Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Parties can and do change. But these four barriers stand between the Republican Party and moderation.

By Pippa Norris

Published Feb. 8, 2021 at 7:45 a.m. EST in The Washington Post/Monkey Cage

Most congressional Republicans continue to embrace Trumpism, despite some wavering after the deadly Capitol riot. The GOP has backtracked on impeachment, with most Senate Republicans voting against holding an impeachment trial. State parties have punished Republicans such as Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who spoke and voted in favor of impeachment, rather than members such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.), who supported the falsehood that the presidential election had been stolen. House Republicans did not sanction Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), despite her past endorsements of wild conspiracy theories.

But the notion that the GOP would suddenly abandon Trumpism once Donald Trump left the White House has the basic story upside down. Trump wasn’t the cause of authoritarian populism; his success was the consequence of deeper underlying forces.

When do parties change?

Median voter theory suggests that there is a normal distribution of views in society, with most people clustered in the midpoint across the ideological spectrum. If so, the shock of major electoral defeats will push rational vote-seeking parties away from the extremes and back toward the political center, where they can harvest the most support. That’s particularly true in electoral systems requiring a majority of votes to win power, as parties realize that they need to broaden their appeal to gain support from moderates and independents. If they do not learn and adapt, if their only appeal is to the extremes, parties will remain in the electoral wilderness.

Under Trump, the GOP lost the House, the Senate and the White House. So unless Republicans don’t understand the true distribution of public opinion, which is always possible, any rational vote-seeking party should recognize the risks of the Trump brand and move the party back toward the conservative center-right.

Right?

Not so fast. Party rebuilding typically takes a long time, a lagged process typically occurring after the shock of a series of major electoral defeats. Four important barriers hinder GOP renewal.

Barrier 1: The Republican Party has adopted authoritarian-populist values

The first problem is that authoritarian-populist values have gone viral and spread deeply through the Republican Party. Expert estimates of political parties’ ideological positions suggest that the party of Lincoln has become willing to undermine democratic principles in pursuit of power, much like the Alternative for Germany, Austria’s Freedom Party and Hungary’s Fidesz. Other independent evidence confirms these estimates.

It’s not just Trump and the top congressional leaders who embrace authoritarian values. This mind-set has penetrated the party nationwide. In December, the Electoral Integrity Project asked 789 experts to estimate the ideological position of U.S. state parties. As you can see in the figure below, some state Republican parties, such as those in Vermont and Hawaii, continue to respect liberal democratic principles. But most, like those in Wisconsin and Nevada, have abandoned these values.

The MAGA base similarly doubts basic democratic principles, such as the integrity of American elections. Even since Joe Biden’s inauguration, about 8 in 10 Republican voters continue to endorse the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was rigged and Biden’s victory is illegitimate.

(Electoral Integrity Project)

Barrier 2: Republicans see diversity as a threat, not an opportunity

One reason so many Republicans are willing to believe that contests are rigged is that the party has gradually lost faith in its capacity to win the White House fair and square by respecting democratic principles, norms and practices. Since 1992, Republicans have not won a majority of the popular vote in seven out of eight presidential elections. Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million in 2016 and by 7 million in 2020.

Instead of adapting, Republicans have come to fear the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the American electorate as an existential threat to the party’s survival. When Republicans control the state legislature, instead of moving toward the center-right to expand support, they fiddle with the rules and rig the outcome in their favor. More than 100 new state legislative bills currently seek to restrict voting rights, particularly affecting communities of color.

Why is the movement against pandemic restrictions so angry?

Barrier 3: Institutional incentives

Moreover, the institutional incentives facing individual Republican lawmakers diverge from the collective interest of the party in seeking to win the White House. The structural rules of the game insulate congressional Republicans from needing to broaden their appeal.

The House (since 2010), the Senate and the electoral college have all been asymmetrical disproportional, meaning that Republicans have a built-in advantage in translating their share of the popular vote into seats. As a result, Republican members of Congress can get elected in White and rural America. But the party has repeatedly been unable to win a majority of the popular vote for the White House with this strategy.

