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What is a Party System?
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The Party System in the United Kingdom
In this course, Professor Paul Webb (University of Sussex) explores the operation and dynamics of the party system – or should that be party systems? – in British politics. In the first module, we introduce the idea of a party system, exploring what the term means and the different levels at which parties operate in the UK. After that, in the second module, we think about the positioning of parties of the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the third module, we think about the party system in Westminster and how it has evolved in the post-war period, before turning in the fourth module to the question of how we might measure the extent to which a political system is truly ‘multi-party’. In the fifth module, we think about whether the General Election of 2017 should be seen as a return to two-party politics, before turning in the sixth module to consider how the issue of Brexit has had an impact on both inter- and intra-party politics.
What is a Party System?
In this module, we introduce the idea of party systems in UK politics, focusing in particular on: (i) the idea of a party system as a pattern of interactions between political parties that can be competitive or collaborative; (ii) the different ‘arenas’ in which interactions between parties can take place: the electoral, the legislative and the executive; (iii) some examples cooperation within each of these ‘arenas’, including the SDP-Liberal Alliance (1983-87, electoral), the Lib-Lab Pact (1977, legislative), and the coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats (2010-15, executive); and (iv) the different ‘levels’ at which interactions between parties can take place: the national, within the devolved administrations, and at the local government level.
Hello. I'm Paul Webb.
00:00:06I'm professor of politics in the department
00:00:07of politics at the University of Sussex.
00:00:09And I want to talk to you today about party systems in the United Kingdom.
00:00:12And I do mean party systems plural, not just party system,
00:00:16even though we habitually talk about the British party system.
00:00:20Um, because, actually, once you start to look at things,
00:00:24there are a multiplicity of different party systems across
00:00:27the United Kingdom at different levels of political jurisdiction.
00:00:30Um, centrally,
00:00:34in terms of devolved administrations and in local government as well.
00:00:35Uh, what I want to do today is talk a little bit about the variety of party systems, uh,
00:00:39in the devolved administrations before moving on to
00:00:46focus mainly on the evolution and change.
00:00:49Uh,
00:00:53indeed the stresses that currently the party system at Westminster is undergoing.
00:00:54Before I get into any of that, I want to start with a brief definitional module,
00:01:00really?
00:01:05In the lead up to that kind of analysis
00:01:05by thinking about the question of what a party system might be. What do we mean by
00:01:08a party system?
00:01:12Well, I have a preferred definition of this, which is
00:01:14like this
00:01:18I would say a party system is a
00:01:19persisting pattern of competitive and or cooperative interactions
00:01:20displayed by a given set of political parties,
00:01:26a persisting pattern of competitive and or cooperative interactions
00:01:29displayed by a given set of parties. So what do I mean by that?
00:01:33Let's break that down a little bit.
00:01:37Firstly, when you think about the term system,
00:01:39you are always talking about a set of
00:01:43components or elements that interact with one another
00:01:46and affect each other in some kind of a way.
00:01:50This doesn't just have to be at the level of politics.
00:01:53We're not just talking about political systems.
00:01:55When you think about it. You find systems of different types
00:01:57in biology, in nature,
00:02:01in science,
00:02:03electronic systems, engineering systems and so on and so forth.
00:02:04They often have the notion of some kind of sense of
00:02:08equilibrium or a recurring pattern of interactions,
00:02:11as these different things
00:02:16affect each other. So in this case, clearly our components are political parties,
00:02:17so we're concerned with a particular set of political parties
00:02:23that interact with one another.
00:02:26How do they interact?
00:02:29Well, broadly speaking,
00:02:31I think they can do it in two kinds of ways they can be competitive interactions,
00:02:33which perhaps, is the more obvious thing when we first look at the way parties
00:02:38compete for office power votes, policy outcomes and so on and so forth.
00:02:43But quite often also,
00:02:49they can cooperate with each other. Sometimes that's a little bit less obvious.
00:02:51It's a bit more behind closed doors,
00:02:55but it's still very significant.
00:02:58I'll give you some examples of that in a moment or two, but before I do,
00:03:00let me just focus first.
00:03:04On one other aspect of this definition, I said that it was a persisting pattern
00:03:06of interactions between parties.
00:03:11Now I don't mean to imply by that that there is
00:03:13no possibility of change that a political party system has to be
00:03:17immutable, the set in stone, forever as it were.
00:03:21But if you think about the essence of the idea of a system,
00:03:25there is this underlying sense of there being
00:03:28a type of equilibrium,
00:03:31some kind of irregularity,
00:03:33a recurrence of a pattern of the way that the elements interact with one another.
00:03:35If you don't get that,
00:03:40then you can't really even clearly talk about a system existing at all.
00:03:43And indeed,
00:03:47there are a few examples around the world of political systems where parties are so
00:03:48unstable they come and go so regularly with a lack of kind of consistency,
00:03:55really,
00:04:01that political scholars even talk about party non systems to
00:04:01try and sum up what's going in such places.
00:04:06That doesn't apply to the United Kingdom,
00:04:09because we are used to the idea of
00:04:10certain parties clearly being there for the long term
00:04:13in our political environment and interacting with each other.
00:04:17So a persisting pattern of competitive and or cooperative interactions.
00:04:21What about some examples of competitive or cooperative interactions?
00:04:25Well, to understand this,
00:04:30I think it helps to think about the
00:04:31fact that these interactions between parties can occur
00:04:33in different arenas.
