Local Elections in Britain

Colin Rallings, Michael Thrasher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134929566
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring the historical context, the structure and method of operation, Local Elections in Britain clearly addresses the key issues and confusions that surround the local election system including:
* the nature and extent of electoral participation including the crucial issue of low turnout
* the candidates, and the growing proportion of women challenging for council seats
* the performance of political parties, now a central feature of local elections
* the dangers of viewing local elections as national opinion polls
Drawing on the results of more than 100,000 local elections dating back over three decades the book is the most comprehensive study of local elections in Britain.

1 Local elections—a case of mystery, intrigue and neglect

Local elections in Britain are a mystery to the general public, intriguing to the media and somewhat neglected by academics. There are good reasons for all three of these assessments. Most of the electorate are puzzled about the local government system for the simple reason that it is puzzling. The structure is already complex and recent structural changes will only serve to add to that complexity. In 1991 the government established a Local Government Commission for England. At the same time it asked the respective Secretaries of State for Scotland and Wales to review the local government structure in those countries. There followed wholesale structural changes in both Scotland and Wales with the replacement of a two-tier system by all-purpose or unitary authorities. In England changes have been piecemeal, resulting in a local government structure which comprises a mix of single—and two-tier authorities. The cycle of local elections is an intellectual challenge in itself. Some authorities have elections when others of the same type do not. There are even occasions when, within a single local authority, electors in some wards are able to vote in an election but their neighbours in adjacent wards, literally across the street in some cases, are not. At least with general and European elections every elector realises something is expected of them, even if some still prefer not to exercise their right to vote.

Arguably, the British local government system is as much of a mystery to the electorate in the 1990s as it was when it was reorganised more than twenty years ago. Before 1973, local government in England—excluding London which had been reorganised in 1964—consisted of 48 county councils, 79 county boroughs, 285 municipal boroughs, 491 urban districts and 415 rural districts, not to mention approximately 10,000 parish councils and meetings. Many of these authorities were extremely small, with fewer than half the county districts having populations above 20,000 (Redcliffe-Maud and Wood 1974). The position in Scotland and Wales was no less complex. Reorganised in 1929, Scottish local government consisted of 33 county councils alongside 4 all-purpose councils of cities which covered the major population centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee. Below the counties were some 21 large burghs, 176 small burghs and 196 district councils. The pattern in Wales resembled more the English structure with a varied collection of county boroughs for the cities and a two-tier structure of county and district authorities elsewhere. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s various reviews of these structures were undertaken and although there was consensus about the need to reduce the number of authorities opinion remained divided over the specific direction reform should take.

The reform debate was dominated by the general feeling that local government should become more efficient, effective and democratically accountable: that an essentially Victorian structure should be transformed into something able to respond to the needs and demands of the late twentieth century. It was also believed that local government needed to be streamlined, that it should be much easier for ordinary citizens to understand its structure, functions and finances. While reorganisation in the early 1970s certainly reduced the number of directly elected authorities, from more than 1,300 to just over 400 in England alone, an opportunity to simplify the electoral system was missed. As we shall show later, the existence of different electoral systems, coupled with a new and strange structure, served merely to confuse voters and frustrate efforts to persuade them to identify strongly with these new authorities. More than twenty years after the system was reformed the evidence from opinion surveys confirms that the public are often ignorant about the functions carried out by local authorities and puzzled about the allocation of responsibilities between the various tiers of local government (Widdicombe 1986c; Lynn 1992; Parry et al. 1992). Despite this confusion, the electorate is then asked to play its part in the local democratic process. When large numbers of electors choose to abstain rather than engage in this process, it is local government which is blamed and local democracy which is perceived to be weak. Strangely, those who created this Byzantine folly in the first place receive little censure.

