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Politics

Apolitical Myth

By Demos Foundation

Over the last ten years one story about public interest in politics has found resonance, especially in the US. It suggests that people are no longer interested in political issues. Researchers from the Demos Foundation put this claim under the microscope.

In particular, it is claimed that Generation X - the cohort brought up in the 1970s and 1980s - cares primarily about itself. Surveys show, for example, that more young people than ever before report an interest in becoming wealthy and owning their own businesses.

The rise of individualism, the values of the 1960s, television, economic change and a host of other factors are blamed for fostering an atomised world in which people feel less social connection and less interest in common issues or collective solutions.

When set against the available data, this relatively simplistic story appears difficult to substantiate, for several reasons.

First, reported interest in political issues is not falling. The latest Eurobarometer survey of European public opinion concludes that 'the often-reported decline in political interest is not apparent from these...results.' Less than a third of the public in 15 European countries say that they never talk about politics.

In America, although more report being bored by events in Washington DC, the number reporting interest in national and local affairs remained constant or even rose slightly during the early 1990s.

In Britain, recent research similarly concludes that young people are not fundamentally uninterested in political issues.

Nor do people necessarily favour individualised solutions to social problems more than they used to.

Although less than two in five Americans think that more government programmes will solve America's social ills, many European societies continue to advocate collective solutions. For example, in Britain New Labour's 1997 victory was preceded by a significant shift in people's identification with policies which work for the whole society, rather than helping individuals get richer.

Secondly, within the broad range of social and political activities, some forms of engagement are increasing. For example, during the 1980s people's participation in unconventional political action rose slightly.

In general, surveys show an enduring correlation between interest in politics and education. As educational levels have increased, so has reported political interest.

In particular, people are increasingly engaging with social issues through their consumption. For example, about a third of the British population say that environmental considerations influence their purchasing patterns.

Ethical brands are a small but growing force in some products - fairly traded coffee such as Caf� Direct now has 3 per cent of the UK market. Ethically invested financial services are also growing strongly.

A recent survey of representative samples in twenty five countries found that social responsibility was the most influential factor in public impressions of individual companies, and one in five consumers reported actively rewarding or punishing a company for its perceived social performance.

The politics of globalisation increasingly focus attention and political action on the behaviour of corporations, and the potential of citizen action, combined with media campaigning, to bring about political change. This shift is consistent with the growing influence of consumption patterns in shaping people's sense of identity and self-image, and with the declining salience of traditional class divisions in many countries.

Thirdly, volunteering and giving to charities has also remained steady in most industrialised countries.

In sum, the landscape at the start of the twenty first century is not apolitical. The long term changes are complex, and relate partly to the capacity of established political organisations to respond to and accommodate new patterns of political engagement. These patterns include the growing range and diversity of political concerns, and the proliferation of channels through which political values and opinions can be expressed. It is to these issues of traditional political engagement to which we now turn.

Affiliation to parties is falling

Within this landscape, the first major shift common to most countries is the decline of attachment to individual parties. The most comprehensive survey of 19 industrialised countries shows that identification with a party fell, on average, among 17 countries between the 1960s and 1990s. The average annual fall is usually less than 1 per cent, but over thirty years this amounts to a significant shift. Perhaps most significantly, party identification is down among the young, the better educated and the politically sophisticated.

However, two key drivers of change stand out.

The decline of single ideologies and broadening of the issues base

There is consistent evidence that the number of issues which people are concerned with has increased. Most people are still concerned about core economic issues. For example, job security has remained a consistent concern for three quarters of the American population over the last twenty years.

But other areas have simultaneously become more important. For example, concern for the environment, women's rights and animal welfare have shown consistent increases.

These newer issues often focus on issues of lifestyle and quality of life, and reflect the well-documented shift towards a new set of 'core values'. As general levels of affluence have risen, the priorities of economic survival, security and insurance against basic forms of risk have been supplemented, and often supplanted, by a broader range of concerns.

Across the western world the proportion of the population giving considerable emphasis to such issues has increased by 20-30 per cent since 1970.

As the number of salient issues has increased, it has become harder for people to 'buy into' a single slate of policies. Individuals increasingly hold an eclectic range of views that a single party finds hard to encompass or accommodate.

This diversification has arguably been compounded by an increasing fuzziness in what parties stand for over time. The all-encompassing ideologies which dominated twentieth century politics have broken down during the last three decades.

