Jacob Christensen

Jonathan Hopkin:

This arrangement [Parliamentary elections as "presidential elections"] has been moribund for around four decades, but strangely the two-party logic still infuses the political debate. The reason is that although the share of the vote won by the Labour and the Conservatives has been in steady decline ever since the 1950s, the decline of the two-party system has been largely masked by two factors. First, the British electoral system vastly over-represents the two largest UK-wide parties, consistently awarding Labour and the Conservatives the vast majority of seats in the House of Commons even as their joint vote share declines. Second, because for most of the last 40 years one of the two parties has performed badly enough to hand a parliamentary – if not an electoral – majority to the other. Labour’s travails gave the Conservatives a free run from 1979 until the 1990s, whilst the Conservatives ceased to be competitive from 1997 until quite recently.

Hopkin also discusses the policy positions of the three main parties and sees complications.

The LSE’s guide to voting systems.

Andrew Rudalevige summarises the logic of the 55%-clause:

…we will all go together when we go…

Erik Voeten considers another mystery of the C-LD coalition: The speed.

…the British coalition seems based on a pretty loose set of principles and was negotiated in a similarly ad hoc manner…

…Given the many difficult decisions the government faces, not in the least on how to balance the budget, one needs not go out on a limb to predict that there will soon be important issues on the table that the coalition partners have not yet bargained about. It would seem equally unadventurous to predict that this government will not last five years.

I’m by no means an expert on the UK constitution but there is one thing about tonight’s developments which made me wonder during this exciting evening: The UK has had a change of Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister has stated his intention to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats but the appointment and the announcement came before either party had formally confirmed any agreement, let alone a government programme.

(The thing is that the UK does not know the concept of an informateur or a formateur. In this case, Brown could have tendered his resignation and continued as caretaker prime minister while Cameron conducted negotiations with the LibDems – and unlike the Dutch, you don’t have to spend months on forming a government).

It is obvious that the leaders of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats want to enter a formal coalition and we should assume that there is a substantial amount of consensus between the parties (if the latter does not apply, look here for an example of how you should not form a government).

But both the Conservative and Liberal Democratic leadership also need to anchor the decision with the relevant bodies – and in the case of the LibDems there is a triple-bind rule in the party statues to prevent the leadership from entering any kind of coalition without securing the consent of the party organisation – Nick Clegg needs support from a massive 3/4 majority in the party executive and 3/4 of the parliamentary group. If he does not, the agreement has to part a vote among the party’s members. If Clegg gets this level of support from the parliamentary party and the executive, we would expect it to be a good thing for the future stability of the coalition, but if he does not, we’re in really messy territory. By letting the announcement of the coalition be made public before the formal accept by the party bodies has been reached, Clegg is either brave or foolish – if he hasn’t put a great deal of effort into testing the waters in his party. (The Guardian says he has)

Needless to say, British media have pointed out that there are LibDem MPs and activists who would rather have died a very painful death than supported the Conservatives – at least before the results of the election were known last Thursday. We are in interesting territory here. And Clegg and the LibDems between a rock and a hard place.

Similarly, Cameron takes a risk, even if it is marginally smaller than Clegg’s. If the deal falls through, he will have to scrape through on support from the DUP and other minor parties and an election in the very near future is almost certain.

So, why did Gordon Brown announce his resignation before the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had formally closed the deal? Was it a spontaneous initiative? (Hardly – surely the Cabinet Office would have prevented this) Did Cameron phone Brown to announce that he was ready to form a government? Or did Brown seize what was left of his initiative to put Cameron and Clegg into what the Germans call Zugzwang – (the ball is in your corner, now you must either deliver or make fools of yourself).

I expect that we will know more on Wednesday. But the signs look set for the first formal peacetime coalition government in the UK since the rather unusual 1931-1940 National Government. Political Science textbooks may have to be rewritten in the coming years.

