must re-imagine democratic institutions to be more inclusive, participatory and deliberative. Only then can democracies resist the threat of increasingly despotic leaders and tackle global threats, including the climate crisis.

Plato. Picture: lentina_x/ (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) licence

The Covid-19 pandemic has spawned a rash of articles speculating about how our world will change in the aftermath of the virus. Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy has described the pandemic as a portal, an opportunity for humanity collectively to break with the past, leaving our ‘dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us’ and imagine the world anew.

Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that ‘Americans will eventually emerge from isolation and take stock of the fallen, both the people and the ideas that did not make it through the crisis.’ One of the ideas that he predicts will not survive is the idea of the US as an economic, political or cultural role model for the world’s democracies.

William Hynes, Head of the New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) at the OECD, has remarked that if the 2008 Financial Crisis provided us with an x-ray of the fractures in our financial system, the Covid-19 pandemic is providing us with a three-dimensional CT scan that is revealing the systemic weaknesses of our societies.

While the pandemic is the most immediate threat to our wellbeing, both individually and collectively, contemporary societies are also undergoing a whole series of other crises. Climate change, environmental degradation and a biodiversity crisis, marked increases in inequality, economic calamities, the rise of populism, rising geo-political tensions, the effects of increased globalisation, and ongoing religious and ethnic conflicts, including the Black Lives Matter protests in the US, provide the backdrop against which the Covid-19 pandemic has erupted. This coincidence of crises marks our era as one of profound change and uncertainty, an era that Johan Schot, Professor of Global History and Sustainability Transitions at Utrecht University, has called an era of deep transition.

One feature of this era, which was apparent before the pandemic but which has now been brought into even starker relief, is that a whole range of current social institutions upon which we depend are not optimal, either for human flourishing or for addressing global challenges. A wide range of institutions, including democracy, economics, religion, gender, technology and higher education, are showing signs of acute stress or outright failure.

One important source to which we can turn to see what might lie ahead at times of deep uncertainty is Plato’s Republic. Its central argument is that history is not linear and progressive, but is instead characterised by periodic degenerations, recurrences and reversals, which can culminate in fundamental transformations of entire social institutions and societies.

In Republic, Plato outlines how Aristocracy (leadership by wise kings) degenerates and transforms into Timocracy (heroic military leadership), which in turn transitions into Oligarchy (leadership by family descendants, and other wealthy elites associated with the military heroes).  In turn, Oligarchy grows increasingly corrupt and is eventually overthrown by democratic revolution. During periods of acute crisis, however, the democratic masses become susceptible to electing charismatic, ‘strongman’ leaders who, Plato warns, soon become tyrants who overthrow democracy and establish tyranny. In this ever-changing environment, Plato cautions, the dominance of particular forms of toxicity, if not constrained, can steer the transformation in a direction that can be catastrophic to the public good. Plato’s warning of the deep transition from democracy to tyranny has critical contemporary relevance.

We contend that at this dangerous historical moment we need to urgently heed Plato’s warning and re-imagine our social institutions so that they can better contain sources of toxicity and instead empower progressive change if impending catastrophes are to be faced and avoided.

Such re-imagining is particularly pressing for the social institution of democracy. For almost half a century now, a minimalist view has dominated in which democracy has been defined narrowly in terms of elections, the rule of law and protection of individual freedoms (usually civil and political freedoms). Broader views, which understand democracy as based on participation and deliberation among citizens, which incorporate human rights protections, collective bargaining power for workers, and shared sovereignty between nations to address shared challenges, have increasingly been rejected. As Wendy Brown has highlighted, the very idea of democratic society itself has been weakened.

According to Brown, society in a democracy is where citizens of vastly unequal backgrounds and resources are brought together, where citizens are politically enfranchised, and where differences and inequalities are made manifest and potentially resolved. The existence of society, however, is precisely what neoliberalism set out to destroy – as illustrated by Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society’. The claim ‘society does not exist’ has permitted ‘freedom’ to be exercised without concern for the social consequences or the common good. It has released citizens from any connection to social conscience, compromise or concern for the social fabric that holds society together.

Neoliberalism’s sustained attack on society has been central in generating a progressively undemocratic and anti-democratic citizenry, ever more willing to authorise an increasingly antidemocratic state, as we are observing in the rise of right-wing nationalist populism today.

Weakened societies are vulnerable to toxicity at times of crisis and deep transition, such as the present. While various sources of toxicity can be identified, one that is currently highly visible and commented on is the toxicity that arises from psychological pathology. A long line of psychiatrists and psychologists have been warning of the dangers posed by individuals with certain dangerous personality disorders, including psychopaths, and those with narcissistic personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder, who are psychologically incapable of conceiving of the idea of equality. Individuals with paranoid personality disorder exist in a state of perpetual suspicion and are only able to perceive of other people as a threat. In positions of power, this minority act as a source of extreme toxicity that can steer transitions in directions that are catastrophic for the public good.

From this psychologically informed perspective, democracy can be viewed as comprising a series of defences against dangerous psychopathic leaders. These defences include the rule of law that applies equally to rulers and citizens, free and fair elections at regular intervals that allow for the removal of toxic leaders, human rights protections for individual citizens based in law, social safety nets that protect societies from high levels of deprivation that stoke mass support for demagogues, and shared sovereignty that allows the international community to act in the event of widespread human rights violations by national leaders. Each of these pillars of democracy serve to limit the power of leaders and provide protection for citizens against the excesses of power. In this view, democracy is a system of defences, built up over centuries, to protect societies from a psychologically disordered minority, and from our own worst natures.

The rise of right-wing nationalist populism and the erosion of democracy in formerly stable democracies is clearly showing, however, that these defences have been breached in many places. A strengthening of democracy and a re-imagining of additional democratic defences is therefore urgently needed.

As Brown urges, the development of new practices of society needs to be a central part of this response. The possible forms of such new democratic practices are already discernible. For half a century, deliberative and participatory democratic innovations such as citizen juries, citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting have been demonstrating the feasibility of new democratic practices that empower citizens and influence policy. The Citizens’ Assembly, Ireland, the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climate, and the Climate Assembly, UK, for example, already allow citizen deliberation to shape the climate policies of national governments.

These forums produce considered judgements based on critical and respectful deliberation, informed by scientific evidence and inclusive of diverse citizen opinions and experiences. In this way, they can contribute an additional ‘powerful segment’ of the wider democratic system. As the climate examples also show, they can also contribute to the ‘slow politics’ required to tackle intractable policy challenges that need long term solutions but are impervious to short term electoral cycles.

Democracy’s capacity for critical self-reflection on the part of its citizens, together with its capacity for self-renewal, is what makes it the best defence we have against toxicity and pathology. New spaces for citizens to revisit the meaning of democracy itself in our era of deep transformation is urgently needed to facilitate this. Given the dangerous erosion of democracy in many places, a more holistic model of democracy is required which involves a combination of deliberative, participatory, direct and representative forms of democracy, where each may act to overcome the deficiencies of the other.  Within this ‘vibrant democratic ecology’ there is an urgent need for participatory and deliberative democratic innovations that empower wider and deeper forms of citizen participation.

