Everyone can agree that blind political loyalty is bad. It is wrong to vote for a party no matter how idiotic or cruel their policies simply because that is what your parents, co-workers or co-religionists have generally done. The good news is that blind political loyalty in the Western world appears to be on the decline.
Recent elections in Canada and for the Scottish parliament have seen historic collapses in support for the Liberal and Labour parties both of which had long been dominant. In Germany the Social Democratic Party has fallen behind the Green Party in many polls while in Ireland, Fianna Fail, the largest party in every election since 1932, lost almost three quarters of its seats in the March general election.
In Ireland, the eclipse of Fianna Fail can be attributed to the cataclysmic consequence of its mismanagement of the economy. However, the decline in party loyalty in Western democracies is a longer-term structural trend. In the UK the percentage of votes gained by the two major parties has declined from well over 90% in the 1950s to just 65% in the 2010 election. In the United States, the two main parties are still dominant but numbers strongly identifying with either party have been in steady decline.
In some ways, this is a good thing. If voters come to a thoughtful and informed choice instead of blindly following the voting behaviour of their parents or socio-economic group, that is surely a good thing.
Sadly, this is not what decline in party loyalty has brought about. Recent election results do not evidence sustained shifts towards particular parties as people reconsider wrongheaded policies of particular parties.
Rather, the fortunes of political parties appear increasingly to depend on the fickle favour of lady luck with voting intentions swinging wildly between them and the results of elections differing markedly from the intentions expressed to pollsters a matter of months and sometimes weeks before. The shift to the SNP in the recent Scottish election, for instance, happened in a matter of weeks, Labour having been riding high throughout the winter and early spring. Similarly, the eclipse of the Liberal Party and crushing of the Bloc Quebecois in the Canadian election was similarly the result of a swing that manifested itself in a matter of weeks.
Of course, the old days of more rigid party loyalty, when people voted largely in accordance with established preferences their group or family, was not ideal. However, those communal and intergenerational decisions to support a particular party had an element of wisdom in them.
These collective political loyalties were at least partly the result of informed, long-term collective experiences that informed ideas of what was best individually and collectively for particular voters.
Working class commitments to social democracy, for example, were the product of decades of experience and reflection of successive generations whose lived experience had taught them the value of broader progressive approaches to law and politics and the power of the state to reduce insecurity and broaden opportunity.
Because public policy is increasingly complex and often tedious in the detail, it is difficult for people to keep abreast of what is in their interest and the national interest.
The current highly fluid political order makes it increasingly difficult to engage the public in the serious task of facing the painful changes that face Western democracies.
In the past parties could rely on loyal traditional supporters to stick with them when they took painful but necessary decisions. That is no longer the case. The parties have to seek to win over all of their supporters anew in each election.
As party loyalties decline but most individuals continue to devote a tiny amount of their time to thinking about politics, their votes will increasingly be determined by whichever party can give them the most simplistic and superficially pleasing slogans.
This is not a context within which it will be possible to take the extremely challenging and painful decisions that are currently necessary. Denial is a powerful force and for people to accept that they may have to consume less, retire later or pay more tax requires sustained debate, truth-telling , political engagement and a degree of historical perspective.
The decline in traditional party loyalty is in fact encouraging encourages parties to play to an ever lower common denominator with voters’ preferences increasingly unmoored from either sustained engagement with politics or the wisdom brought by historic group loyalties. The result is an electorate swinging every more wildly and frequently between parties and growing ever more frustrated at their failure to produce the promised easy solutions.
In its most extreme version we get to the situation in the United States where the landslide repudiation of the Republicans and their policies in 2008 was followed only two years later by an equally crushing Republican triumph in the mid terms of 2010. The US electorate appears to be swinging increasingly wildly between the parties both of which pander to a childish desire for instant and painless solutions.
Falling levels of party loyalty are bound to increase the incentives to treat voters as consumers who are always right no matter how self-serving or irrational their desires. This is especially damaging for issues such as climate change that require short-term pain for long-term gain. It will also mean that the pain of economic adjustment is likely to be imposed on the poor and marginalised as attacks on their interests will be most readily moulded into digestible soundbites and superficially seductive tabloid headlines.
Tribal loyalties are not ideal but without a major increase in public engagement with political debate we may come to regret their passing.
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