There is nothing as fascinating as a juncture where established procedures no longer seem to work. A case in point is the 1973 Danish general election where all existing parties were thoroughly whacked by the voters and five new parties won 30% of the vote (and of the seats in parliament). Political routines which had developed since 1920 had to be thrown out the window and the next six or so years were a pretty bumpy ride as voters and politicians tried to adjust to the new circumstances. Eventually, after a number of trial and errors, politicians in 1982 hit upon the minority coalition as the solution which combined a useful mix of stability and flexibility in a multidimensional political spectrum.

The voters in the UK similarly decided (if “voters” can actually “decide” anything – elections are the outcomes of millions of individual decisions) to pull a nasty trick on the parliamentary elite. Yes, the Conservatives noted a modest but not excessive win. Yes, Labour suffered a defeat but not a debilitating one, and the Liberal Democrats enjoyed the smallest of gains counted in votes and a marginal loss of seats.

Now, the parties face two problems: One short-to-mid-range and one long-range.

The mid-range problem has to do with the economic state of the UK which is complicated enough as it is.

The long-range problem is about constitutional reform, or to be more specific: A reform of the electoral system. The LibDems want some kind of proportional representation (apparently, some kind of AV is the most likely outcome), the Conservatives – in particular backbenchers and members of the party organisation – want to retain the status quo and Labour – well, Labour may be late converts to PR.

One frequent argument against introducing PR is that it will lead to instability and sinister back-room dealings between politicians, presumably moving influence from voters to parliament. The counter-argument is that no UK election since 1901 has resulted in any one party receiving a majority of the votes cast. Strictly speaking, every government since 1945 with the exception of those operating under the Lib-Lab pacts have operated against a popular majority. Parliamentary agency is a fundamental fact in any form of parliamentary government. The Conservatives have been the main beneficiaries for the last 65 years and so it is no surprise that the party organisation would prefer the world in general and Westminster in particular to stay as it was in 1945 (well, actually 1951 would be their year of choice).

This makes the prospect of a C-LD agreement (either in the form of a formal coalition government or a tolerated minority government) puzzling. In policy terms (in particular foreign policy and Europe, the nemesis of John Major and every subsequent Conservative leader) the Conservatives and the LibDems appear to have very little in common and in constitutional policy, they are polar opposites.

So how about Lab-LD? Even if the LibDems are closer to Labour in many areas, Labour never delivered on its loose promises of electoral reform – and let’s face it: Labour managed to hold on to power in 2001 and – crucially – 2005 thanks to FPTP – so there is a credibility issue here. And even more importantly, despite all talk of a rainbow coalition, Labour and the Liberal Democrats do not have a working majority in the new House of Commons. If there had been a majority, a Labour-Liberal Democrat deal would have been a no-brainer and the Conservative backbenchers would already be reaching for their knives.

But now look at the mess: The only viable coalition appears to be C-LD, but LD surrendering to the facts (provided those are the facts) would be a deadly strategy. On the other hand, David Cameron might look weak – especially in the eyes of the Norman Tebbits of the world – if he gave too large concessions.

The relatively weak performance of the Conservative Party in this election could be a blessing in disguise for David Cameron. Sure, a number of die-hards and right-wing newspapers would argue that the Conservatives should just sit out the storm, call a snap election in six months’ time and – whoopla! – the world is back in order and the lower classes know their place in society.

But Cameron could just as well argue that in the short term a coalition with the LibDems is a prerequisite for winning government office, and – hey, we have done business with the LibDems now, so electoral reform (but preferably in the most minimal of alternatives) could in fact help us in the long run. After all, the UK has now had two elections in a row where no party won more than 36% of the vote (okay, 36,1%, but still), despite FPTP. Maybe this kind of fragmentation is the reality of the 21st Century, and the political leader who is the first to realise this and act accordingly could have a big advantage.

Anyway, I foresee a great number of academic papers and books analysing the dilemmas faced by the parties and their strategies in the negotiating process as well as its eventual outcome (I would still put my money on some kind of C-LD deal). Plus endless gabbing by pundits, of course.