In response to the toxicity that is threatening to overpower our societies, contemporary democracy urgently needs to empower the forces of progressive change to contain toxic leaders, overcome dangerous polarisation, and collectively create a path to greater sustainability and human development. Democracy’s ability to re-imagine itself, and the success it has in doing so, may be our only hope in developing the ‘slow’ fact, future and other-regarding politics required to tackle the multiple crises we face, and move collectively towards societies that are stronger, fairer, more sustainable – societies in which people can thrive rather than merely struggle to survive.

This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position Democratic Audit.

About the authors

Dr Clodagh Harris is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government & Politics, University College Cork.   She was a member of the Academic and Legal Advisory Group to Ireland’s Constitutional Convention (2012–14) and has  served on the advisory boards of Ireland’s first Citizens’ Assembly ‘We the Citizens’ (2011) and the ESRC Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit (2017). She is currently a member of the Research Advisory Group to the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly.

Ian Hughes is the author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personality Disorders Are Destroying Democracy and contributing author to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at University College Cork in Ireland.

Clodagh and Ian are both co-authors of the Democratic Audit of Ireland Power to the People? Assessing Democracy in Ireland and participants in the Deep Institutional Innovation for Sustainability and Human Progress (DIIS) project at MaREI, University College Cork.

DIIS will host former President of Ireland Mary McAleese at the July 6 event Ideas That Can Change Our Lives. You can register here.

Nick Dickinson draws on previous inquiries to discuss what a public one into the Covid-19 crisis may look like. He concludes that, while an inquiry into the government’s response may be necessary for evaluating what went right and what went wrong, an inquiry should nonetheless not be seen as inevitable nor the most useful way to provide accountability.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

In the last few weeks, several articles about the UK’s pandemic response have led to speculation about an eventual public inquiry into the crisis. Most notably, the Sunday Times’ Insight investigation was framed significantly around the idea that the events of recent months will eventually become the subject of an inquiry. Indeed, from relatively early on in the crisis, some had already concluded that such a review was inevitable and that its findings will presumably be damning. But why are the hypothetical conclusions of a future investigation so important to the current debate? And what might an inquiry actually say about the government response when it eventually reports?

Public inquiries have been called ‘Britain’s favoured mechanism for ascertaining the facts after any major breakdown or controversy’. First established on a legislative basis in 1921, and now regulated under the Inquiries Act 2005, public inquiries have a deceptively simple purpose to provide a means, independent of the government, to answer three questions. What happened? Why did it happen and who is to blame? What can be done to prevent this happening again?

While being far from the only means to do so, they have been deployed increasingly frequently in recent years. In 2017, an Institute for Government study identified 68 public inquiries between 1990 and 2017, compared with a mere 19 in the previous 30 years. Based on this record, and the small but fascinating literature on the topic, what can we conclude about what a Covid-19 inquiry will look like? And what might it ultimately conclude?

A public inquiry into Covid-19 is not as inevitable as you think

The establishment of an inquiry may often seem inevitable, but not all major incidents are subject to one. In 1988, the Lockerbie disaster killed 270 people abord Pan American Flight 103 yet no inquiry was appointed. There was also no independent public inquiry into the banking crisis in 2008, with the task instead handled by the Commons Treasury Committee. According to one study, of 664 events which led to calls for an inquiry in the twenty year period to 2003, only 44 (6.6%) resulted in an inquiry.

Ultimately, this is because, while inquiries play a critical role in getting to the facts, the choice to establish one in the end lies with ministers. As such, the probability of an inquiry has been shown to be the result of a complex blame avoidance and strategic calculation on the part of ministers, who will establish an inquiry only when the costs of not doing so outweigh the risks of acknowledging failings.

An inquiry would culminate a trend towards ‘risk’ focused inquiries

While inquiries do not always follow major incidents, an inquiry into the Covid-19 crisis would follow the pattern of inquiries not focused on a particular government decision but on the competency with which a specific risk was managed. As Adam Burgess notes, “the subject and focus of inquiries have tended to shift from matters internal to the state to more public concerns. Specifically, social risk in the sense of pervasive yet diffuse uncertainty and threat, often focused around rare but high-profile incidents.”

Unlike early inquiries like the Marconi inquiry, or more recent investigations like those on Iraq, a Covid-19 inquiry would seek to establish if the government did enough to protect people from a risk it played no part in causing. This role for public inquiries has been crucial in creating an environment in which the unnecessary suffering of ordinary people becomes a serious matter of state. At the same time, it may impose unreasonable expectations on what government can do.

As some of the reporting has shown, a key failing of pandemic planning may have been resignation to a scale of suffering which proved politically unsustainable in practice. A Covid-19 inquiry thus may well trigger a broader reassessment of assumptions about what hazards government is responsible for preventing.

There may well be more than one

Attempts to assess government policy often lead to multiple non-cumulative evaluation, in which learning from mistakes is inhibited by contradictory conclusions. This problem has often affected UK public inquiries. The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday was faced with the toxic legacy of the previous Widgery review, widely viewed as a whitewash. Likewise, the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq war faced some public scepticism and fatigue as a result of two previous inquiries which had come to alternate conclusions about the handling of intelligence in the runup to war.

A rushed or botched Covid-19 investigation could ultimately lead to reports which muddy the water and leave conclusions either permanently open to challenge or, just as serious, arrived at years too late for recommendations to be implemented in time for future pandemic events.

The choice of chair and terms of reference will be highly contested

The choice of the chair and terms of reference for an inquiry will be both crucially important and a moment of acute danger for any inquiry. This choice lies with ministers. However, increasingly appointments and terms of reference have been developed in consultation with representatives of affected groups. This has obvious benefits of securing buy-in from victims. Yet the dangers of this approach have also been seen in the case of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse, which has cycled through four chairs, with a series of revisions to its scope and terms of reference.

This dynamic, whereby the inquiry itself is drawn into the scandal afflicting the part of the state it is seeking to investigate, is a key risk for a Covid-19 inquiry. The last review of a UK government response to a pandemic, the 2009 H1N1 ‘Swine flu’ outbreak (though not a public inquiry) had two bullet points for terms of reference and interviewed around 100 actors mainly from within government. An inquiry into Covid-19 will be nothing like this, requiring a process and a chair capable of engaging with the vast array of victims this crisis is creating daily.

It may centre more on conflicts between the regulatory and political state, rather than the actions of particular politicians

While much of the reporting has focused on the political battles and actions of the Prime Minister, an inquiry will inevitably focus more on the institutional conflicts between and within the ‘regulatory state’, or the complex webs of accountability which constitute the modern British state. Since the Health and Social Care Act 2012, operational control of the health service in England has largely been transferred to a non-departmental public body, NHS England, and an executive agency, Public Health England. Likewise, government scientific advice is structured through an ‘alphabet soup’ of committees with varying responsibilities.

Even where senior politicians are called to give oral evidence on failings, the results are unlikely to be satisfying. A study of the 2009 Irish Banking Inquiry showed that financiers avoided providing direct apologies, opting instead only for general expressions of regret that the crisis had occurred. The chances for such a cathartic moment over Covid-19 are thus slim.

A useful tool, but not a panacea

In sum, a public inquiry into the government’s pandemic response may well be a warranted and necessary part of the process of evaluating what went wrong in the greatest public health crisis in a century. But we should not see an inquiry as necessarily either the inevitable conclusion or the most useful way to provide accountability and learn the lessons of Covid-19.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position Democratic Audit. It was first published on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog.

