Tony's war Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Performance Politics and the British Voter,
07/2009
Book Chapter
Speaking before parliament in November 1945, British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin claimed that: ‘the common man is the greatest protection against war’ (Holsti, 1996: 4). Although Bevin was neither ...the first nor the last to advance this claim — it has been a perennial topic of debate among students of international relations — in fact, ordinary citizens are not invariably united in their opposition to war. When the possibility of engaging in military conflict is salient on the political agenda, it often has positional rather than valence characteristics. Public opinion is divided, sometimes deeply. However, it also is clear that attitudes towards a war can shift, sometimes dramatically, with the typical pattern being for enthusiasm to wane as costs escalate, casualties mount, and ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ fades to black. What had been a position issue becomes a valence one. These stylized facts aside, much remains to be learned about factors that drive public reactions to international conflicts, and how these reactions affect the dynamics of support for political parties and their leaders. In this chapter we address these topics by analysing British public opinion about the Iraq War.The war was hotly debated for several months before it began on 20 March 2003, and those debates continued afterward. Indeed, British involvement in Iraq was a topic of controversy throughout the remainder of Tony Blair's tenure as prime minister and beyond. When first advanced, the proposal to invade Iraq split the Labour Party, and the decision to go forward ultimately required a bipartisan parliamentary coalition of Conservatives and a majority of Labour MPs loyal to the prime minister.
Voting and political participation Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Performance Politics and the British Voter,
07/2009
Book Chapter
Britain's first fully peacetime, post–Second World War general election was held on 23 February 1950. In that contest, 84% of the eligible electorate went to the polls — a highpoint in voter turnout ...that has not been revisited. In twenty–first–century general elections, turnout has been dismal, with only 61.2% voting in 2005 and only 59.4 doing so in 2001. These numbers are the end–points — thus far — in a long–term decline in electoral participation in Britain. The downward trend has accelerated over the past decade, and the percentages of people taking part in the two most recent general elections are lower than at any time since 1918. This raises an important question: is the decline in turnout unique or a reflection of a more general decrease in political participation?If voting is affected, but not other forms of involvement such as party activity, boycotting goods and services for political reasons, and protesting, then it suggests that in an increasingly complex and interconnected world citizens are finding other ways of trying to influence the political process. Although the long–term consequences of this development for British democracy will not be wholly salutatory, since making choices among governing and opposition parties traditionally has been the principal way by which the vast majority of people make their voices heard, the overall effect is unlikely to be fatal to democratic governance. Within broad limits, the percentage of people voting may not matter greatly when large numbers of citizens are availing themselves of other means of exerting political influence.
In previous chapters, we show that valence judgments have powerful effects on party choice and electoral participation. In this chapter, we consider how these judgments affect people's orientations ...towards themselves as political actors and their orientations towards various institutions of the British political system. A focus on people's sense of themselves as political actors enables us to explore the sources of several key independent variables that drive electoral turnout and other forms of political participation. Specifically, we develop and test models that explain why some people are more interested in politics, feel more politically efficacious, or have a stronger sense of civic duty than do others. In turn, a focus on orientations towards political institutions — on support for the ‘political regime’ (Easton, 1965) — enables us to study the extent to which effective government performance affects trust in major political institutions, attitudes towards parties and elections, and extent of satisfaction with the practice of democracy in Britain.The first section develops a typology of citizens’ orientations towards the political system and describes operational measures of key concepts. The second section outlines the theoretical reasoning motivating our argument that valence considerations affect people's orientations towards politics in general just as they affect electoral choice in particular. Our core claim is that people are more likely to respond positively towards political institutions and processes when they think that those institutions and processes have delivered, or are likely to deliver, valued goods and services. They are more likely to respond negatively when institutions and processes have failed to deliver (or are seen as unlikely to deliver) them.
Performance politics reconsidered Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Performance Politics and the British Voter,
07/2009
Book Chapter
The story of this book is a story of performance politics. What counts most — not exclusively — when voters make their choices are judgments about how well the competing political parties and their ...leaders perform on issues that matter. These typically are what Donald Stokes (1963, 1992) called ‘valence issues’. As discussed in earlier chapters, valence issues are ones upon which there is strong agreement. The quintessential example is the economy — virtually everybody wants a buoyant economy characterized by vigorous, sustainable growth, coupled with low rates of inflation and unemployment. But, economic well–being is not all. Healthcare, education and other public services are also important. In Britain and other mature democracies, effective delivery of these public services long has been a key aspect of performance politics. Judgments about party performance on valence issues have multiple sources, but they are not simply reflections of what people read in the newspaper and see on television. Personal experience counts as well.In recent years, the traditional valence issue agenda that defined the battleground of party competition since the end of the Second World War has been transformed to include concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism. Although overwhelming majorities always have been opposed to criminal and terrorist activities, opinion about immigration has followed a different course. Historically, although some people have been opposed to an expansive immigration policy, others have looked favourably on it, arguing that large–scale immigration fuels economic growth and is consistent with principles of diversity and tolerance that are central tenets of a democratic political culture.