Gerrymandering means that Republicans can also win House seats by appealing to their MAGA base in safe districts. Where parties are deeply polarized, this tendency is reinforced by primaries and caucuses, which typically engage the most partisan voters. Lawmakers fear angering primary voters, even if this means ignoring their district’s general electorate.

Barrier 4: Party cultures are slow to change

Finally, the party’s unwillingness to abandon Trumpism is reinforced by institutional inertia. Congressional Republicans got elected under Trump, so why should they change? It’s risky. Normally, any party must be shocked by successive landslide electoral defeats to oust the old regime. Party renewal grows from subsequent electoral gains, gradually bringing moderate new blood into the party. So far, the reverse has been happening as moderates leave in despair and QAnon acolytes step up. Enough are elected to Congress to block liberal legislation and trigger gridlock.

Parties can and do learn. They can move closer to the median voter. But congressional Republicans haven’t suffered the shock of landslide defeats. Rather, the party has gained House seats, insulated by gerrymandering.

Republicans could abandon authoritarian populism and move back toward the traditional conservative center-right — becoming the party of Mitt Romney (Utah), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). A minority seeks to do so. But fearing the dedicated MAGA base’s wrath, and hoping that new restrictions on voting rights will help win seats in the 2022 midterm elections, the Trumpist wing in Congress has an incentive to block party renewal.

Pippa Norris

Pippa Norris, the McGuire lecturer in comparative politics at Harvard University, is the founding director of the Electoral Integrity Project and a co-author, with Ronald Inglehart, of “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism.” Follow

“Was Nigel Farage the midwife delivering Johnson’s victory?”

This blog first appeared in the LSE Blog. Monday 16 December 2019

On election night and its aftermath, all the headline attention focused on Boris Johnson’s triumphant victory with 365 seats (up 47), generating an 80-seat parliamentary majority, the Conservative party’s largest since 1987. This result is all the more remarkable given years of austerity cuts by successive Tory governments under Cameron and May, doubts about Boris Johnson’s flamboyant character, and fratricidal internal party division over Britain’s membership of the EU. The outcome has been attributed to the focused message and disciplined but ultra-vague repetition of the Conservative ‘Get Brexit done’ mantra and the aggressive targeting of Northern seats with pledges to splash the cash. Johnson understood the positive attraction of ‘One Nation’ Toryism blending promises of an end to austerity with the traditional flag-waving appeal of British nationalism

Equal attention in the post-mortem focused on the reasons for the collapse in Labour Party support, especially in their North East Leave-voting, former mill-and-mining heartlands like Blyth Valley, Workington, Leigh, and Darlington, as well as seats such as West Bromwich East and Stoke-on-Trent Central in the Midlands. In Wales they lost votes in every constituency. Labour returned with just 201 seats (down 59), their fewest number of MPs since 1935, and their fourth successive general electoral defeat.  Much blame has been cast on the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the party’s studious ambiguity on Brexit, as well as their Momentum-led radical-socialist economic agenda, and the party’s unfocused Christmas tree manifesto pledges on welfare spending. Corbyn campaigned on traditional Labour issue like the NHS, but he was not fighting on the Brexit battleground, the most important issue to the electorate.

Elsewhere the constitutional tensions posed by the triumph of the SNP, and developments in Northern Ireland, have also widely debated.  

By contrast, after Nigel Farage’s brief BBC interview with Andrew Neil on election night, there has been relatively little discussion about the Brexit party. After all, they ended with a paltry 2.0% of the UK vote (5% in the seats they contested) and no MPs. UKIP performed even worse, with 22,817 votes (0.1%). Farage’s euroskeptic clothes, and thus rationale, were stolen by Boris Johnson. Both parties are seemingly consigned to become a footnote of modern history and the occasional doctoral thesis. Robert Ford, for example,  remarked that the Brexit party proved an ‘electoral flop’, with the main effect of their efforts likely to have saved several Labour incumbents by ‘splitting the Leave vote’.