About the author

Nick Dickinson (@NickSDickinson) is a Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Exeter.

In Peter Shore: Labour’s Forgotten Patriot, Kevin Hickson, Jasper Miles and Harry Taylor looks back at the ‘lost Eurosceptic tradition’ within the Labour Party’s history by examining the life of the largely neglected front-rank politician, Peter Shore. This skillfully crafted and revealing biography not only reappraises Shore’s career, but uses this as a lens to examine salient issues in the historical development of the Labour Party, writes Patrick Diamond.

Image Credit: Palace of Westminster, Millbank Tower, Lambeth Bridge and Vauxhall riverside. London, UK (Ввласенко CC BY SA 3.0).

Peter Shore: Labour’s Forgotten Patriot. Kevin Hickson, Jasper Miles and Harry Taylor, foreword by Bryan Gould. Biteback. 2020

Peter Shore: Labour’s Forgotten Patriot is a call for the Labour Party to rediscover its ‘lost Eurosceptic tradition’ on the social democratic Right of the party. The book examines the life of one of its most able, if now largely neglected, front-rank politicians, Peter Shore. Shore’s political career led him from King’s College, Cambridge, to play a leading role as an official in Labour Party headquarters, helping to author the 1964 election manifesto that swept Labour to power, promising to use the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ to modernise the British economy. Following the party’s defeat in 1959, Shore was appointed as the Head of Labour’s influential Research Department. Harold Wilson thought that Shore was one of the most intellectually gifted backroom advisers operating in the party. Shore was selected eventually to fight the ‘safe’ seat of Stepney in East London in October 1966. Safely installed in Westminster, he went on to serve in the cabinets of Prime Ministers Wilson and James Callaghan, standing for the party leadership on two occasions.

The authors of this skillfully crafted and revealing biography not only reappraise Shore’s career, but use the life of this unique, indeed idiosyncratic, politician as a lens to examine salient issues in the historical development of the Labour Party. Shore has received relatively little attention from Labour historians, partly because he is so difficult to classify ideologically. His biographers wisely avoid trying to force Shore’s politics into the pre-defined ideological categories of ‘Bevanite’ or ‘Gaitskellite’, ‘revisionist’ or ‘fundamentalist’. Shore became close to Tony Benn in the late 1950s and was certainly regarded as an ally of the Bevanites, but was never part of the ‘Bennite wing’ of the party. In the early 1980s, he also faced a concerted effort by hard Left activists to oust him from his seat.

Neither was Shore a conventional figure on the Right. He grew uncomfortable with the uncompromising revisionism of Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland that sought to jettison public ownership from the party’s doctrine following the 1959 election defeat. Later on, he became well known as an ardent opponent of British membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). In 1980, Shore stood for the Labour leadership believing he would receive the support of the Left in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Yet Michael Foot ran against him. With Denis Healey carrying the mantle of the party’s traditional Right, Shore was stranded in the middle, receiving only 32 PLP votes. He ran for the leadership again in 1983, but in the wake of a further devastating election defeat, the party turned to the rising political generation epitomised by Neil Kinnock.

A further reason why Shore is often marginalised in official Labour history is that his views, not least his impassioned Euroscepticism, became unfashionable in the party of Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair. Under Kinnock, Labour had denounced the policies of the 1983 manifesto which demanded British withdrawal from Europe. The party became steadily more pro-European. In 1988, the President of the EU Commission, Jacques Delors, attended the Trade Union Congress (TUC), outlining his vision of a ‘Social Europe’ while inviting the trade union leadership in Britain to become its ‘architects’. Two years later, the Labour frontbench supported British entry to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), the forerunner of the Euro. Under Smith and Blair, Labour pledged to put Britain at the heart of Europe, ending its status as ‘an awkward partner’. This pro-European shift horrified Shore, as did the emergence of the embryonic New Labour project. Shore believed that Blair had no coherent political beliefs, was dangerously uncritical of the EU, had prematurely discarded Keynesian economic ideas and had no natural understanding of patriotism: an essential quality in appealing to the British, and in particular the English, working classes.

In another sense, Shore’s alienation from the Labour Party of the 1990s as it prepared for power was unfortunate both for him, and for the party leadership (as was also the case for Bryan Gould who departed British politics to take up an academic post in New Zealand). Throughout his career, Shore thought purposefully about economic issues, and his continuing presence in the party would have enriched immeasurably the economic policy debate of the 1990s. As Shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown was understandably focused on the goal of election victory. He imposed a new economic orthodoxy which necessitated the adoption of macro-economic disciplines, while shifting focus from demand-side Keynesianism to supply-side reform of labour and product markets. Labour’s new economic strategy was not ‘neoliberal’. Yet it was underdeveloped intellectually. In embracing the rhetoric of all-encompassing ‘economic globalisation’, the party ceased to think more imaginatively about what constructive role the state should play in strengthening national economic performance. By indulging in blanket characterisation of ‘Old’ Labour as a historical failure, New Labour failed to heed the lessons of Labour’s experience in governing the economy during the twentieth century.

Labour’s Forgotten Patriot is a fascinating account which demonstrates how troubled Shore was by the turn to Europe as the template of ‘modernisation’ for the Left, and the underlying contempt of New Labour politicians for English identities and values. Shore was part of a generation who saw Britain and England in admiring terms. They revered the stability and continuity afforded by the British constitutional settlement. The values of Britain were held to be a beacon to the rest of the world.

All that being said, Shore’s judgements on New Labour were not always the most objective. It is certainly the case that the party became more pro-European by the 1990s. However, the main instigator of that policy shift was Kinnock. By the mid-1990s, the leadership had arguably become more wary of the EU. They sought to expose divisions in the Conservative Party by adopting a general position of ‘Euro-caution’. In the 1997 election campaign, for example, Blair wrote an article for The Sun newspaper entitled ‘Why I Love the Pound’. He rejected the prospect of a federal Europe, embracing a politics driven by pursuit of the national interest. Of course, the Labour government eventually decided not to join the Euro.

Furthermore, the accusation that New Labour under Blair was ‘unpatriotic’ sits uneasily given that Blair spoke frequently in opposition about his ‘love of country’, to a degree some party members found embarrassing. For Left-liberal social democrats (including the new leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer), the Blair governments were all too willing to indulge in rhetoric designed to appeal to a ‘Little Englander’ mindset.

In Labour’s Forgotten Patriot, the authors have performed a considerable service in advancing the historiography of the British Labour Party. Their book draws judiciously on meticulous archival research, copious interviews and a rich array of memoirs and political diaries. They are right to argue that the Eurosceptic social democratic tradition in the Labour Party that shaped Shore’s career merits further re-examination. Given the nature of the party’s defeat in the general election of 2019, Labour politicians will have to think harder about where they stand in relation to patriotism, identity, belonging and the question of Britain’s future relationship with Europe, all of which are critical to a viable future governing project for the centre-Left.

This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of Democratic Audit. It was first published on the the LSE Review of Books blog.

About the author

Patrick Diamond is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of a forthcoming book on Labour in Opposition and Power, 1979-2019.

Independence referendums are comparatively rare – and even more so when conducted without the approval of the relevant central government. Jaume López and Marc Sanjaume-Calvet assess the case of Catalonia in 2017, and how the differing strategic priorities and culture of Spanish and Catalonian governments led to the referendum, repressive counter-measures and resulting stalemate.

