Abstract
Among Western European party systems, Britain’s has long been— and continues to be, admittedly with serious reservations—regarded as a “textbook example” of two-party systems, based as it is on the domination of the Conservative and Labour parties, a situation that was markedly helped by the “first-past-the-post” single-member constituency electoral system. Yet the question that now arises is whether a major change is not in the process of taking place under our very eyes: after a period of over 20 years during which the two major parties won handsomely and succeeded each other in office almost “naturally,” the classic “two-party system” was sufficiently undermined at the 2010 general election to give rise to a coalition government, a first in the country for over 60 years and indeed for many more years if one excludes the wartime coalition of 1940–1945. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal democrats did continue without very serious hold backs, although there were a number of disagreements on various issues, such as the level of student fees and the question of the reform of the House of Lords.
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Notes
S. Driver and L. Martell, New Labour (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
R. S. Katz and P. Mair (eds.), How Parties Organize (London: Sage, 1994), 113 (Appendix 2.C).
K. D. Ewing, The Costs of Democracy (Oxford: Hart, 2007 ).
Ibid.
Ian Budge, H. D. Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum, Mapping Policy Preferences, Estimates for Parties, Governments and Electors1945–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The faithful support of the electors to “their” parties has been replaced by greater attention given by electors to issues, a move that was helped by the fact that the media in practice obliged parties to clarify their policies. Thanks to the determined efforts of a group of political scientists, led By Professor Budge, the content of party “manifestos” has been systematically recorded and classified. It has thus become possible to trace the evolution of party programs throughout the second half of the twentieth century and consequently to assess the extent to which party ideology has come to be modified over time. Two volumes have analyzed the complex technical problems that needed to be overcome to render comparisons possible and to summarize cross-national findings. While the scope of these inquiries already goes markedly beyond Western Europe, they are being gradually extended further to all the countries in which party competition at elections genuinely takes place.
See, for instance, Anthony King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
D. Sanders, Clarke, H., Stewart, M. and Whiteley, P. “The Economy and Voting,” in Pippa Norris (ed.), Britain Votes 2001 (Hansard Society Series in Politics and Government) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and G. Evans and R. Andersen, “The Impact of Party Leaders,” in P. Norris and C. Wlezien (eds.), Britain Votes 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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© 2012 Takashi Inoguchi and Jean Blondel
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Blondel, J. (2012). Britain. In: Inoguchi, T., Blondel, J. (eds) Political Parties and Democracy. Asia Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277206_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277206_2
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