America sets the path

‘They don’t have a Labour party’
During the forty years of the Cold War, America was commonly held to be exceptional because its politics differed from those of Western Europe. Continental Europeans basically, it was seen, enjoyed a choice between, Christian Democrats on the right, and Social Democrats on the left. This spectrum wasn’t especially ‘Conservative’ towards the right, though to the left, it could be impressively socialistic. Britain, and most of the other Commonwealth democracies, differed only inasmuch as they tended to have ‘Labour’ parties on the left, and sometimes something that passed for Tory on the right. What grew to amaze political scientists as decade after decade of post-war stasis rolled past was that the United States didn’t conform to this pattern. For in America the binary divide didn’t include an honestly socialist party. Between the steadily increasing Europeanisation of the US, and the doctrinal collapse of socialism worldwide, this anomaly has faded as a source of interest. But something else long divided Europe (and Britain) from the United States, and that was turnout.

Americans were commonly sneered at on this side of the Atlantic for their disinclination to vote overly much in the many polls they were offered. Some of us put this, in contradistinction to too many European states, down as proof positive of American democracy’s robust health. Our thinking being that, not only was the American system secure enough not to require participation to signal consent, those subject to it knew that it was. And that this indeed was why so many of them were sufficiently confident that they didn’t need to vote. They exercised their consent through abstention. So what then to make of this latest convergence between the two lungs of the West, that now Europeans also, increasingly find it unnecessary to have to vote in quite the numbers they once did? Again, I’d argue that it shoes how well entrenched democracy has become in what was previously barren ground, but obviously there are arguments against that.

The cry of the radical throughout the ages has been that politics is corrupt, or that it fails to address the concerns of the majority, or the disadvantaged. That, essentially, ‘politics’ is a racket participated in by a small, self-serving elite. And the radical having seen this, denounces it. This is where critics of low turnouts hold their case to be the strongest. For criticism of democracy in the past, they maintain, was dissolved by a high level of participation, whereas low mass turnout inevitably must mean a lessening of legitimacy for high politics. So is low turnout a danger, and should we fear it?

As it happens, we’re odds on to have a marginally higher turnout than in 2001. But it’s virtually impossible that this is going to take us out of the low 60s, and we’ll thus be millions and millions of freely made private choices away from the high 70s and low 80s British general elections used to entail. ‘Disenchantment’ is the commonly accounted bogey for what’s happening. Again, this can be made to fit in with the radical critique that, democracy isn’t delivering, otherwise the people would be taking part. However, what’s surely at fault here is the overly intellectual assumption being made about how and why people vote as they do, or don’t. Democracyists, in effect, assert that a failure to vote is a judgement consciously passed by the individual elector on the overall state of the political system. A far more plausible understanding though is that a disinclination to vote merely recognises the scale of importance the average individual places upon it. And if it’s a low value he assigns, then yes, this might betoken him having ‘given up’ on politics. But at least equally likely, and in truth, far, far more so is that in a mature democracy, people mostly only vote when they feel they have an incentive to. That either voting protects them against change they would rather not see happen, or conversely, that it might bring about changes whose absence they regret. Therefore not voting is a sign that politics simply doesn’t impinge on your life very much.

This quietism fundamentally marks a triumph for the right, on a conservative/socialist spectrum — socialists holding the personal to be political. But it is not such unambiguous good news for Conservatives in a conservative/liberal spectrum. Leastways it isn’t if ‘liberal’ values are those that are already culturally dominant. So vote if you want, but remember, most people clearly neither expect nor want it to make a difference.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.