Picture: Beverly Yuen Thompson / (CC BY-NC 2.0) licence

On 1 October 2017, a referendum on independence took place in Catalonia despite the opposition of Spanish central authorities and the lack of constitutional support. The Yes option won by 90% of the votes and the turnout was 43%. More than three years later, Catalan leaders remain in jail or in exile and members of the former Catalan government and leaders of civil society have been convicted to serve several years in prison, while many civil servants and citizens are still awaiting trial. A pro-independence government remains in place in Catalonia, but in Madrid the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy was replaced by a leftist coalition of Socialists and Podemos. While the 2017 vote on independence was a major landmark of Catalan secessionist movement, it did not produce an independent state nor a change in the inflexible approach to the territorial question by the central government. Recently, the new executive led by Pedro Sánchez has slightly opened the door to an eventual negotiation on the Catalan issue in a ‘table of dialogue’, but this has not yet borne fruit.

Referendums on independence in liberal democracies are rare, even more so when held without the agreement of the central government. In our research we attempt to answer several questions: how can we explain the decisions of the political actors involved to hold a referendum and of others to repress it? And was this referendum comparable to other cases? We consider both strategic culture and rationality as relevant factors for explaining the political actors’ behaviour. Although the political use of popular mobilisation through a referendum to strengthen legitimacy is common among this type of referendum, the Catalan case presents some peculiarities since it occurred in a liberal democracy, civil society actors were instrumental in making the vote possible, and central authorities repressed both the organisation of the vote and the voters themselves.

Why did Catalan and Spanish governments act as they did?

Using Qvortrup’s (2014) competition proximity model applied to the rationality of referendums we argue that in the Catalan case calling for an independence referendum was a rational strategy of secessionist actors. According to this model, when competition is high and the preferences of most voters align with the policy to be carried out, referendums occur. The Catalan government was in strong competition against the central Spanish government in 2017, after several failed attempts to negotiate on the political status of Catalonia. Moreover, there was internal competition among pro-independence political parties too at two levels: among pro-independence forces composing the heterogeneous ruling platform (Junts pel Sí) and within the broader pro-independence parliamentary majority. The pro-independence parties had already obtained a parliamentary majority in the last regional elections without any change in the attitude of the central government regarding self-determination, and Madrid remained against the possibility of a negotiation on independence or on the right to decide based on the Catalan democratic mandate. From the point of view of the Catalan government, the referendum implied delivering ‘the right to decide’ and legitimising independence vis-à-vis the central state and international actors. In September 2017 a poll published by El País found that 82% of the Catalans supported a legal and agreed referendum. Later on, several polls found a consistent majority of Catalans supporting a referendum on independence (between 70 and 75%).

The reverse calculations can be applied to the central government. In this case, competition was exceptionally low on this territorial policy since both the ruling party (PP) and main opposition party (PSOE) opposed the referendum in Catalonia, as did the main judiciary institutions. Moreover, the Catalan government did not represent a challenging competition to central government. Public opinion was more divided on the issue than political elites but still against a referendum. According to the polls less than 50% of Spaniards supported a referendum on independence in Catalonia. Therefore, opposing the referendum was somewhat expected according to the competition proximity model.

The role of strategic culture  

Beyond such rational, competition-based motives, strategic culture played a relevant role too. In Catalonia, the framing of a ‘right to decide’ had been shaping the demand for self-determination since the Statute of Autonomy reform in 2005. The beginning of this popular public demand can be traced back to when the Platform for the right to decide was formed at that time by around 700 civic associations. Since then, several mobilisations were inspired by the idea of applying the democratic principle, such as the grassroots local consultations on independence that took place between 2009 and 2013. In fact, the 2017 1 October referendum was executed by an underground civil society network.

Strategic culture also shaped the response to this territorial challenge from central government. The constitutional and political response to the Basque precedent had already shaped a legalistic defence against independence referendums in Spain. Despite criticisms of the narrow legal doctrine on this issue from constitutional law experts, the Spanish government remained inflexible to the Catalan demands and repressed the pro-independence movement and leaders to avoid the 2017 referendum. The Spanish government used several legal and coercive measures to stop the 1 October referendum. These included arrests of civil servants and politicians, the deployment of more than 10,000 extra police from the rest of Spain in Catalan territory, opening criminal law cases against MPs, government officials and 700 mayors, police searches in various Catalan ministries and private businesses, the censorship of websites including official sites and apps, bans on public events on the referendum, and the infringement of postal privacy by the public mail service in order to block the distribution of electoral propaganda, among other actions.

A comparative view

Was the 2017 referendum in Catalonia a rare case? The Catalan case presents some similarities with other experiences of unilateral referendums organised by pro-independence movements in the past but also important differences. The use of unilateral referendums, either de jure or de facto, might not lead to independence, but can have political and legal consequences and do not end up as a zero-sum game. Cases of referendums held in other territories and contexts such as Quebec, Aaland Islands, Kurdistan or Kosovo in which de facto or de jure referendums were used to advance the secessionist cause bear some resemblance with the Catalan experience.

However, at least three features make the 2017 this case a rare phenomenon. First, the 2017 referendum was a de facto independence referendum; this kind of referendum generally does not occur in liberal democracies. Second, the referendum was executed by civil society, although it was coordinated by regional authorities. Finally, the turnout was less successful than other unilateral experiences from a comparative perspective. All these peculiarities are partially explained by the clash of rationalities and strategic cultures we have detailed.

The Catalan referendum on independence and its repression was a rare event in a liberal democracy but it obeyed a specific rationality and strategic culture of actors involved. Our research sheds light on this case-study and might be used as a material in comparative analysis on the use of referendums of independence in secessionist conflicts.

This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position Democratic Audit. It draws on their article, ‘The Political Use of de facto Referendums of Independence The Case of Catalonia’, published in Representation.

About the authors

Jaume López is Lecturer in Political Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. His main areas of research are: democratic innovation, right to self-determination, collective action, philosophy of social sciences.

Marc Sanjaume-Calvet is Lecturer in Political Science at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. His main areas of research are: democracy, federalism, nationalism, political theory. 

Chris Game assesses the efficacy of one of Parliament’s most antiquated procedures, the Private Members’ Bill, and finds that, though they have proliferated to little effect, in some notable cases, including local government procurement, they have instigated considerable reform.

Private Members’ bill ballot, 2016. Picture: UK Parliament/Parliamentary Copyright, reproduced with the permission of Parliament

One incidental phenomenon of this extraordinary period in our lives is the explosion in the quantity of free stuff around, and advertised as just that: ‘free stuff’.  It takes me back a few years – memory-jogged by a recent report from the ‘neo-localist’ think tank, Localis, of which more later – to the heyday of ‘free stuff’ in the local government world. 

Which in turn took me back, coinciding with MPs’ so-called return to work, to Parliament and a sometimes overlooked sphere of its work that every so often genuinely enhances public life – rather more than most Question Times, in-person or virtual.

I refer to Private Members’ Bills (PMBs) – the means by which non-ministerial MPs and peers can attempt to get their names into the statute books, or – much more usually – a one-line Hansard mention. I jest not – of the 386 PMBs introduced in the extended 2017–19 parliamentary session, just 15 received Royal Assent.