00:04:37And I would suggest thinking about the electoral arena,
00:04:39about the legislative arena
00:04:42and about the executive arena.
00:04:44In terms of the electoral arena, competition between parties is pretty obvious.
00:04:47They compete for votes.
00:04:51They put candidates up against each other to try and win votes
00:04:53and to try and win positions in assemblies in elected assemblies.
00:04:56But they don't always compete against each other.
00:05:01There are instances, including in the context of British politics, as well,
00:05:05where sometimes parties will agree to cooperate with one another.
00:05:09Perhaps the best example I can think of in recent British political history
00:05:14would take us back to the 19 eighties,
00:05:18when the Social Democratic Party formed as a breakaway from the Labour Party
00:05:20and found itself competing
00:05:25in elections in very similar kind of ideological terrain
00:05:27with the Liberals, the old Liberal Party.
00:05:31Now, eventually, the SDP and the Liberals merged, as you probably know,
00:05:35with one another in the late 19 eighties
00:05:39to create today's Liberal Democrat Party.
00:05:41But before they did that in the general elections of 1983 and 1987 they remained
00:05:44as two separate parties
00:05:49but recognised that it would be suicidal for them to
00:05:51run candidates against each other to stand against each other.
00:05:55So what they did was they carved up the
00:05:58600 or more constituencies in mainland Britain between themselves,
00:06:01and they said, You know,
00:06:06in some constituencies we will just run a liberal candidate.
00:06:08Any others will just run an SDP candidate
00:06:11and they would run under the banner of the SDP Liberal Alliance,
00:06:13So that's a good example of cooperation between parties
00:06:17in the electoral arena.
00:06:21Then there's the legislative arena.
00:06:23And again, you know you have the regular, adversarial,
00:06:26knockabout between government and opposition in the House of Commons.
00:06:28So a very clear vision, really, of how parties oppose and compete with each other
00:06:32in terms of trying to get their policies
00:06:38implemented or not implemented, as the case may be.
00:06:40But often behind the scenes,
00:06:44there is probably more cooperation going on between the
00:06:46parties than many folks might actually readily understand.
00:06:49Sometimes it's over minor details of bills before the House
00:06:53of Commons or motions before the House of Commons,
00:06:58and a little bit of negotiation
00:07:01tip for tat. Going on between the parties will mean that they agree that they
00:07:04that the opposition will sometimes not oppose a government
00:07:09measure. Or indeed, the government might accept an opposition amendment to a bill.
00:07:13Um, but there are even starker kind of arrangements than that.
00:07:21If we think about the present situation,
00:07:24Theresa May's government lacks an overall parliamentary majority.
00:07:27So what she did after the 2017 election was managed
00:07:31to negotiate an agreement with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party
00:07:34and um, it was a confidence and supply so called confidence and supply agreement,
00:07:39which means that the D.
00:07:44U P will vote with the Conservatives in any vote of no confidence in the government,
00:07:45which could potentially bring Theresa May's government down.
00:07:50And indeed, in finance bills connected with the with the budget,
00:07:53the passage of the budget.
00:07:57So in crucial areas, really, the government will be sustained
00:07:59an even better example in a way to expect in the 19 seventies,
00:08:04when Jim Callaghan's Labour government completely lost
00:08:07its majority in the House of Commons
00:08:10and negotiated a deal with David Steel's old Liberal Party at that time
00:08:13to get the support of the Liberals on a particular and sort of restricted
00:08:19um programme of legislation that would be put before the Commons,
00:08:25it became known colloquially as the Lib Lab pact lasted for about 18 months.
00:08:29But it didn't entail any formal coalition at the executive level,
00:08:35and that takes us to the third
00:08:40and final of one of the arenas that I mentioned the executive arena.
00:08:42We used to the pattern, um, in terms of Westminster,
00:08:47of single party majorities since 1945 and single party governments.
00:08:51But of course, sometimes governments lack majorities overall,
00:08:55and one of the options they have before them is to actually
00:08:59share power within the executive to form a formal coalition government.
00:09:02And, of course, we have one recent, very important example of that.
00:09:07After the 2010 election, when David Cameron's conservatives
00:09:10are formed a coalition with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats,
00:09:14the two of them formed an executive coalition together so you can get
00:09:18cooperation as well as competition in these three arenas.
00:09:24And you can get that at the level of
00:09:28the Central States politics,
00:09:31Westminster and Whitehall, or in any of the devolved administrations, or indeed
00:09:33in
00:09:39any of the 400 or more local government authorities, which exist as well.
00:09:39So once you start to think about that, you can realise that probably
00:09:45the dynamics
00:09:49of party systems, what they look like,
00:09:51how much cooperation and competition there actually is.
00:09:54They can vary a lot.
00:09:57That's why I say, Actually, there are multiple party systems in the U. K.
00:09:58Not just a single
00:10:02party system
00:10:04
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Webb, P. (2020, February 20). The Party System in the United Kingdom - What is a Party System? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-party-system-in-the-united-kingdom/brexit-193ffb0b-889d-4ddb-8d04-20e0b922e010
MLA style
Webb, P. "The Party System in the United Kingdom – What is a Party System?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 20 Feb 2020, https://massolit.io/courses/the-party-system-in-the-united-kingdom/brexit-193ffb0b-889d-4ddb-8d04-20e0b922e010