Large sections of the media share this state of ignorance with the general public but here the imperative of producing copy or preparing a broadcast is such that they feel the need to develop ‘an angle’ while simultaneously concealing their own confusion. The approach normally pursued is a response to the standard questions—what can these local elections tell us about the next general election/the future of the Prime Minister/the current state of the parties, and so on. We would not wish to deny the value of such questions nor, indeed, the appropriateness of using local voting data to detect changes in national trends. The problem is that the media often seem obsessed with such an interpretation and appear indifferent and oblivious to all else. Local elections have become nationalised to the extent that the media seem unconcerned about their consequences for local council control, the conduct of local authority business or the effects on local services. Naturally, this upsets many people who want to view local elections as precisely local elections and not merely as surrogate indicators of developments in national politics. Commenting on media coverage of the 1981 elections, for example, Jones and Stewart remarked, It did not enter into the minds of most commentators that these results were from local elections, and that in some cases people were voting about the behaviour of their local councillors' (Jones and Stewart 1983:16, emphasis in original). This sense of frustration is echoed by many who feel that the media's failure to broaden its election coverage to accommodate local influences and effects does local government and the political system a disservice. That said, the quality of local election coverage by the press and broadcasters alike has improved markedly over the past decade. There are a number of factors, some technological, some attitudinal, which have allowed a broader media agenda. Local broadcasting organisations, particularly the BBC's own network of radio stations, have certainly helped to strengthen the local interpretation of such elections. Nevertheless, the relevance of local elections for national politics is still a dominant theme for the media.

SURVEY DATA

The study of local elections and electoral behaviour by academics has similarly been patchy. Given the healthy state of electoral studies in Britain we might have expected local government elections to be a topic of extensive scrutiny and analysis. Unfortunately, survey data, used as a major source by political scientists because it explores individual attitudes and voting behaviour, has largely been missing as a resource for local electoral studies. Opinion polls generally ask questions about national, not local, voting intentions. Funding for academic surveys of attitudes before, during and after general elections has been secured. Those data have proved invaluable in helping us to understand some of the essential dynamics of electoral behaviour in Britain. Similar surveys, set in the context of local elections, have only rarely been conducted and never in the same depth as their national equivalents. Compared with the amount of survey data on parliamentary elections, that specifically concerned with attitudes to local voting is minuscule. Ironically, far more is known and written about individual-level voting behaviour of Britons at elections for the European Parliament, despite the fact that even fewer people participate in these than in local elections (Atkinson and Braunholtz 1996; Franklin and Curtice 1995; ICM 1994; Reif (ed.) 1985).

The main demand for surveys of specifically local attitudes has come from government appointed committees of inquiry, with a very few commissioned purely for academic research. The Maud committee, which investigated management in local government in the 1960s, published findings from its own survey of the local government elector but little of this report dealt with voting behaviour (Maud 1967). Amongst the findings that did relate to voting attitudes, however, the committee's survey found that men (as opposed to women), middle-aged respondents and those in professional and managerial occupations were more likely to take their responsibilities as local citizens seriously. The research also found a core of electors who appeared either uninterested in or ignorant about local government. For such people the electoral process was of little importance or too complex to understand (Maud 1967:72–82). Smaller scale opinion surveys conducted within individual local authorities produced virtually identical findings. The public were generally ignorant about the local government structure, the administration of services and the methods for raising local taxes (Birch 1959; Bealey and Bartholomew 1962; Bealey et al. 1965; Budge 1965; Budge et al. 1972).

It was not until the mid-1980s that another government sponsored survey of public opinion was carried out, this time for the Widdicombe committee investigating the conduct of local authority business. In addition to a series of questions designed to examine the public's awareness of local government and its services, the survey also sought clues about attitudes towards local voting. One of the more interesting findings from this study was that while most voters' partisanship did not vary between local and national elections it did for a sizeable minority of about 20 per cent of respondents. This led to the conclusion that ‘there is some scope for the impact of local influences on local voting’ (Widdicombe 1986c). In short, roughly one in five voters viewed local elections as more than just an annual general election.

Further evidence that some voters have evolved different party allegiances according to the electoral context can be gleaned from various opinion polls. A poll conducted for the Sunday Times in 1984, for example, noted that Labour's lead over the Conservatives increased by 8 per cent when respondents were asked about local voting intention rather than how they might behave if a general election was being held. In a survey conducted by National Opinion Polls (NOP) in 1987 a similar local electoral advantage for Labour of 7 per cent was found (Gyford et al. 1989). A more recent NOP survey conducted before the 1994 local elections confirmed these earlier findings with approximately one in five supporters of the three main parties revealing that they were either undecided about supporting their national party or had already decided to switch their vote to a rival party at the forthcoming local elections.