But is this a correct assessment of Nigel Farage’s legacy – in particular, what was the broader impact of the Brexit party on the agenda and the results in the 2019 UK General Election? Arguably, despite being wiped out electorally in this contest, Farage’s role has been one of kingmaker in terms of both the predominance of the Brexit policy agenda and the size of the Conservative parliamentary victory in the 2019 general election. As Giovanni’s Sartori observed decades ago, minor parties can still serve a critical function through their ‘blackmail’ potential, even if they fail to win seats or ministerial office. The impact of Nigel Farage was both direct, on votes and seats, and indirect, on the policy agenda.

Direct effects on party competition

What matters for the electoral outcome is not simply demand-side factors – long-term shifts in partisan dealignment and generational shifts in cultural values, loosening the salience of the traditional Left-Right economic cleavage and the politics of class, as argued in Cultural Backlash – but also their interaction with supply-side factors, including strategic decisions by leaders over Downsian party competition, within a broader context of the opportunities for exerting power and influence within the Westminster electoral system.

Thus, one of the key reasons for the outcome, often neglected in the election post-mortems, concerns the impact of strategic party competition, especially whether party leaders decide to cooperate or not informally with rivals. This is particularly important in the UK, given the high hurdles needed to win office in a majoritarian/plurality electoral system. The Conservative share of the UK vote under Johnson, after all, went up only 1.4% across the country, almost unchanged from May’s 2017 result. Despite this, the Tories gained 47 seats and the Johnson government enjoys a comfortable 80-seat parliamentary overall majority, freed from May’s shackles of the Conservative government depending upon an informal agreement with the DUP.  The outcome should not be attributed necessarily to the supposed brilliance of the Conservative campaign and their leader, the weakness of their opposition, or the disparities of the winner’s bonus in the UK’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system, as other argue, but rather, at least in part, to the spoiler role of the Brexit party combined with divisions over strategy and tactics among opposition parties within the Remain camp, which prevented their effective cooperation. The result reflected the old adage: united they stand, divided they fall. While Farage formed a Leave phalanx with the Tories, the Remain troops scattered their forces across the battlefield.

Figure 1 illustrates how UKIP, and then the successor Brexit Party, both experienced roller-coaster rides in successive local, European and general elections.   UKIP ran 378 candidates in the June 2017 general election - but won just half a million votes (1.8% of the total), with no seats. Despite this wipe-out, the major parties, especially the Conservatives, were rocked by the initial electoral success of the Brexit Party, which won the largest share of the UK national vote and seats in the May 2019 party-list European Parliamentary elections, just four months after founding. Most strikingly, the party swept up almost half of the over-65s. The opinion polls registered around 23% support for the Brexit party at their peak a few weeks later, in mid-June 2019, when they were tied or even a point or two ahead of the two major parties.

Given this result, when the 2019 campaign kicked off, the Brexit Party’s challenge to politics as usual appeared formidable. In early-November 2019, as the general election campaign started, the Brexit party initially announced that it would contest all 632 British seats during the general election and speculated publicly about a ‘Leave alliance’ with the Tories. But the Conservatives leadership quickly rejected any sort of electoral pact, treating their rival upstarts strategically like a pariah. In response, on 11 November 2019 Farage climbed down and declared that the Brexit party would withdraw in 317 seats won by Conservatives in 2017, to avoid damaging internal rows, and the risks of splitting the Leave vote. This, combined with subsequent Brexit candidate defections, triggered a collapse in their popular support. Their share of voting support subsided in the opinion polls from an average of around 10% at the start of the campaign to just 3% at the end, as supporters drifted back to the Tories. Farage was still included in media coverage and the larger TV leadership debates, campaigning for a ‘clean-break’ Brexit and political reform,  but the Brexit party saw a substantial collapse in their total amount of media coverage during the final weeks of the campaign. Election night saw that Brexit had won just 2% of the vote (642,323), with no seats, while the rump UKIP part got a miserable 22,817 votes (0.1%).

