Carrying the Scorpion

The Conservative Party's pivot to the right is a dance towards electoral doom

As we enter week three of the UK’s General Election campaign, I fear that my tongue in cheek reference to the ‘Leeroy Jenkins Election’ (read here, if you missed it), might have been more portentous than I had originally believed. By announcing a General Election before his party - and possibly strategists - were ready, Rishi Sunak had hoped to shake up British politics with a brave act of derring-do. Instead, he appears to have charged his party towards disaster.

The campaign has had its share of unforced errors - most obviously skipping out on half of the D-Day ceremony to record a TV interview that wouldn’t air for a week. But in my view, there has been a broader strategic error: trying to fight the election by veering to the right.

I am a professional political scientist. So I believe in archaic and unfashionable concepts such as the median voter theorem. TLDR: elections are typically, if not always, won from the centre. Obviously this frustrates activists on the left and right. But the victories of Tony Blair, David Cameron, and even Boris Johnson (don’t worry, I’ll explain) reflect the core political science truth that elections in majoritarian systems require you capture the bulk of voters who sit around the middle of the distribution of ideological beliefs.

Keir Starmer clearly believes in this logic, again much to the disappointment of left-leaning activists. He is fighting a campaign based around moderate voters, trying to avoid doing anything that will scare them. That of course means he may lose some voters at the very left of his coalition, who will likely head to the Greens (now an intriguing catch-all party for hippies, environmentalists, people disappointed with Labour’s Gaza policy and NIMBYs - now there’s an episode of Come Dine With Me). But the electoral logic is that enough left-leaning voters will vote Labour to get the Conservatives out of office. I suspect this logic will prove accurate, although I am less convinced than others that Labour will have a majority over 100.

The Sunak campaign could have tried to fight an election for the median voter. That probably would have required a different strategy from Rishi Sunak on assuming the position of Prime Minister. After the initial period of ‘safe hands’ governance and the signing of the Belfast Protocol, Sunak has however abandoned a ‘competence and centrism’ brand. Instead, and partly because he is actually a genuine fiscal and social conservative, he has shifted towards an offer to the right, particularly as it relates to the ‘stop the boats’ campaign about illegal crossings of the English Channel and his Rwanda migrant offshoring policy.

There was a logic to these policies. The voters who the Conservative Party had lost after 2019, particularly post Boris Johnson’s Partygate and the complete farrago of the Liz Truss government, were generally older, social conservatives from lower to middle incomes, who were highly concerned about immigration. I wrote a lot about the merits of this strategy last year. If your only concern was winning back previous voters this made sense.

But there are two problems.

First, there are many people who voted for the Conservatives in 2019 who do not share this obsession with immigration. And many who voted for Boris Johnson because he was not Jeremy Corbin. Indeed, Johnson’s offer was a relatively left-wing one for the Conservatives - focused on levelling up, protecting the NHS, and a Johnsonian mix of populist language but oftentimes liberal instincts on social policy (see where we ended up with Johnson’s immigration policy, which massively increased legal migration numbers). So there was a serious risk that Sunak’s strategy would turn off moderate voters.

Second, targeting your campaign towards people who are tempted to vote for a party further right than the Conservatives - i.e. Reform UK - might simply lead to those people wanting to drink the real thing, rather than the diet option. A Conservative campaign that focuses on things that excite Reform UK voters simply draws attention to Reform UK and makes people want to vote for them instead.

The re-emergence of Nigel Farage as an actively campaigning politician, as opposed to just leading owner of the business entity referred to as Reform UK, has shot the Tories’ fox. Now there is a highly visible reminder that, even if Reform UK doesn’t have all the characteristics of an organised political party - it lacks much of a ground-game and has very few local councillors - you can absolutely vote for it come election time.

Like Stephen Bush (link £), I previously had some skepticism, largely based on their poor performance in recent local elections, that Reform UK could beat UKIP’s 12.6% vote in the 2015 General Election. Like Stephen too, I am open to changing my mind about that, particularly because the Conservative Party have decided to run a campaign dedicated to telling voters how great the kinds of policies associated with Reform UK actually are.