Like everything else about our Parliament – fabric, functioning, and obviously electoral system – the whole PMB business is decades overdue for overhaul and reform. Unsurprisingly, insofar as it featured at all in Photiadou and Dunleavy’s assessment of the House of Commons in the most recent Audit of UK Democracy, it was on the ‘Weaknesses’ side of the balance sheet, exemplified by a single MP’s being able to block a widely supported PMB that would have outlawed ‘upskirting’. Yet, almost despite itself, it regularly does produce seriously worthwhile law.

And there was one decade in which it excelled, creating a shelf of legislation that remains today hugely worthwhile – abolition of capital punishment, reform of law on abortion, homosexuality, divorce, theatre censorship, Sunday entertainment – and that was just the headliners. It was the 1960s, of course – as I was discovering a genuine interest in politics, had university essays to write, and became fascinated by this way of handling ‘conscience legislation’ – (PG Richards, Parliament and Conscience, 1970) – which is probably why I still pay sporadic attention to what goes on.

I admit, though, I had little idea of how the show-off Presentation Bill procedure had mushroomed.  The Hansard Society counted 147 of them in that extended last session – except that there weren’t, in any physical sense. For all you need do is, well, present your proposed bill’s title – handfuls at a time, if you feel really shouty – to a sparsely occupied Friday Commons. 

This still newish parliamentary session is already set to leave that 147 total standing. Imagine last Thursday, first day back at school, as the shoutiest boys (you can’t imagine women MPs bothering with this stuff, can you?) presented their holiday homework. Prominent Brexiteer Peter Bone managed 15 bills, but his supposed mate, Sir Christopher Chope – the upskirting bill objector, incidentally – left him almost wimpering with his (I think) 41.

Thankfully, you don’t even get to air what’s bothering you, because there’s no speech, no debate, and the things are frequently not even printed. Yes, there are occasional, vital exceptions – like the recent EU (Withdrawal) Bills sponsored by Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn that sought to avoid a ‘no deal’ Brexit in the absence of the Withdrawal Bill’s ratification.

But exceptions they were. If you have a serious cause, a genuine knowledge of the subject and the deficiencies of the present legislation, plus ideally access to ‘expert’ advice and parliamentary drafting skills, then you don’t shout, but try a Ten-Minute Rule Bill and/or chance your luck in the Private Members’ Bill ballot.

This is a big parliamentary happening, at the start of each session. Most eligible MPs enter, their anonymised numbers inscribed on ping-pongy balls and pulled out of, obviously, a goldfish bowl for total transparency. The first 20 names then get, in reverse order, a guaranteed Friday slot in the parliamentary timetable to introduce and hopefully progress their chosen bill. 

Of the 15 PMBs passed in the last session nine were these Ballot Bills. Most focus on a specific need, injustice or population group, like the Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Act 2018, introduced by Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake, who came eighth in the 2017 ballot, and which has finally just come into operation. Labelled ‘Jack’s Law’, after Jack Herd, whose mother, Lucy, led the campaign for the bill, it authorises a minimum of two weeks’ paid bereavement leave for the several thousand employed parents each year who lose a child under the age of 18 or have a stillbirth from the 24th week of pregnancy.

The difficulty in taking on an unsympathetic government on a politically big issue is illustrated by SNP MP Dr Eilidh Whiteford, who was seventh in the 2016 ballot. She tried using her bill to embarrass the government, already five years after signing the Council of Europe’s wide-ranging Istanbul Convention on Combating Violence Against Women, into actually ratifying it into UK law, instead of merely agreeing how jolly important it was and blocking it in the EU Council. Three years later: surprise!  Shamefully, still unratified. However, with the Counting Dead Women project estimating at least 16 domestic abuse killings during the first three weeks of lockdown, Home Secretary Priti Patel is reportedly considering setting up a new cross-government taskforce on domestic abuse.  So that’s sorted, then.

And back to the local government part of this blog’s theme, courtesy of Chris White, Conservative MP for Warwick and Leamington from 2010 to 2017.  With beginner’s luck, White came third in the 2010 Private Members’ Ballot, and used it outstandingly, to introduce the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012. Working ‘with the grain’ of both central and local government progressive thinking, it required councils and other public bodies to pay regard to ‘social impact’ – social, economic and environmental well-being – when making procurement decisions. 

Some councils needed no convincing, but plenty did. Yet, really quite rapidly, social value advanced – from campaign slogan, through the development of Social Value Strategies, to statutory requirement, to an almost universally recognised consideration in dealing with both public and frequently private sectors.

The Localis think tank argues – not for the first time, but in greater depth – that the government should now go further. Councils should be required to produce publicly available Community Value Charters defining where social value offers would be best targeted, thereby aiding both commissioners and potentially bidding contractors.

Thanks significantly to Chris White, as the publication reminds us, we’ve come a long way from councillors and officers on the procurement side of a negotiating table asking, slightly self-consciously: ‘What about all the free stuff – sorry, the additional economic, environmental and social value?’ – and bidders frantically guessing what might be required to seal the deal.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position Democratic Audit. 

About the author

Chris Game is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham.

Ahead of each UK election, there is a rush to get people registered to vote, and confusion about who is already registered. In a new report Toby James and Paul Bernal set out how to improve the system while protecting data privacy, through automatic or assisted voter registration, and so widen access to democratic participation.

Picture: Chris Christian / (CC BY-NC 2.0) licence

Electoral registers are a vital part of the machinery of democracy. They are the definitive record of who is able to vote in an election. Eligible or not, if your name is not on the register then you’re not voting. In the UK, they are also used to construct electoral boundaries and for other civic purposes – making them doubly important.

And yet the UK’s electoral registers have regularly made negative headlines. It is well known that millions of citizens are missing, and electoral officials are under severe pressure with a last-minute rush of applications close to deadline day before any election. There have therefore been calls for automatic voter registration (AVR) from parliamentary committees, campaigners, politicians and academics to address some of these problems. Cross-party parliamentary support for automatic voter registration has come from the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in its 2014 report on Voter Engagement, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democratic Participation’s report on the Missing Millions. The Electoral Commission called for automatic or direct voter registration processes in 2017, and there has been political party and civil society support from groups such as the Electoral Reform Society. Interest in automatic voter registration has no doubt been encouraged by debates in the US, where many states have introduced it in recent years.

Is it time to introduce automatic voter registration to the UK? And what actually is it? A new report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust sets out arguments for and against. Debate about automatic voter registration has been made difficult by confusion about terminology with AVR used very loosely. There are also a range of philosophical and logistical questions that need to be thought through.

What is automatic voter registration?

Automatic voter registration is a broad principle and umbrella term that could in practice involve a range of different approaches. The report defines it as the direct enrolment of citizens onto the electoral register by public officials, without the need for pro-active action by citizens. This is in direct contrast with the current system used in the UK, where citizens are responsible for registering themselves ahead of the deadline for election day. The UK system is comparatively rare in democracies, with registration automatic in most countries.

Assisted voter registration is a half-way house which involves citizens being asked to register to vote when accessing other government services, for example when you renew your driving licence.

Options for automatic voter registration

There are a variety of different pathways to automatic voter registration. The first, and most direct, is the use of a new centralised civil population register, which is how it is implemented in many countries around the world. Broader concerns about civil liberties may make this approach unpopular, however.