Therefore, Nigel Farage decided to play the long game by competing strategically in the election only in opposition seats, asking Brexit candidates to stand down in Conservative-held seats. This served two goals: as a brand-new party, for expedient reasons, Brexit’s financial and organizational resources were over-stretched. Moreover, the stated aim of this strategy was to present a united front which avoided splitting the Leave vote.  This strategy had two consequences; the Brexit party had opportunities to snatch Leave ballots in Labour-held seats, without simultaneously damaging the electoral prospects for incumbent Conservative MPs. At the same time, the Remain vote remained divided because Corbyn stubbornly ruled out any informal pact, despite discussions among the opposition parties, and various efforts to organize tactical voting. As Figure 2 illustrates, the Conservatives were flanked by the Brexit party, but otherwise enjoyed ‘clear blue water’ to shovel up Leave votes on the socially-conservative and nationalist right. By contrast, the socially-liberal left parties  were all clustered closely together, able to exchange votes with each other but thereby dividing the spoils and failing to gain seats.

Labour’s strategy continued to reflect leadership hubris and outmoded majoritarian Westminster norms. This proved fatal in the context of fragmented party competition which penalized their chances of consolidating Remain support and gaining seats. This was similar to divisions and failures of leadership vision which doomed attempts for the opposition to seize the Westminster agenda during the Brexit stalemate under May. In total in Britain, excluding Northern Ireland, the Remain/pro Referendum parties got 16.2 million votes (52.3%), 1.5 million more ballots than 14.6 million votes cast in total for the Leave parties (47.4%).  The balance of voting support was remarkably close to that estimated in the long series of YouGov polls since late-2017 concerning right track/wrong track levels of support for Leave or Remain options in the general electorate.  The outcome of the general election therefore reflects, in part, the disastrous failure of opposition party strategy and leadership to come together in an informal Remain Alliance electoral pact when seeking office in a First-Past-the-Post system, not simply a triumph of the Johnson campaign, or a failure of the appeal of Corbyn’s personal character, problems of press bias, internal rows over anti-semitism, or Labour’s manifesto policies and confused campaign messages.

The impact of parry strategies

Does the scale of their electoral support mean that we should write off the Brexit party as irrelevant to the outcome - or that Farage failed in his grand project? On the contrary, Farage’s strategic decision to compete in Labour seats, but not in Conservative seats, was arguably decisive for the eventual outcome. The failure of attempted negotiations to agree an informal ‘Remain Alliance’ among opposition parties, but the division of seats between the Brexit and Conservative parties on the Leave side, was one of the prime reasons why the Labour party saw a hemorrhage of votes among many of their Leave voters in their Northern industrial heartland seats.

Analysis of constituency results in the 2017 and 2019 general elections shows that in seats where Brexit party candidates stood, the change in the share of the UKIP/Brexit vote was more strongly correlated with the fall in the Labour share of the vote than the changes in the Conservative or Liberal Democrat share of the vote. This relationship continued as significant, albeit weaker, even after models controlled for the social composition of constituencies in terms of the proportion of routine manual workers, ethnicity/race,  younger/older people, and long-term unemployment. In seats with a Brexit candidate, the Labour vote fell on average by -8.6%, compared with -7.3% elsewhere. There was also a modest impact with Brexit taking some support from the Tories: in seats with a Brexit candidate, the Conservative vote went up 1.7% compared with +2.5% elsewhere.   But my estimates suggest that the share of the Brexit vote was large enough to allow the Conservatives to slip in the back door and make up to twenty seat gains in former Labour seats which changed hands, thereby doubling Johnson’s eventual parliamentary majority (see Figure 3). The Conservative party would have won a smaller parliamentary majority without the Brexit party alliance – but it is likely to have been far less sweeping. Farage’s party thereby served as a spoiler, allowing the Conservatives to seize many Labour seats in the North and Midlands which had never changed hands for generations. This bonanza is all the more remarkable given a rise of only 1.4% in the Conservative’s nation-wide share of the UK vote since 2017. Meanwhile, by contrast, deep divisions prevented an electoral alliance among all the opposition parties favoring either outright scrapping of Brexit (the Liberal Democrats) or else holding another EU referendum.  Remain voters on the liberal-left scattered support among the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP and PC, as well as the more ambivalent Labour party.