In the industrialised world, the economic and social policies of the so-called left and right have merged in increasingly fluid ways. For example, in many countries, protectionist policies and calls for macro-economic demand management are no longer automatically associated with the left, while social authoritarianism is no longer the preserve of the traditional right.

These changes have both driven and been accelerated by a growing emphasis on candidate-focused politics. Accompanied by economic restructuring in many countries, changing individual values and the erosion of ideological frameworks have weakened the traditional class basis of organised politics.

A decline in associational organisations

A second, sometimes related, development is the decline of organisations that linked people both to parties themselves, and to traditional forms of political engagement.

For example, across the industrialised world Trade Union membership has slightly declined. In the US, the proportion of non-agricultural workers belonging to a trade union is below 15 per cent, less than half the level reported in the 1950s.

Other forms of social organisation associated with parties were also important in some countries, for example Conservative Clubs in Britain. Such local social clubs have tended to decline, whether or not they are formally linked to parties. In other countries declining church membership has loosened affiliation to Christian parties.

Elections are more volatile

The first effect of these changes is to increase electoral volatility. Spectacular volatility has been evident in elections such as the 1993 Canadian election, in which the conservatives fell from a clear majority to just two MPs. Overall, volatility has increased in 15 of 18 nations.

More people are also splitting their votes at different levels of the political system, preferring to put different parties into power at local, regional and national levels. As part of the same broad shift, more voters defer their decision about who to vote for until election campaigns are well under way.

Declining membership in parties

A related trend is the decline of membership and activism in many parties.

Party membership in all European countries except Germany is lower than in the 1960s.

It is arguable that such a decline in membership does not matter greatly for parties, for several reasons. First, most parties have greater media resources and are able to reach greater audiences without necessarily maintaining a mass membership base.

Second, funding has not generally declined, with the state, wealthy individual donors, companies and trade unions compensating for the loss of individual subscriptions.

Third, there is some evidence that those activists who remain within parties are more active than in the past. However, two specific challenges stand out.

First, systems of party organisation must be able to nurture new generations of political leaders.

As formal institutions lose deference and trust among their publics, political leadership positions need a broader, more diverse base on which to draw. The decline of party membership has the potential to signify less intensive competition for leadership election, and a narrower range of skills and experience among candidates.

Second, national politics and parties still rely on effective local organisation for activism, between and during election campaigns. A recent review of turnout in the UK European elections found that effective local organisation was critical to stemming or reversing the decline in turnout observed.

The decline of party membership, and especially of active party members, threatens the strength of local political cultures and the relevance of local party organisations to the broad mass of public concern at local level.

Turnout at elections is declining

The second broad shift in the landscape of political engagement is declining turnout.

Where the better educated and more politically aware are losing their allegiance to parties fastest, it tends to be poorer and least enfranchised groups it is the poorer who are opting out of voting altogether.

Declining civic engagement

Voting rarely makes sense from the viewpoint of individual rationality: one vote almost never makes a difference. In this sense, turning out to vote is always partly a question of attachment to a general sense of civic duty.

Surveys consistently show that more than 9 out of 10 people think that it is important to vote. However, it may be that the progressive decline in feelings of 'social connectedness' (as one commentator, Robert Putnam, dubs it) is having an impact on turnout levels. The relatively mobile and the unmarried are less likely to vote.

In the US, at least, there is also evidence that membership of locally based civic organisations is declining. Civic engagement is strongly correlated with levels of broad political engagement.

Complexity of voting

Another possible explanation is that the process of voting has become more complex.

A more plausible explanation is that voters are put off by the complexity of issues they are being asked to vote on. Without such clear ideological preferences or party differences, making up one's mind is increasingly difficult.

Simply asking people to vote more frequently also decreases voting - Switzerland, which has the most frequent referendums, and the USA, which has many electoral tiers and opportunities to vote on particular issues, have experienced the most rapid declines.

Decline in activism

Finally, there is some evidence that the decline in activism already noted has had a negative impact on turnout. For example, people who have had contact with a canvasser are more likely to vote, but the proportion who report such contact has greatly declined in Britain over the last few decades. In particular, while media campaigns reach people for national elections, local elections still rely on activism.

As digital technologies and the Internet fragment media audiences, the ability of parties to reach mass audiences through more recent campaigning methods may also begin to decline.

The decline in turnout is arguably a more serious problem for parties of the centre left than for others. As we have noted, declines have been greatest among the young and poorer sections of society, traditionally more important constituencies for the left, especially in the context of ageing demographic profiles.