Alternatives might include the expansion of other centralised governmental databases such as the Department of Work and Pensions’ Customer Information System to act as a single national electoral register. Currently electoral registers are maintained by local authorities, and localised registers could be maintained, but local officials could be given access to a broader set of national datasets which they could use to augment the register without the prior permission of citizens.

The report proposes an alternative route. Direct enrolment could be relatively easily achieved for specific groups – namely 16-year-olds when they are issued with their National Insurance Number. This would mean that citizens are systematically registered to vote when they are within the school system and it would provide an opportunity to provide comprehensive political and civic literacy. This would directly add 700,000 citizens to the roll each year with minimal administrative effort. At present young people are expected to register, public resources are spent encouraging them to do so, and they are threatened with fines if they don’t do as they are told. We could just save ourselves that battle.

At the same time, assisted voter registration could be introduced by prompting citizens to register to vote when accessing a range of other government services such as applying for a driving licence. Using Freedom of Information requests, we estimated that the number of times that citizens would therefore be prompted to register to vote:

• 6.5 million per year when applying for a passport
• 4 million people when they update their driving licence address with the DVLA
• 2 million people a year when applying for Universal Credit
• 2.5 million students through annual student enrolment
• 800,000 when they apply for child benefit for the first time
• 500,000 when they provide the Student Loans Company with a new address
• 450,000 when they apply for disability benefits

Data concerns

One area of the automatic voter registration debate that hasn’t been thought through in detail is privacy and the use of the electoral register. There is currently an open/edited register that citizens can opt out of. This can be purchased by anyone. It is currently used by companies to construct people databases where you can search for an individual’s address, likely age, length of residency, other household occupants, previous household occupants and neighbour’s details. This data is then combined with other sources such as the insolvency register; births, marriages and death records; land registry and business listings databases. You can therefore buy 27-page background reports on your person of interest. We think this register should be abolished. Any move to automatic or assisted voter registration should certainly ensure that citizens are not included on the open/edited register without an explicit action from them.

The main electoral register remains accessible to stakeholders such as elected representatives, political parties, government agencies and credit reference agencies. There is currently a provision to register entirely anonymously subject to strict criteria, meaning that no one except electoral officials can view your name and address. This is vitally important for citizens such as those who domestic abuse victims. Anonymous registration should be possible for a longer period (at least five years) and made easier to administer for a citizen in this situation. Automatic and assisted voter registration options are not therefore privacy threats if carefully managed. But there are privacy threats already there and these should be addressed.

The UK’s electoral register retains its Victorian origins – but has seen considerable modernisation over the past twenty years under successive governments. The report sets out 28 recommendations to modernise the UK’s electoral machinery for an inclusive 21st-century democracy. Moving to automatic and assisted voter registration is this next step.

The report, ‘Is it time for Automatic Voter Registration in the UK?’, can be downloaded here. This report was funded by the UK Democracy Fund. The UK Democracy Fund, a Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd initiative, funded the work reported in this publication. The material presented here represents the views of the author(s), not necessarily those of JRRT or other UK Democracy Fund contributors. This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit.

About the authors

Toby James is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of East Anglia, UK. His most recent books are Comparative Electoral Management (Routledge, 2020) and Building Inclusive Elections (Routledge, 2020).

Paul Bernal is Associate Professor of IT, IP and Media Law at the University of East Anglia, UK. His most recent book is What do we know and what should we do about internet privacy (SAGE, 2020).

Stephen Holden Bates, Stephen McKay and Mark Goodwin assess the gender balance on the newly elected select committees, and their chairs, and find there have been clear improvements in some areas. However, further progress cannot be assumed, and they recommend Parliament considers more reforms to improve representation within its committee system.

Treasury Committee, 15 April 2020 via Parliament Live/Parliamentary copyright

The results of the elections for the UK House of Commons select committees are (nearly) out.

The 2010 Wright Reforms, designed to increase the standing of Parliament in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, are now a decade old. One of the main reforms introduced was to alter the method of selection for House of Commons select committees from appointment by party managers to election by the whole House (in the case of chairships) and by party caucuses (for membership). This reform has been hailed by many as one of the reasons why select committees have become an ever more prominent and prestigious part of Parliament. There is also evidence that the reform has been good for gender equality within the committee system, particularly in terms of female MPs becoming committee chairs (although it is a moot point whether the reforms have been good for other aspects of equality, particularly ethnic minority representation). For the latest round of select committee elections, in terms of female representation, they are a case of simultaneously bedding down, treading water and taking two steps forward.

Bedding down…

The general picture from these elections is similar to that of previous rounds. The proportion of both female chairs (32.1%) and female members (35.4%) broadly mirrors that of the House of Commons as a whole (33.8%).

Moreover, as can be seen from Figures 1 and 2, female chairs are distributed relatively evenly across committees with different levels of prestige and which cover policy areas that are often (stereotypically) coded feminine, neutral or masculine (for example, Health and Social Care is typically perceived as feminine, with Defence masculine). This welcome pattern of female chairs elected across a range of portfolios and levels of prestige is one that has been emerging over the last decade and appears to be here to stay.

Figure 1: Percentage of female chairs by prestige of committee

Notes: Total number of committees in the high-, medium- and low-prestige categories in brackets. For a full explanation of the categorisation, see the authors’ article ‘Electing to Do Women’s Work? Gendered Divisions of Labor in U.K. Select Committees, 1979–2016’, in Politics and Gender.

Figure 2: Percentage of female chairs by gender category of committee

Notes: Total number of committees in each category in brackets. For a full explanation of the categorisation, see the authors’ article ‘Electing to Do Women’s Work? Gendered Divisions of Labor in U.K. Select Committees, 1979–2016’, in Politics and Gender.

…Treading water…

If we look at chair candidacies, a more mixed story emerges. While 31.5% of candidates for all committees in the 2019–20 elections were female, there were no female candidates for three of the five most prestigious committees: the Defence, the Foreign Affairs and the Treasury select committees. Indeed, there have only been two female chair candidates for these three committees since 2010 compared with 48 male candidates. This may partly be a consequence of party matters. Since 2010, these three committees have been chaired by the Conservatives, which today has around a quarter of MPs who are female (compared with over 50% for Labour). However, there is also evidence to suggest that it may be a consequence of long-standing gendered divisions of labour within the select committee system.

As can be seen from Figure 3, the distribution of female MPs across the select committees is not spread evenly; female MPs are over-represented compared to their presence in the House of Commons on some committees and under-represented on others. Indeed, on one committee – International Trade – there are no female MPs at all.

The proportion of female MPs on a number of these committees correspond to what we would expect on the basis of our recently published work on the gendered divisions of labour within the select committee system in the journal Politics and Gender. For example, we found that the Health and Social Care and the Home Affairs select committees were consistently and strongly disproportionately female, and that the Defence and the Foreign Affairs select committees were very strongly disproportionately male. For these committees at least, these gendered patterns have continued.