Indirect effects on the issue agenda

The entrance of UKIP and then the Brexit party also shaped British politics in an even more profound way indirectly, by mobilizing authoritarian-populist forces and thereby polarizing the country and the policy agenda around the issue of Brexit. Mainstream parties on the center-right and center-left can respond to new rivals by strategic attempts at either exclusion (treating their new rivals as pariahs) or else inclusion (by parroting their competitor’s rhetoric and issues positions). Ever since Anthony Downs, the consequences of these strategies have been widely debated in terms of both their electoral effects and their impact on the policy agenda. Farage has obviously failed at gaining office at Westminster -but he has had a profound effect on the policy agenda by forcing other UK parties adapt their policy position towards Europe.

Cases vary, but in many countries, new authoritarian-populist parties have become accepted as legitimate and democratic partners with a seat at the table, thereby directly influencing the issue agenda in parliament and the composition of coalition governments. In Norway, for instance, Siv Jensen’s anti-immigrant Progress Party entered ministerial limos as part of successive center-right coalition governments. In this context, mainstream parties have often sought to parrot or adopt the key issues of minor parties, notably by adopting the populist language and more restrictive immigration policies championed by authoritarian-populist, and governing coalitions have stolen key planks from their platforms in election campaigns.

Elsewhere, however, exclusion from entry to governing coalitions is often common. In Germany, for example, the Christian Democratic Union party refused to collude with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite their becoming the third largest party in the Bundestag in 2017, in an attempt to erect a cordon sanitaire. In the Netherlands, as well, Mark Rutte’s 2017 governing coalition excluded Gert Wilder’s Party for Freedom (PVV), in the attempt to deny them credibility and respectability. In extreme cases, some authoritarian-populist parties have been banned by law, for example the racist Flemish Vlaams Blok, or otherwise legally restricted from funding or ballot access.

Even where treated as ‘pariahs’, however, minor rivals can still impact the policy agenda indirectly, by forcing the mainstream parties to adjust their stances in response to new concerns, in this case by parroting issues of nationalism and immigration. Johnson’s unprincipled ambitions, and the machinations of the ERG group, made the Conservative party ripe for a hostile tack-over by populist forces. In this regard, both major parties have absorbed the cancer of Euroscepticism, mobilized by Farage and the ERG Conservatives, and injected this into the mainstream of the body politics.

In conclusion, the role of the Brexit Party should therefore go down in the history books as one which proved an electoral failure at Westminster, losing the general election battle. But in the long-term, Farage played a decisive indirect role by boosting the size of the Conservative’s electoral victory, fueling the politics of Brexit and thus influencing the UK’s withdrawal from EU membership, strengthening the polarization of UK party competition around cultural cleavages dividing nationalists and cosmopolitans, and even potentially heightening existential threats to the future of the United Kingdom as an independent nation-state.

Is Britain about to experience a Westminster earthquake?

First published 13 Nov 2019 in the LSE Politics and Policy blog

Pippa Norris (Pippa_Norris@Harvard.edu)

After a series of parliamentary defeats and constant frustration in attempts to get his Brexit deal passed, Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided that rolling the dice on a UK general election on 12 December, although a high-risk strategy, was the least-bad option left.  Is the outcome likely to crack the durable structure of party competition at Westminster and in the electorate? In particular, will it prove a watershed contest, with the Leave-Remain division over-riding traditional party loyalties?

To make sense of developments, we can turn to several ways that political scientists typically think about distinct types of outcomes, including whether elections are maintaining, dealigning, or realigning contests.

A maintaining election?