Declining trust

The third broad area of concern is focused on evidence that politicians and political institutions are trusted less. Of thirteen countries for which data are available, twelve show decline in levels of confidence expressed in politicians. The World Values survey in the early 1990s found that in 8 advanced industrial societies, only 22 per cent of the public expressed confidence in political parties as institutions.

These declines of trust in political institutions are matched in most countries by declining confidence in the most important public institutions, such as the civil service and legal system.

There are, however, some indications that this trend may be levelling off or even reversing.

Like affiliation and turnout, the causes of these shifts are subject to considerable debate. They do not reflect a rejection of democracy per se. More people than ever say that democracy is the best way to run a country - none more so than the American public, who have particularly low confidence in their politicians.

Government irrelevance and failure

The most comprehensive recent analysis suggests that the problem lies primarily in the relevance and performance of politicians and government. This analysis points out that confidence in political institutions often rose during the 1950s and 1960s, period during which economic and social conditions generally improved rapidly. As growth slowed and unemployment rose, confidence also waned. At the same time, average government spending rose from 25 per cent of GDP in 1960 to 47 per cent in 1997.

The authors also point out that smaller countries which have done better in economic and social terms over the last 15 years achieved higher trust. Although economic growth rates in the United States were higher than in Europe, the benefits were largely confined to the wealthiest fifth of the population.

Alongside this analysis runs the suggestion that the power of governments to influence economic and cultural conditions has declined with the increase in global trade and communications. For example, imports and exports in OECD countries increased by an average of 12 per cent of GDP during the 1980s. Finally, the authors suggest that confidence is partly dependent on levels of corruption.

Overall, the argument is that people are right to reduce their confidence in our political institutions, during a period in which their capacity to deliver increased wealth and security, and to effect change in a fast-changing external environment, has fallen.

This analysis is convincing, and may go some way to explain the increase in confidence over the last few years of economic growth. However, it is probably not a full explanation. Over the last fifty years we have witnessed a change in patterns of trust held by the public in most experts, not just politicians.

The immediate post war generations were more trusting of leaders and experts in general than those who grew up between the wars. Those born since the 1960s have experienced steadily declining confidence. Part of the story, alongside the impact of growth and institutional effectiveness, seems to be the loss of deference among the public for institutions and leaders of most kinds.

The importance of these changes for parties is difficult to assess. On one level, we are surely witnessing the growth of a culture in which trust must be earned, and in which automatic deference to hierarchy is less common.

Among corporations, consumer relations and marketing strategies increasingly focus on winning customers by earning trust through positive experience, and then sustaining it through repeated demonstration that products and services are customised to the individual, as well as representing value for money.

This set of changes also points to the need for public institutions to respond more radically to the demands placed on them by a changing environment, and more sceptical, demanding citizens.

One general implication is that parties and politicians have an important stake in the strength and health of a broader civic culture which extends beyond purely partisan loyalty and activism.

The existence of a public sphere, in which citizens both express confidence and have opportunities to engage, is in many ways a prerequisite for the effective function of party organisations.

Conclusions: questions for parties

The overall conclusion must be that in most, if not all, of the industrialised democracies, the system of representation and party organisation offered is one which fits less and less well with the structure of political concern among citizens, despite the fact that this concern, in general, remains high.

Mass political parties have been an integral part of the infrastructure of industrial democracies during the 20th century.

By and large, their organisational form and political identity have been closely dovetailed with the dominant organisational forms and characteristics of that period - parliamentary democracies, stable ideological blocs organised broadly around the interests of capital and labour, widespread membership with a much smaller minority of activists, and hierarchical forms of organisation.

At local level, parties have occupied a key place in the ecology of civil society, helping to link local political groupings and concerns, and providing a channel of communication between local and national arenas.

As the economic, social and technological underpinnings of these systems are gradually transformed, we should expect the basis of party organisation to change, and in many systems it already has.

Television and national media campaigning has become more important, while local activism has become more focused and targeted. Partisan attachment has become more contingent, and in many parties less dependent on political and family tradition.

The key question is not whether parties have a future, but how they can adapt to the emergence of a new social and media infrastructure, and how well they can group and rank an increasingly diverse range of citizen and political concerns.

This is an edited version of a Demos briefing paper by Tom Bentley, Ben Jupp and Daniel Stedman Jones. The complete paper can be found at http://www.demos.co.uk/ For more details, email [email protected].

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