Figure 3: Percentage of female members for select committees 2019–20 (with 95% confidence bounds shaded in red)

…And taking two steps forward

Taking the above into account, what is perhaps most notable from Figure 3 is the proportion of women on the Treasury Select Committee. This figure of 73% is a historic high for such a high-profile committee and, being categorised as strongly disproportionately male in our research, is not in line with our expectations at all. Notwithstanding the idea that gender parity across committees should be the aim, this is a positive development and, if it becomes institutionalised, raises interesting questions about the drivers behind such a change. For example, it is notable that all the non-Conservative MPs on the committee are female, again raising questions about the role parties play in challenging gendered parliamentary behaviour and outcomes. We may also ask whether the former Conservative MP and now Baroness, Nicky Morgan, who was the first (and remains the only) female chair of the committee during the last parliament, acted as a role model across party lines for this cohort of female members.

Another noteworthy but less obvious outcome is that there are more female MPs than has most often been the case on committees that deal with aspects of Parliament itself – for example, the Procedure and the Backbench Business committees – and whose membership can often act as gatekeepers and guardians of parliamentary process.

Why might this matter and what else needs to be done?

It matters that certain trends in the gendered divisions of labour appear to be persisting and some changing because, although not straightforward, gendered patterns in the descriptive representation of female committee members probably have (continuing) ramifications for the substantive representation of women in certain policy areas. For example, it is almost certainly a very good thing for women – and, by extension, society more generally – that female MPs are no longer in the minority on the Treasury Select Committee. This is especially the case in a (post-)Covid-19 environment. We know that austerity has had – and continues to have – gendered effects in the UK, and the architects of it are already talking about retrenchment and reducing public sector debt in the aftermath of the current crisis. Therefore, it is most likely to be beneficial to women that we have a majority-female Treasury Select Committee to scrutinise the gendered dimensions of any changes to public spending and taxes.

Moreover, it is almost certainly a bad thing for women – and perhaps also democracy – that there are no female MPs on the International Trade Select Committee. Given the extent to which trade deals are critical to successful post-Brexit international relations, the exclusion of women from the committee holding government to account on this policy area is sub-optimal.

It may also matter for committees that focus on Parliament itself because, depending of course on the motivations of the members, the increase in female membership raises the possibility of making it easier to change the culture of Parliament away from a gender regime underpinned by a particular and traditional form of masculinity. The former Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, Maria Miller, is now a member of the Procedure Committee for example.

And it may matter for the effectiveness of select committees and the scrutiny and accountability work they undertake because research suggests that diverse groups tend to outperform homogenous groups.

Our research in Politics and Gender showed that gendered patterns across select committee membership are not systematically disrupted because of increases in female MPs. We, therefore, cannot simply just wait for a cohort effect and put our efforts solely into getting more women elected to the House of Commons. Neither can we rely solely on existing reforms because, however positive in some regards, there is at least some circumstantial evidence to suggest that they are often in tension with powerful informal institutions that sustain gendered power imbalances.

We therefore believe Parliament should turn to some of the unimplemented recommendations of The Good Parliament report by Sarah Childs that concern committee composition and chairing:

• Recommendation 15: Introduce sex/gender quotas for the election of select committee chairs prior to the [next] general election if, by [a year prior], the percentage of women chairs is less than 40%;
• Recommendation 30: Prohibit single-sex/gender select committees, and encourage political parties to be mindful of wider representativeness in the election of members to committees.

Implementing Recommendation 15, the responsibility of the Commons Reference Group on Representation and Inclusion, would ensure that women’s leadership positions as Committee Chairs would move considerably closer to parity and may help disrupt some of the persistent gendered membership patterns highlighted above. Implementing Recommendation 30, directed to the Procedure Committee, would prevent all-female or all-male committees, such as has been seen with the composition of the current International Trade Select Committee.

This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sarah Childs and Alice Park for their suggestions concerning earlier drafts of this blog. The research was part-funded by the British Academy (SQ140007).

About the authors

Stephen Holden Bates is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham with research interests in parliamentary power and parliamentary committees.

Steve McKay is Professor of Social Research at the University of Lincoln with research interests in social policy and quantitative methodologies.

Mark Goodwin is a Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University with research interests in the UK Parliament, select committees and British public policy.

Making use of cross-country European survey data that was fielded both before and after Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented, André Blais, Damien Bol, Marco Giani and Peter Loewen find that support for the incumbent leader, support for government in general, and trust in democracy have all increased in the short term.

Photo by Manuel Peris Tirado on Unsplash

Governments around the globe have responded to the spread of Covid-19 by imposing strong confinement measures, following advice from a transnational expertise, though with some variations in timing and extent. These measures entail liberty-reducing and security-enhancing effects akin to special measures during terrorist crises, and have clearly prioritised the health of vulnerable individuals above generalised economic interests in ways that were ex ante not obvious.

There is little doubt that the current crisis has placed the state under the spotlight. It has highlighted a key question: when confronted with grave threats, do citizens trust the democratic system to respond? Yet the distinctive nature of the pandemic response yielded opposing guesswork among experts about likely public attitudes, resulting in two factions: those who believe that the lockdown boosted status-quo bias, and support for state action, and those who believe that it would sharpen the quest for change by increasing chaos and mistrust in authority.

In this paper, we take advantage of a representative cross-national survey focusing on key political attitudes in 15 Western European countries that was undertaken in March and April this year. Responses to the survey came both before and after the introduction of lockdown measures and so are able to capture the short-run dynamic of attitudinal change during the process of social confinement. The survey covers indicators of both specific political support – i.e. ones that relate to current political leaders or governments – and diffuse forms of political support, related to trust in an institution or a regime.

To identify the date at which the lockdown became operative we relied on the data gathered by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, which defined lockdown as nationwide and strictly enforced social confinements. Seven countries surveyed, including the UK, France, Italy and Spain, enforced such a lockdown over the survey period (to avoid data error, countries like Germany where the containment policy was decided at the subnational level were excluded). Because of the timing and method of the survey, some respondents were surveyed before their countries’ lockdown, and some after. Our main independent variable, therefore, is a dummy variable taking the value of 1 if the respondent was surveyed after their country’s lockdown enforcement date.

Figure 1: Effect of Covid-19 lockdown on support for incumbent PM’s party (a), satisfaction with democracy (b) and trust in government (c)

The graphs above plot the effect of lockdown enforcement on key political attitudes. The graph on the left shows that in countries where a lockdown was introduced during the survey period, voting intention for the party of the incumbent prime minister or president increased by 4%. The middle graph and the right graph show respectively that satisfaction with democracy and trust in government also increased by 2%. The results are net of incidence of Covid-19 in the country, as well as from the effects of a set of standard sociodemographic variables.

Several additional tests give us some confidence about the broad picture presented here. One problematic aspect would emerge if respondents surveyed before the lockdown were substantially different in terms of demographic features or social status from those surveyed after the lockdown. In that case, the reported increase in diffuse and specific support for democratic institutions may inaccurately reflect aggregate public opinion responses. However, luckily, we show that this was not an issue in our study. A second important test that we ran consists in isolating the effect of the lockdown from that of other milder policy restrictions. We find that the observed public opinion dynamic is unique to the lockdown, as schools and workplaces closing entailed no effect on political attitudes. Finally, we show that whereas the lockdown spurred support for existing political institutions, it had no effect on individuals’ self-position in the left-right ideological scale. This refines our overall picture, suggesting that the enforcement of the lockdown was not perceived as an ideological decision.