Party politics are in a state of constant flux, following the fortunes of the latest opinion poll or parliamentary division. Commentators emphasize that today the British electorate is more volatile than ever, with the outcome of the general election proving unpredictable and risky. Poll trackers show surges and sudden reversals in party fortunes – the rise of Brexit and the Lib Dems during the European Parliamentary contests, then the revival in Conservative support following Boris Johnson’s anointment.  An unpredictable outcome is exciting for journalists desperately trying to flog interest in the campaign among the Brendas from Bristol who prefer to be making their mince pies than watching party political broadcasts. Many ‘Don’t Knows’ in opinion polls are a classic signal of dealignment uncertainty.

Nevertheless, in maintaining contests, despite voter flux, indecision, and churning, the party order still endures, with one party often predominant in government over a series of contests. The relatively enduring features of UK politics persist across successive elections. Party systems in long established democracies involve patterned, stable and predictable interactions in the competition for seats and votes.  Maintaining elections reflect the status quo: there are no strong issues, events or major shifts in party policy to deflect voters from their habitual electoral preferences. Each party mobilises its 'normal base' of support. This concept requires splitting the actual vote cast for a party  into  two  parts: a 'normal' or baseline vote to be expected from a group, based on their behaviour over successive elections in the past, and the current deviation from that norm, due to the immediate circumstances of the specific election. The Labour campaign platform is based on the assumption that the outcome will revolve largely around ‘politics as usual’ – more spending on the NHS, no tuition fees, free childcare, higher wages. It could be 2017 all over again. This is similar to the Democratic presidential contenders betting the house on healthcare, not highlighting the third-rail of immigration. And, not to be out gunned by Labour, the Conservatives have responded with their own series of generous spending pledges, splashing the cash on ‘new’ hospitals and the like.  If this contest maintains the status quo, the potential outcome could be the return of another hung parliament, failing to break the impasse at Westminster. The Remainers would still be divided. The Conservatives would remain the largest party but without an overall parliamentary majority, and, under Johnson’s Brexit deal, with doubts about prospects for a revived parliamentary alliance with the DUP.

Deviating contests: Flux not flow

By contrast, in deviating contests with a dealigned electorate, weak partisan anchors are evident. Sharp swings in support towards one party are possible -- but in deviating contests these do not endure, so that equally strong counter-surges in subsequent contests remain equally likely. In deviating elections, particular personalities, issues, or events produce a temporary sharp reversal in the 'normal' share of the vote for major parties. Deviating contests are characterised by negative protests against the government, which cause dissatisfied voters to defect temporarily to minor parties, only to return home in subsequent contests.

Partisan dealignment is nothing new; it has been observed since the 1970s. But events and deepening divisions over Brexit at Westminster, with dramatic internal splits weakening party discipline in the Commons, are likely to have further dissolved the glue of Conservative and Labour loyalties in the electorate. The British Election Study, for example, found that from 2010-2017, across three elections, almost half the UK electorate did not vote for the same party.  Personalities, events, and specific issues may encourage base defections from all parties on polling day – notably Corbyn’s deep unpopularity and internal fissures dividing Labour moderates and hard-liners, Johnson’s ‘death in a ditch’ failure to deliver anything on 31 October, the Lib Dem bold but risky Remain stance, revived stirrings of independence in Scotland,  and Farage’s guerrilla war for a No Deal Brexit. Frustration and anger over Brexit makes protest voting more likely -- but the impact of negative partisanship is highly unpredictable in multiparty systems. Flux makes it easier for some modest seat gains by the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Greens, and Independents. But it is also possible that Brexit has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. The majoritarian First-Past-the-Post system props up the two-party system and penalizes geographically-dispersed parties.  Once Brexit is ‘done’ with a formal withdrawal agreement --  in the sense that the UK severs its ties with the EU though facing years of trade negotiations– under this scenario, despite some temporary losses,  ‘normal‘ two-party party battles will resume over the standard domestic agenda of health and education, jobs and poverty, spending and taxes, climate change and crime. In this sense, the outcome could be change plus ca change.

