Why political polarisation is nothing to worry about

The polarisation of political views is exercising observers in the US at the moment. There is a flurry of publications from journalists and scientists at present about why democracy is bound to disintegrated under the onslaught of centrifugal forces. The lack of political consensus and the unwillingness of compromise in the House of Representatives in the US are often cited as examples of increased polarisation. And psychologists like Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards (Democracy despite itself, MIT Press 2012) provide empirical material to support the claim of a doomed democratic politics.

While there can be little argument over the rise of the 'fringe or anti-politics' politician, and the popularity of Tea Party Movement in the US, the numbers are not really bearing out a significant flight of the moderates into the extremes of the political spectrum. If anything, the opposite is the case. Wherever important electoral battles are waged, moderates such as Obama win with comparatively large majorities with mainstream political programmes. So what is going on?

In a sense, it is the location of politics that is changing, not the balance between mainstream and the fringe. Politics is increasingly played out in the media at the expense of a wider public domain and the preferences for political confrontation over political consensus in the media are well documented.

Yet, there is another aspect to it. The rise of the politician who holds immoderately questionable views is not just a problem of how politics is portrayed. It is above all an issue of mobilisation.

This is where the gulf between electoral victories of fringe politicians and their relative lack of success in important electoral competitions comes into view. UKIP and the National Front in France struggle to win any important electoral battles but often succeed in local or by-elections. Why?

Mainly, because the broader moderate electorate does not assign much significance to these battles and stays away. They only feel sufficiently motivated to vote as and when important issues are at stake. So, in effect, it is a question of how to mobilise whom and when. This is where political parties increasingly struggle and come under what often looks like the polarisation drag. To campaign for a political party you have to have at least two sorts of resources at your disposal: a lot of time and deeply held views on particular issues. Moderates rarely possess either. Hence they stay away from party politics and are seldom found to stuff letter boxes with campaign literature on a rainy day.

This is often interpreted as political apathy. But I think to do so is a misunderstanding. What leaves political moderates actually disengaged is an acute sense of when and where really important issues are (or aren't) at stake. In a way, moderates trust the political system to bear some extreme weather in the turbulent to and fro of daily politics. They bank on the belief that the inertia of the democratic system wears extreme views thin in the long run. This may be an error but as long as the electoral map still shows not a single member of UKIP in Westminster, I think their calculation is right.

The virtues of First-Past-The-Post

As the expenses crisis hit the political system in Britain, the new speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow said his main objective was to strengthen the role of the backbench politician. Less than a year later, the British public voted to retain the first past the post voting system with an overwhelming majority. About two years into the new parliament, parliamentarians and observers agree that Speaker Bercow, though hardly liked by his colleagues, has delivered. Backbenchers have been allowed to call debates at short notice and the speaking time granted to them, to the chagrin of the party whips, has increased significantly.

Contrast this with the recent developments in the German parliament where a spat between the speaker of the lower house (Bundestagspresident) Lammert and the chief whips of the main parties threaten to lead to new rules for parliamentary debates, potentially removing the right of the speaker to call backbenchers for debate at his own discretion and curtailing their speaking time to 3 minutes. 

The German and British parliaments differ in many things but probably nowhere more so than in the power of the party whips. While disenchantment with the main political parties is rife amongst the publics in both countries, the responses of the political classes has been markedly different. In Britain, it has led to a silent revolution in the distribution of power between backbenchers and parties, with the chief whips losing much of their say over who speaks in parliament at which debate. Coupled with the retention of the first past the post voting system, this seems to have strengthened the role of individual parliamentarians with backbench revolts against government backed legislation at an all time high. 

The story in Germany could be more different. Although Germany does elect a substantial number of parliamentarians through the first past the post system, overall it operates a mixed electoral system which puts the political parties firmly in charge of candidate selection. Smaller parties like the Greens and the Left party which traditionally have few parliamentarians elected with outright majorities in their constituencies, have only tenuous links with their voters, something that solidifies the power of the party whips. 

The spat between Lammert and the party whips reveals this trend of strengthening political parties over parliamentarians voting with their consciousness. In a recent debate, Lammert allowed some parliamentarians to articulate their misgivings about legislation brought by the government. The chief whips of the main parties, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, took that as an assault on their god-given right to determine who speaks in which debate. Consequently they now propose new rules which curtailed the discretion of the speaker to call individual members of the parties in any debate. In effect, through the new rules, party whips put themselves in charge of deciding who can speak in parliament and who cannot. 

The response of the party whips is telling in the wake of some devastating defeats in recent state wide elections in Germany. The Pirate Party, a motley crew of individuals who either reject parliamentary politics altogether or party politics in particular, has enjoyed some phenomenal success in Germany over the last year, seriously threatening the dominance of established political parties. You would think that the message of voters would have been clear: conventional parties are losing their connection with the concerns of ordinary voters. Yet the reaction is one of tightening the grip of political parties on their members rather than permitting more diversity of opinion to be reflected in parliamentary debate. 

Although this was rarely discussed when Britain voted in the referendum last year, it seems that the first past the post system is still the better system to guard against the overbearing power of political parties. Or perhaps, thank God for Speaker John Bercow.