Survey data can also be a useful way to explore public opinion over time. A survey conducted in 1990 (Bloch and John 1991), for example, replicated some of the questions from the Maud survey. These data give an opportunity to study what had happened to attitudes over a twenty-five-year period. Compared with the 1960s the public appeared more cynical about local politicians. In 1965, 56 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘The people you vote for say they'll do things for you, but once they're in they forget what theyk've said'. By 1990 67 per cent agreed. Interestingly, the proportions agreeing with the statement ‘Local council elections are sometimes so complicated that I don't really know who to vote for’ were exactly the same at 29 per cent in both surveys (Bloch and John 1991:34–5). Local government reorganisation in the 1970s, therefore, had clearly not had the effect of simplifying the electoral process in the minds of electors.

As well as monitoring changing attitudes over a long period surveys can also be constructed so as to measure short-term fluctuations in opinion. Such a technique was employed in one of the few book-length studies on the subject of local elections in Britain. Miller's Irrelevant Elections? (Miller 1988) ingeniously used evidence from the first survey conducted on behalf of the Widdicombe inquiry and combined it with a follow-up poll carried out after the May elections in 1986. Altogether some 65 per cent of the original sample of 1,145 respondents were interviewed again. The use of two surveys allowed Miller to construct a panel of respondents and to test for any change in their attitudes over a six-month period and, more importantly, to examine the relationship between attitudes to local voting and voting itself.

Using these data Miller addressed such questions as whether local election outcomes reflected attitudes to local or national politics? Did local voters concern themselves with the concept of local autonomy? How did their assessment of local government performance affect their voting behaviour? Amongst the main findings were that while some groups, principally the elderly, better educated, and middle-class respondents, expressed a positive attitude towards local voting, such differences were less noticeable when it came to actual voting. Although a majority of voters often abstain in local elections Miller found that there were few voters who consistently abstained. While a third of respondents said they voted for the candidate rather than the party in local elections a majority indicated little interest in local politics. Such work is immensely valuable in identifying those sections of the electorate more likely to vote or abstain in local elections and in exploring the impact of individual attitudes on behaviour. Ultimately, however, survey data should form but a part of any serious investigation of local voting. Generally speaking they tell us little about local election results, the nature and state of party competition, the characteristics of candidates and councillors, the nature of the electoral cycle, the operation of the electoral system and much else. Such topics can best be analysed using aggregate voting data.

AGGREGATE DATA

One of the first (and almost the last) major studies of local voting to use actual election results was published thirty years ago. Voting in Cities (Sharpe (ed.) 1967) presents a series of case studies of the 1964 local elections in boroughs such as Bradford, Exeter and Wolverhampton. It examines the state of party competition, the characteristics of candidates and councillors, the nature of local campaigns as well as the election results themselves in terms of turnout, ward marginality and electoral swing. Although specifically concerned with one set of elections, a number of contributors drew on their local knowledge and available electoral statistics to provide the reader with a fascinating account of the evolution of party politics in some local authorities. Hill's study of Leeds (Hill 1967), for example, gives aggregate vote shares for the three main parties in that borough dating back to 1945, analyses local councillors in terms of years of service, and shows how the electoral system helped distort the relationship between votes and seats. Published in an age with no personal computers to help process the data it represents a remarkable achievement of data collection, organisation and analysis. Technologically speaking we have moved on a great deal since and it is surprising, not to say disappointing, to discover that Sharpe's book still remains the sole example of its type. Austin Ranney's comments on the utility of aggregate data analysis remain pertinent. He wrote:

the availability and inexpensiveness of aggregate data invite replicative and comparative studies on a wide scale…. Aggregate election returns are the ‘hardest’ data we can get, in the sense that their meaning and comparability vary less from area to area, from time to time, and from study to study than do most survey data…. Whatever complex socio-psychological processes may underlie the voter's decisions to make particular allocations, the votes themselves constitute a basic medium of political exchange. Thus their relative ‘hardness’ as much as their accessibility, makes election returns a significant body of data for political analysis.