In December 1981, Charles Frost was a worried man. The small engineering company that he owned and ran was suffering severely from a decline in export orders, largely as a result of the high value of ...sterling against other currencies. He was already laying off some of his workers and he was not sure whether the company, which his father started in 1951, would survive another year. He was particularly disappointed with Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. Mrs Thatcher had promised to pursue a rigorous ‘tightmoney’ policy that would squeeze inflation out of the British economy and restore its international competitive position. As he contemplated a difficult winter, Frost could not help feeling that she had somehow lost her way. The trust that he had placed in her economic and political judgment was ebbing fast. Perhaps her confident pronouncements about the virtues of monetarism were little more than hot air. He grew even more alarmed in April 1982 when Thatcher despatched a large naval task force to deal with the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. How could the objectives of such a force possibly succeed when most of the Third World, and much of the developed world, appeared to sympathize with Argentina's claims to sovereignty over the islands? Frost was as surprised as anyone when, by the summer of 1982, it was clear that British forces had achieved a rapid and overwhelming victory in the conflict. There were also signs that the British economy was beginning to respond positively to the dose of monetarist medicine that had been administered by Thatcher's chancellor Geoffrey Howe.
Electoral choices Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Performance Politics and the British Voter,
07/2009
Book Chapter
This chapter analyses party choice and turnout in Britain's 2005 general election. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the context in which this election was held differed from that of the 2001 general ...election. At that time, Labour was in a very strong position. The economy was vibrant, a sizable plurality of voters identified themselves as Labour partisans, and the issue agenda was dominated by public services such as the National Health Service and education, issues that Labour traditionally had claimed as its own. Labour leader Tony Blair, not especially popular, was more warmly received than his principal competitor, Conservative leader William Hague. However, by 2005, public opinion had shifted, and judgments about the performance of Prime Minister Blair and his New Labour government had become considerably more negative. In Blair's case, analyses presented in Chapter 4 have demonstrated that adverse public reactions to the continuing conflict in Iraq in the run–up to the 2005 election had done much to damage his image as a competent, trustworthy leader. Although the electoral system remained biased in Labour's favour, and most opinion polls showed the party holding a modest lead over the Conservatives, its 2005 electoral prospects were clearly more uncertain than they had been four years earlier. Labour would likely win more seats than its rivals, but a hung parliament was a real possibility.In this chapter, we employ BES data to document the mix of public beliefs, attitudes and opinions that governed electoral choice in 2005. We then examine the explanatory power of rival models of party choice to understand the forces that affected voting behaviour in 2005.
The theory of valence politics Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Performance Politics and the British Voter,
07/2009
Book Chapter
In Political Choice in Britain (Clarke et al., 2004b) we examined several rival models of electoral participation and party choice. One model involved the role of social class given its historic ...prominence in academic accounts of electoral behaviour in Britain (e.g. Butler and Stokes, 1969; Heath et al., 1985; Pulzer, 1968). However, analyses revealed that social class now plays a relatively minor role in explaining party choice and, at least since the 1960s, the effects of class have been smaller than commonly assumed. The really powerful explanations of party choice are found in voter attitudes related to choice–based models of individual decision–making that see voters as active participants in a complex, dynamic and uncertain political process. These models contrast sharply with sociological accounts in which socio–economic forces and early socialization experiences drive people's political attitudes and behaviour.Choice–based models of electoral behaviour are strongly informed by spatial and valence theories of political choice. The former theory has its origins in the work of Harold Hotelling (1929) and Duncan Black (1948, 1958), but was developed and popularized by Anthony Downs (1957). The latter theory derives from a seminal article by Donald Stokes (1963) which set out a comprehensive critique of spatial models. Spatial and valence models are closely related to each other, although this has not been fully recognized in the literature. This is partly because spatial models have received an enormous amount of attention from political scientists compared with valence models—their main theoretical rival.Stated informally, spatial theory asserts that people vote for the party with which they most agree on the issues of the day.
The short campaign Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Performance Politics and the British Voter,
07/2009
Book Chapter
Election campaigns are always a time for rhetoric — sometimes very fiery and highly negative. Heated exchanges between Conservative leader Michael Howard and Prime Minister Tony Blair during the 2005 ...campaign provide excellent illustrations. In a speech about halfway through the campaign, the opposition leader declared:Mr Blair started his campaign by lying about our spending plans. When it became clear that he could not sustain these claims, he dropped them. Now he denies making them and he's resorting to false claims about our plans for hospitals … How can anyone trust Mr Blair when his campaign is based on these lies? It's time Mr Blair started telling the truth and had an honest debate about the real challenges facing our country.(Smith, 2005: 114)Not to be outdone, Tony Blair attacked the Conservatives, particularly on the issues of asylum and immigration:The Tory party have gone from being a One Nation party to being a one issue party. Afraid to talk about the economy, embarrassed by the sheer ineptitude of their economic plan, unable to defend their unfair and elitist NHS and schools policies, unable to explain how they would finance the extra police they are promising, they are left with this one issue campaign on asylum and immigration.(Smith, 2005: 150)The leaders' caustic remarks may have reflected the fact that they believed there was more at stake in the 2005 election than was the case four years earlier. In particular, the Conservatives began the 2005 campaign with high hopes of regaining power after eight years in the political wilderness.
