Carrying the card (2)

This post continues my exploration of why I am a member of a political party.

At the end of the last episode, we reached the first answer which I summarised as, “who else are you going to vote for?”.

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It wasn’t the most optimistic place to end a post, and today I want to be more positive about the role of parties, and why I am a member of one.

Let’s start with one answer to the “who else to vote for” question. If you don’t like parties, you can vote for independents. There are usually a few at every election. Alternatively, you could save voting for referendums or other opportunities to have a voice, such as getting selected for a citizen assembly.

But if political parties have declined, why has there not been a surge in independent candidates? And if referendums are popular with voters (polling suggests they generally are), why aren’t we getting rid of parties and putting everything to the vote?

In part, because a side-effect of party competition is to make government policy more coherent and effective.

Why? Parties are incentivised to cover as much of the political landscape as possible, because covering more issues means more votes and influence. The bigger the area they cover, the more they suffer from incoherencies and internal conflicts.

This dynamic means not just that there is a natural maximum size for a party, but also that every party has to create a permanent internal process to maximise the coherence of their policies, to minimise internal arguments and ensure that their opponents cannot attack them for inconsistency.1

This internal process of coherence brings benefits when parties get into government. In majoritarian systems, where parties generally rule alone, the party will have a platform of policies that have already been tested for coherence, and which can then be implemented - as far as the public will let them.

In proportional representation systems, there is a double synthesis. The different synthesised policies of the parties in the coalition are synthesised again into the coalition or government agreement, a sort of manifesto highlights package that sets out the common agenda that the government will be implementing.

Every modern government has a huge range of responsibilities, and an equally huge number of decisions to take every day. Without a manifesto or a government agreement that had been reached before, government action would be a spaghetti tangle of individual initiatives, completely incoherent and quite probably self-contradictory.

Party politics may often come across as too negative and cartoonish, or “Punch and Judy politics” to use the English phrase. But they channel the factionalism that the American founders were so afraid of, and which naturally arises from competing interests, and create better policies from it.

To understand the impact that they have, look at two examples where the synthesis role of parties was not possible. In the US, the Republican Party in 2020 did not put forward a new policy platform for the 2020 Presidential Election, but reused the pre-Trump 2016 platform. Their internal systems had been so disrupted by Trumpism that they had no means of reaching the compromises necessary to create a new policy synthesis, so the 2016 platform, pulled from the wreckage of the old party structures, was the only thing to hand. However, the result is that they had little to offer on concrete policy, and knew that nothing that was promised would be delivered if the President didn’t want it, so they gave up the core function of a party and became a mere campaign for King Donald.

Unlike Trump, who could at least be contained within a constitution with separation of powers, Brexit hit the British government like an asteroid in 2016.

The only requirement of the people’s vote was that Britain should leave the European Union, not how it should happen or what consequent choices should be made. Although some parties had talked about leaving the EU, no-one had seriously prepared for it, or had a policy platform that addressed how government would work post-Brexit.

Had this been an election rather than a referendum, and a pro-Brexit party felt it might win, a clear position could have been reached quickly . British membership of the EU is not a law of physics, a party that had prepared a platform in the normal way could have come into office and implemented it. However, the pressure of preparing their platform would have made them choose a vision of Brexit to build around.

In the referendum, there was no such pressure. Quite the reverse, the incentives were to promise everything to everyone.

As a result, the voting coalition around Brexit was so broad that it could never have been contained within a single party, even without the undeliverable2 and the fantastical3 promises. Socially conservative, high spending voters were promised no immigration and more money for the NHS. Economic liberals were promised major deregulation and free trade. Criticism was waved away as “Project Fear” - the UK’s negotiators would be so brilliant, and at such an advantage, that they would be able to sort out these details very quickly.

The combination of an uncertain political mandate, contradictory arguments, and no clarity as to how it was to be implemented broke the policy making machinery of the British state. It took years of deadlock and a purge of the Conservative Party to reach a consensus position around which other policies could be constructed - and that final position was a hard Brexit that - given the closeness of the referendum - certainly had minority support even in 2016. The Conservative Party are likely to suffer the consequences of that at the next election.

Political parties make government better, not just by getting their ideas implemented, but by processing a wide range of ideas and beliefs into a coherent and implementable platform. Party policy committees might not be everyone’s idea of a good time but, like gut bacteria, they do essential work in unpleasant conditions.

But in the end, this is systemic point. Parties mean better government. They are a systemic benefit. That’s good, but many things that are good for the health of systems don’t need my personal involvement - like those gut bacteria. Parties are large machines, I don’t have much impact as a party member. So, again what’s the point?

Parties as vehicles for community and organisation is the topic of my next post.