(Ranney 1962:96)

A number of shorter pieces of aggregate data analysis have been published, however, which all serve to show that local election results can prove an invaluable source of data for electoral analysis. Some of these studies have concentrated on specific sets of local election results, concerned with describing winners and losers, reporting vote shares, changes in council control and assessing the dominant electoral issues (Bristow 1981; Bartley and Gordon 1982). More detailed analyses of specific local election cycles have also featured in books whose main purpose has been to provide a record of ward by ward results. Bochel (firstly John and later his son, Hugh) and Denver, for example, have published the results of all Scottish local elections since 1974 and in each of their books there is a chapter of analysis and summary tables covering such topics as candidature, party competition, turnout, changing party vote and seat shares (Bochel and Denver 1974 onwards). While Bochel and Denver systematically covered the Scottish results the treatment of local elections south of the border was piecemeal. Results for elections in London have been published but until the early 1960s these reports contained summary data only and little, if any, commentary (see Minors and Grenham 1994).

For many years, outside London there was no systematic publication of election results and coverage was restricted. There was, for example, a guide to voting in Greater Manchester produced prior to the inaugural elections held in 1973 (Clark 1973) and the same author went on to publish a similar guide to the 1977 county elections (Clark 1977). An investigation into the viability of the six new metropolitan county councils contained an analysis of voting patterns in those authorities from 1973 to 1981. The study observed that voting patterns and electoral swing were fairly uniform across these authorities and concluded that national, rather than local factors were most influential in deciding the outcome (Bristow 1984). It was not until the 1985 local elections, however, that something comparable to the Scottish election series was produced for England. Starting in that year we published the results of the English county elections (Rallings and Thrasher 1985) and since then have expanded our election coverage to all types of local authority elections in England and Wales. Later (Rallings and Thrasher (eds) 1993), we published a statistical digest of local election results for all authorities in Great Britain which recorded summary aggregate data for each and every cycle of local elections held since 1973.

Interest in local voting statistics has also led some researchers to more specific types of inquiry. The practice of using multimember electoral divisions in British local government has facilitated research into the effects of ballot structure on voting patterns. One study (Upton and Brook 1974) examined the relationship between a candidate's position on the ballot paper and the level of voter support. This was followed by another piece of research (Denver and Hands 1975) which focused on the spread of votes amongst candidates from the same political party. As we shall show in later chapters complex local government ballot structures continue to be a useful source for observing patterns of voting.

Another relatively popular topic has been the possible relationship between levels of local taxation and voting behaviour in local elections. The most favoured approach has been to address the question of whether voters react negatively to a party seen as responsible for raising local taxes. While research on councillors has often found them to claim concern about the electoral impact of their actions (Gregory 1969; Hampton 1970; Newton 1976), analysis of the tax/ vote relationship has proved more difficult. A study of four sets of elections in London over a ten-year period, for example, found rate increases related strongly to a party's electoral fate for only one set of elections (Ferry 1979). Typical of this type of analysis are the conclusions reached by two studies conducted in the early 1980s which identified very little relationship between rate increases and local voting behaviour (Economist 1980; Bristow 1982). More recently Gibson (1988) has cast doubt on the method employed by earlier researchers. His argument has been that it is wrong to focus on seat changes when investigating the effects of taxation and better to measure vote change. Using this approach suggested that ‘rat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Local elections—a case of mystery, intrigue and neglect
• 2 The evolution of local democracy
• 3 The local electoral system
• 4 Turnout in local elections
• 5 Contestation, candidates and incumbency
• 6 Party competition in local elections
• 7 Votes, seats and local electoral outcomes
• 8 Major parties and local elections
• 9 Minor parties and local elections
• 10 Local elections and national politics
• 11 Local by-elections—parochial contests or national electoral indicators?
• 12 Local elections and representation
• 13 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index