Oh, and the post-election process has been interesting in one particular way: Note how civil the politicians have been and that the negotiating process(es) actually appears to have been carried out in a quite professional way. Not a bad performance for a system used to single-party majorities.

“If this were repeated across the country, it would be very messy”. Somehow Monty Python got it right.

Patrick Dunleavy on a more serious note: “Nobody has won in terms of votes, but the last-minute momentum was to Labour”

Other LSE experts weigh in. I particularly like this one:

Charlie Beckett – POLIS Director

In media terms, what have we learnt?

1. That opinion polls during an election campaign are an expression of sentiment, not intention

2. That the TV debates shook up the campaign but they were platforms to perform, not parliaments to decide power

3. That the right-wing newspapers were unable to shift votes significantly, as the Tory share declined over the last month

4. That journalists were right to report the campaign process, but wrong to confuse polls, online memes and TV performance with real politics

Beckett’s comments should be the dashboard of every political journalist’s computer. And I mean every. (Right-wing newspapers play a lesser role in Danish politics but the other three points apply).

Let’s begin with the difficult question first: Do you know the name of the prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia?

Oookay … what about his party affiliation then?

Right – I’ll put you out of your misery and reveal that his name is Jürgen Rüttgers, he’s from the CDU and the CDU/FDP win in the 2005 state elections triggered the early German federal elections in the autumn of 2005. The 2005 NRW election wasn’t the only reason that the Red-Green coalition broke up – it came as the last of a series of disastrous state elections for the SPD – but it tells us that this Sunday’s state election may have implications for the Federal level, and by implication European politics.

As it is, the NRW campaign has had some effects on the European level: Chancellor Angela Merkel sure as hell wouldn’t want any kind of settlement of the Greek crisis which could in any way affect CDU’s chances at the polls. On the other hand, the loss of the CDU-FDP majority in … do you know which city is the capital of NRW? No? Düsseldorf … could be a blessing in disguise for Merkel. If CDU puts in a respectable performance while the FDP gets whacked there is the possibility of a Black-Green coalition taking over. That would definitively liven up proceedings in the Bundesrat.

To Scandinavians, NRW is a curious, somewhat anonymous place. Like many German states it is an artefact created by the Allies after the Second World War combining parts of the Prussian Rhine Province, Westphalia and the state of Lippe. If you have a couple of days to spare, try visiting Bonn, Köln and Düsseldorf – three cities within commuting distance but completely and utterly different in character. Still, the Ruhr District continues to be the symbolic centre of the state which has almost 19 million inhabitants (that is more than all Nordic contries combined) but NRW has also been characterised by the fundamental changes in the German economy leading to the decline of mining and steel industry.

Which election is the most interesting: The NRW state election or the British general election? I will agree with Mattias Tesfaye that Germany is curiously underreported in Danish media (one reason is that most Danes don’t know German anymore, but then again: Why don’t Danes learn German anymore?) and that the UK has a position in international media which is not quite congruent with the country’s international importance. In some ways, the UK is to Europe what New York is to the US. On the other hand, he (and we) should not underestimate the problems a traditional industrial economy as that of the Ruhr has been – and still is – facing. The discussion about the relative merits of the Anglo-Saxon and the Rheinische models of capitalism is a major one in political economy and political science – even if academics tend to see the merits of the German/Continental model, especially when it comes to the creation of jobs, as somewhat more mixed. And we shouldn’t forget Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg which have been the powerhouses of German economy since the 1970s.

Even if we like to ignore Germany, the country is one of the largest markets for Danish services and goods, and therefore the NRW election is of more than peripheral interest. But which election is the most important? The NRW one or the GB one?

The headline almost wrote itself.

But I must admit that Nick Clegg is a very brave man here.

I have no answers to these, but they keep popping up when I follow UK election reports:

1. How much of the LD vote is a protest vote and how much can be said to be issue based (meaning: how stable is the surge in LD share of the vote in polls)?

2. How much is due to the Clegg-effect (Cleggfect?), and – to use the Danish phrase – how much could be picked up by a hobby-horse anyway?