Or realignment along Leave-Remain cleavages

Alternatively, however, the UK could be experiencing that once-in-a-lifetime phenomena, more often predicted than observed: a critical realignment.  The concept of critical realignment has a long pedigree, particularly in American political science, which has conventionally divided the party order into distinct historical eras. The theory of critical election originated with V.O. Key (1955) and the extensive literature generated by this work has long debated the historical periodization of party systems. Dispute continues about the magnitude, durability and direction of electoral change, and its enduring consequences for party government, in order for contests to qualify as a case of critical elections. President Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. election, reflecting a hostile take-over of the Republican party by authoritarian-populist forces, is the most obvious contemporary case -- although it is unclear whether the key signs of change started with the Tea Party movement under Obama,  and heated debate remains about the persistence and legacy of Trumpism beyond Trump.

Classifying recent elections as a critical realignment, without the benefit of hindsight, is often highly problematic. It is far harder to distinguish distinct party systems in the UK; the years from the expansion of the franchise during the mid-Victorian era to the first World War were a period of Conservative-Liberal predominance based on rural and religious cleavages in the electorate. The 1918-39 period, following the rise of Labour and the politics of class, was characterized by a complex and unstable three-party system. By contrast, the era from 1945 to 2010 can conventionally be seen as exemplifying the predominance of two-party class politics at Westminster -- but cracks started to appear beneath the surface as early as the 1970s. In the past there have been many false dawns of breakthroughs predicted by over-excited headline writers as new parties like the SDP or the Greens or UKIP/the Brexit party have temporarily surged at the polls in second order contests, exemplified by byelections and European elections, only to fall back in subsequent contests. In the aftermath of the Tory landslide of 1983, and Foot’s nadir, many claimed Thatcherism was invincible. Similar hopes surrounded the false new dawn of Blair’s 1997 sweep. As with any predictions, we can only provide cautious interpretations of the current political landscape which may, or may not, be borne out by subsequent events. Psephology is far more like a provisional medical diagnosis based on exploratory surgery than the laws of physics. We will only know the full extent of the change in electoral behaviour which occurred in 2019 after subsequent contests either consolidate or reverse the alterations. Nevertheless, we can speculate whether this election shares some of the characteristics of critical elections in the past, in Britain and elsewhere.

There are basically two types of realignments.

Secular realignments: OK, boomers

These are elections characterised by an evolutionary and cumulative strengthening in party support over a series of elections. For V.O. Key, the American party system maintained a stable equilibrium for long periods of time, over successive elections the pattern of voting by different regions, counties and social groups was largely predictable. But the party system could evolve due to a gradual shift in the electorate over successive elections, with the more or less continuous creation of new party-voter alignments and the decay of the old.  This familiar model gives primacy to broad socio-demographic developments, such as demographic turnover in the electorate and socio-economic trends which gradually produce long-term shifts in the composition and values of the electorate. Much attention in voting studies has focused on understanding long-term secular trends in post-industrial societies, including the growth of new social cleavages and the process of generational value change which may glacially transform the electorate. The most plausible candidate for secular realignment in the UK concerns the steady fading of class divisions as predictors of party choice in the electorate – and its replacement by a widening and substantial generational gap.  Secular realignment model produces an incremental, durable and persistent strengthening in the long-term contours of party support. Elsewhere in Cultural Backlash I have argued that the rise of authoritarian-populism can be attributed to a tipping point in the balance of forces dividing social conservativism and social liberalism, fuelled by enduring generational value shifts. Generation (and education) replaces social class as the core cleavage in the electorate.

Critical realignments

Lastly, critical elections are exceptional contests which produce abrupt, significant and durable realignments in the electorate. with major consequences for the long-term party order. Critical elections have significant consequences, not just for a single administration, but also for the dominant policy agenda of successive governments. In this sense the pendulum of party competition ratchets decisively in a new direction. While every contest sees some electoral flux back and forth among parties, lasting transformations of the party order rarely occur. Critical elections are characterised by three interrelated features:

(i)         realignment in the ideological basis of party competition;

(ii)        realignment in the social basis of party support; and finally,

(iii)        realignment in the partisan loyalties of voters.

Ideological realignment involves major changes in the programmatic basis of party competition, for example if the deep Leave-Remain cleavage over Brexit reflects a new cross-cutting issue reflecting divisions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism which continue to divide parties and the electorate long after Brexit is decided in law. Cultural Backlash argues that the classic economic Left-Right cleavage in party competition found in many established democracies during earlier decades has faded in importance, replaced by contemporary competition over Authoritarian and Progressive cultural values, on one dimension, and the use of Pluralist or Populist rhetoric, on the other.  The simple Left-Right economic cleavage over state v. markets has been replaced by a strategic game of multilevel competition.  The winner-take-all nature of the Westminster electoral system means that whichever side of Brexit loses, loses big.  But the electoral system at Westminster also serves as a major constraint preventing party system change, even if no longer fit for purpose in the UK electorate (or in hung parliaments).

Shifts can also arise if parties shift rapidly or 'leapfrog' over each other across the ideological spectrum, for example if Remainers abandon Corbyn to consolidate behind any parties in the Remain Alliance.  Realignment can also be signalled if the Brexit party gains seats, especially if Conservatives were ever to form a coalition with them. Social realignment concerns major shifts in the traditional coalitional basis of party support based on structural cleavages, such as the revival of the rural-urban cleavage in American politics and the fading of class cleavages in the UK. The generational divide over the climate crisis and progressive social values is evident – but to secure a shift in power at Westminster this does require that young people turnout to vote. If Boris Johnson’s strategic appeals break Labour party ties among Leavers, forging a persistent base of Conservative support in key marginals in the Midlands and North, -- such as Barrow and Furness, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Dudley North - then this would count towards social realignment. Labour and the Lib Dems also hope to make gains in Remain seats, such as in the Greater London suburbs. Lastly, if these shifts consolidate in subsequent contests, realignments should eventually be observed in the partisan loyalties of voters.

[Figure 1 about here]

Figure 1 illustrates how political party competition on Libertarian-Authoritarian values and on Europe, and how this changed before and after the 2016 Brexit referendum. Thus, in response to the Farage threat, the Conservative party shifted in the top-right quadrant, becoming more authoritarian on policies of personal freedom and more Eurosceptic. Most of the opposition parties clustered in the bottom-left quadrant moved simultaneously in the opposite direction, becoming more Remain, heightening polarization over the EU. This laid the conditions facilitating the Remain Alliance. The one clear exception is Labour, which moved after the referendum towards the centerground on Europe, just at a time when the general electorate polarized. Under Corbyn’s assiduous fence-sitting, Labour adopted a position which is neither Remain fish nor Leave fowl.

Significant change across not one but all three levels in the 2019 contest would provide convincing evidence for a durable and deep-rooted alteration in the party order which is likely to persist for more than one term of office. These changes would transform the familiar geographical map of party support, threatening party heartlands, exemplified by the GOP take-over of southern states during the late-1960s. A contest which led electoral reform or Scottish independence, such as a minority Labour-government dependent upon parliamentary votes from the Lib Dems and SNP, would consolidate persistent changes at Westminster. Realignment is a high hurdle, however, given churn and uncertainty among the mass electorate – and churn and uncertainty among Westminster parties as well, with moderates deserting the battleground and only true-believers left. V.O. Key identified critical elections as those "...in which more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community, and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed." These exceptional contests represent sudden and large breaks in the established social and ideological basis of party competition, with enduring consequences for government and for the public policy agenda. Critical elections move the party system from equilibrium to a new level and then this level stabilises and consolidates.  

Whether the 2016 Brexit referenda laid the foundations for a critical realignment in the bones of the British electorate, or a more temporary period of uncertainty and flux, or simply a repeat of the status quo in a hung parliament, will become clearer once the smoke rises after 12 December. Calling the election was always a high-risk roll of the dice by Johnson.  It is not hyperbole to claim that the future of Westminster party politics, the future of Brexit, indeed the future of the United Kingdom nation-state, all hang in the balance.

Bio: Pippa Norris is the Maguire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard University and the author of numerous books on British and comparative politics, including, with Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash (CUP 2019). @PippaN15 www.pippanorris.com