And here is where I turn to the political science. My brilliant colleague Tarik Abou Chadi has spent the last few years rigorously demonstrating the electoral ineffectiveness of centre-right parties moving to the right under pressure from far-right or populist right parties. Of course, no-one has listened. Such is the Cassandra-like fate for political scientists.

Before we begin, some throat-clearing. Following Cas Mudde, I am going to use the phrases ‘radical right’, ‘far right’ and ‘populist right’ to mean roughly the same thing - parties to the right of the main centre-right parties who may criticise the political system but who play within its rules. That distinguishes them from ‘extreme right’ parties who denounce the entire political system and maybe democracy itself.

So the former group include everything from UKIP and Reform UK, to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National to Germany’s AfD. The latter group would be groups like Die Republikaner in Germany or the British National Party. That latter group is much smaller and less electorally influential (not that they really believe in elections as such, anyways). It’s the former who matter politically. And their main agenda over the past few decades has been to reduce immigration and clamp down on multiculturalism.

So what has been the effect of radical right parties on the behaviour and success of the centre-right? Well, it’s not gone brilliantly.

In work co-authored with Denis Cohen and Werner Krause, Tarik shows that across 108 elections in 12 European countries since the 1970s, centre-right attempts to accommodate radical right parties have been “fruitless in the best case, and can be detrimental in the worst case’. This holds up regardless of whether we look at party vote share in the aggregate or at the behaviour of individual vote-switchers. If anything, centre-right parties becoming more anti-immigration appears to encourage individuals to switch their votes to parties further right.

You might think, then that centre-right parties would refrain from accommodating parties to their right. But of course that’s not what happens. In another important paper with Werner Krause, Tarik shows that when radical right parties are more electoral successful both centre-left and especially centre-right parties do become more ‘culturally protectionist’. This is a clever study, because the authors are able to look at discontinuities when radical right parties only just pass electoral thresholds, to produce a more causally convincing account of the behaviour of other parties. In other words, it’s not just a change in public opinion driving this - it’s the direct electoral success of the radical right.

So we have an infernal logic here from these two pieces. When radical right parties do better, it encourages mainstream parties, especially centre-right ones to veer towards the cultural right. But that strategy doesn’t work. If anything it just increases further the vote share of the radical right, as they say to voters, ‘see, we told you’.

It’s also worth noting that this strategy doesn’t seem to help social democratic parties either. When the Danish Social Democrats moved to a more socially conservative set of policy proposals a few years back under PM Mette Fredericksen, there was a flurry of arguments that this was the only way for social democratic parties to survive. But as Tarik and his coauthors note in a recent policy brief, the decline in support for social democratic parties appears to have little to do with the radical right. Most people switching away from social democratic parties head towards parties on the left or in the centre. And indeed, they show that only twenty percent of people who would consider voting for a social democratic party would vote for the radical right.

That however, is not true for people who support centre-right parties. As we’ve seen, there is some vote switching by centre-right voters to parties to the right. And Reform UK’s current voting support is certainly bulwarked at the moment by ex-Conservative voters. As Dylan Difford has shown, a very large proportion of Reform UK’s current voter intention base comes from 2019 Conservative voters.

This is almost a uniquely bad situation for the Conservative Party by cross-national standards, since for the most part radical right support tends to come from people who don’t identify with the mainstream parties (in the policy brief mentioned above, fewer than a quarter of AfD voters actually came from the other German political parties). Somehow, the Conservative Party has broken this trend and managed to send ever more voters in Reform’s direction, all the while adjusting their own policies ever further to the right, to absolutely no avail.

And so we return to the scorpion and the frog image, which heads this piece. The Conservative frog has made a lousy deal with the Reform scorpion. It has carried the Reform Party back into political viability. And now it will feel the sting of the scorpion’s tail. What do Reform get from this? Well probably not more than a couple of seats in Parliament, thanks to the UK’s fantastically unrepresentative First Past the Post electoral system. But they will take the frog down with them. As the scorpion says: LOL. LMAO.

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Since it’s electoral season, these posts are coming a little thicker and faster. Which also gives me further opportunity to promote my Tortoise podcast, “What’s Wrong With Democracy?”. This week I spoke to James Ball, Emeka Umejei, and Ben Scott about misinformation and disinformation. Do listen in here or (radio voice) wherever you get your podcasts.