3. Supposing there is no overall control in the 2010 parliament, how big are the chances of a coalition government (as compared with a tolerated minority government)? Risks and opportunities for the LD?

4. I have noted that no-one has yet called Clegg on which (formal or informal) coalition partner the party would prefer after the election. Strikes me as odd. (Or maybe this is because everybody knows that the LD draws its vote from L and assume that the only realistic option would be an L-LD pact?)

5. Main issues besides discontent? I’ve noted that the Guardian spent an hour discussing education in a podcast – but what else? Economy, employment?

6. I noted that L is using the “Brown is a safe pair of hands”-argument. Somewhere in the back of my head, I have Germany 1998 (“Weiter so” – not so, the voters said) and Denmark 2001 (“Nyrup the statesman”) as templates for disaster. Brown did better than I would have expected in last week’s debate, but patronising is very a difficult, if not outright dangerous, strategy for an unpopular leader.

7. Promising an Upper House of Parliament elected by PR seems like a dangerous strategy by Labour. Maybe I’m being Scandinavian here, but wouldn’t a more representative but less powerful chamber seriously expose the problems in FPTP – opening for a massive constitutional crisis?

Just in case anybody wondered, The Daily Mail reminds us about the mode of thought motivating today’s “Little Englanders”.

Case in point: The Mail’s character assassination of Nick Clegg – never mind his policies or political efficacy…

The multilingual Lib Dem leader was born to a Dutch mother and a half-Russian father, and employs a German spin doctor.

and it just gets worse:

Mrs Clegg, a Roman Catholic, admits that she refused her husband’s plea to give English names to their three sons, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.

(My emphasis)

The word we’re looking for does indeed begin with an X. But in a way it is fascinating that something so noxious can be published in a mainstream newspaper.

I wonder how the Brits would react to a similar report in Bild-Zeitung. Or perhaps not.

HT: Next Left. (1), (2).

As we approach the US Independence Day, I thought it could be fun considering which country in Europe that would count as the most “American” – and by the way Denmark seems to be the only country which holds an official popular July 4th celebration (as in: a celebration where the local US Embassy is not the organiser).

US-European relations are notoriously tricky. On the one hand, Americans tend to see Europeans as more cultured and sophisticated while on the other hand deploring their (our) lack of initiative. Europeans see Americans as shallow and materialistic and consequently do everything that is in our power to emulate the US lifestyle with a couple of years’ delay.

OK: Our cars and houses are still smaller, but you get the picture.

But to round up some suspects and criteria: What does it take to be “an American country”?

First, we could be looking for a country which in some way or the other has influenced US culture and social and political institutions in a significant way. Britain (legal system) and France (rationalism, republicanism) would be obvious suspects, but perhaps the Netherlands also merit some attention.

Second, we could look for countries where American social, economic and political influence has been especially profound. The Federal Republic of Germany with its emphasis on federalism and the role played by the Bundesverfassungsgericht would be an obvious candidate here.

Third, we could look for countries which institutional similarities even if there is no evidence of direct US influence. Switzerland with its profoundly federal style of government and limited public sector would be a parallel on this side of the Atlantic. But then again, the Swiss are probably too organised and exclusive for the American taste.

But, just to tease you, I will promise two more posts on the subject with some surprising candidates. Stay tooned.

I’ll admit: Personally, I’m no supporter of the Danish People’s Party but the initial manoeuvring over the UK Conservative Party’s choice of partners in the European Parliament has something ridiculous over it. The Tories have stated that the Danish People’s Party were out of the question because it was too extreme politically.

So, which positions are not too extreme for the Tories?

We urgently need global chemotherapy against Islam to save civilisation. Fair and balanced. (Belgium)

Marching with local SS veterans? A-OK. (Latvia)

Women should not stand for parliament? Sure. The Tories are a modern party. (Netherlands)

Banning gay-rights demonstrations? No problem. (Poland)

I’m sorry, but the only thing to do about British politics is to shake one’s head in disbelief.