Taken together, our findings indicate that part of the population has become more supportive of its political leaders and democratic institutions since the pandemic lockdowns were implemented, resulting in a nonpartisan status-quo bias. It seems that people understand that strict social containment is necessary, and reward governments that decide to enforce it, at least in the short term. Furthermore, our findings suggest that it has a positive spill-over effect on support for democracy and its institutions.

This article is based on the authors’ working paper ‘The effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on political support: Some good news for democracy?’, which you can read here.

This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit.

About the authors

André Blais is Professor in the Department of Political Science and holds a Research Chair in Electoral Studies at the University of Montreal.

Damien Bol is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.

Marco Giani is a Lecturer in Economics, King’s College London. 

Peter Loewen is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto.

Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin propose reforms and urgent actions to tackle economic and educational inequalities in the UK.

Image by Tom Parsons on Unsplash

Social distancing measures during the coronavirus pandemic has given a new meaning to the problem of low social mobility. But make no mistake: the long term reverberations of the crisis will likely exacerbate the divide in life chances between the poor and privileged. Covid-19 has the scope to increase the toxic mix of rising economic and education inequality that hinders social mobility. Unless we tackle these inequalities, we face a dark age of declining opportunity.

Economic shocks

The pandemic has shone a light on a deeply divided workplace: the highly paid, salaried graduate elites on one side, and the workers in dead-end jobs, lacking basic rights or entitlements, on the other. Those who are able to work from home (on average richer individuals) are significantly less likely to be furloughed or lose their jobs. Indeed many middle class salaried earners will be accumulating wealth, via forced saving from not spending on the likes of expensive holidays or restaurants.

The huge shocks paralysing the global economy are hitting low income (and younger earners) the hardest (Adams-Prassl, 2020). In excess of one million people have newly applied for Universal Credit, the basic benefit for working-age people. Moreover, as with earlier recessions and experience of unemployment, the Covid-19-induced downturn is likely to have long-term scarring effects – companies put out of business for good, employees facing permanent layoffs.

In truth we were already heading towards a reckoning. Young people growing up today were facing declining absolute mobility, meaning falling real wages, fewer opportunities and the growing spectre of downward social mobility (Elliot Major and Machin, 2018). We may be applauding NHS workers for their priceless work battling to save lives, but for too long we have underpaid our key public sector workers – teachers, nurses and carers, among many others. Britain has become a fragmented country, defined by economic, geographical and political divides.

Polling in the United States meanwhile suggests that Covid-19 will make class divides wider: poorer people are more likely to have the underlying conditions of diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) that make them vulnerable to the virus, and are less likely to adhere to social distancing measures (Reeves and Rothwell, 2020). Minorities have suffered disproportionately. The same is almost certainly true in Britain as well. Poorer people are more likely to do the jobs that make them vulnerable to the virus.

Education shocks

The upheaval in education meanwhile has been equally seismic. Online tutoring is flourishing due to mass home learning. Tutoring firms have reported a surge in business – fuelled mainly by parents with the money to afford tutoring for their children. Children from better-off households are more than twice as likely to have had more than £100 spent on their education since the shutdown (Sutton Trust, 2020). A home learning divide is inevitable, as not all children will benefit from the study space, computers, internet and general support available in middle class homes.

In truth, efforts to close the achievement gap between poorer pupils and their more privileged peers were already stalling before the pandemic (Department for Education, 2019). In February 2020, the Department for Education reported a slight increase in the ‘pupil attainment gap index’ for a second year. The fear now is that the gap will become much wider, reversing the incremental gains made over the last decade.

It is hard to calculate how much education gaps will grow, but we can give broad estimates. Given the unprecedented circumstances, disadvantaged pupils could experience learning losses of perhaps between four and six months if disrupted by school closures for several months. Any earlier return to school before the summer will likely reduce any learning losses.

Summer learning loss has been documented across the world, with poorer children lagging further behind when they return to school (Cooper et al, 1996). Low income pupils were found to be as much three months behind their better-off peers in reading achievement after the long summer vacation in the United States. Learning slides were also observed for maths. Other studies using different methodologies reach comparable estimates of total learning loss (Burgess and Sievertsen, 2020).

These are unprecedented times, so we do not precisely know how much middle-class pupils will pull further away through tutoring and superior study conditions over an extended period of many months. There are also concerns that poorer students may suffer from being under-predicted in their A-levels by teachers, missing out on highly selective universities (Murphy and Wyness, 2020). The same could be true for GCSEs, often critical to securing a sixth form place.

Radical proposals

This combination of widening inequalities in work and the classroom are the perfect recipe for declining social mobility and worsening social justice (Elliot Major and Machin, 2018). Many have commented on the collective spirit that has emerged in the fight against a common enemy. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that ‘there really is such a thing as society’. But we now need to back this up with systematic reforms to create a fairer and more productive world.

On work:

Social assistance packages are needed immediately to provide quick assistance to help those hit hardest, including the self-employed. Layoffs should not be imposed on workers who can be furloughed. For the unemployed there should be an income guarantee while the crisis lasts.

In the aftermath of the immediate crisis, the government should introduce a progressive wealth tax assessed on the net worth of the top 1% of richest individuals (Landais et al, 2020). This would be enough to repay all the extra debt due the pandemic after ten years. From an intergenerational perspective, taxing wealth is an effective way of redistribution as it does not discourage people working hard or investing in wealth-creating businesses.

Employers, with appropriate government assistance, should be required to adopt pay and benefit parity policies. These commit to providing the same wages and benefits to contractors as in-house workers – unless there is a strong and genuine business rationale to do otherwise.

On education:

We should organise a national tutoring service to help level-up the playing field. Undergraduate students at every university could be signed up to tutor school pupils. This is one way of helping already over-worked teachers to bring pupils up to speed during the next school year. Undergraduates would benefit from the experience and be rewarded for it. One-to-one tuition is one of the most reliable ways we know of helping learners catch up. Delivered well, it can lead to an extra five months learning gain for pupils during one academic year (Elliot Major and Higgins, 2019).

At the same time, we will have to consider more radical temporary measures for schools, perhaps shortening the summer holidays (and extending holidays at Easter or Christmas), so pupils return to school earlier in the autumn. That will help workers get back into work as well. Pupil premium funding could help pay for extra tutoring, with extra grants allocated to regions of the country that need it the most.

In the longer term, we also need a credible vocational stream in schools while acknowledging many schools are already acting as social welfare hubs. A more systematic approach is required.

To promote a more egalitarian education system, in cases where education institutions are over-subscribed there should be random allocation for school and university admissions, where candidates have met selection criteria.

As the Great Depression in the 1930s and the aftermath of World War Two showed, hard times can prompt moves to fairer and more collective societies. This has needed to happen for some time, but it is just getting worse after the triple whammy of the global financial crisis, Brexit and Covid-19. The reforms discussed here could tackle economic and educational inequalities, and help the country avoid the spectre of declining social mobility in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.

This blog post draws partly on the authors’ book What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?, to be published by Sage later this year.

The post expresses the views of its authors, not the position of Democratic Audit. It was first published on the LSE Business Review.

Lee Elliot Major is professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter and is an associate at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. He was formerly chief executive of the Sutton Trust and received an OBE for services to social mobility.

Stephen Machin is professor of economics at LSE and director of the school’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP).