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andrewduckerThe UK has no mechanism for triggering a general election early that isn't dependent on the existing representatives choosing put themselves at risk.
If you were to institute a mechanism for triggering a general election that didn't involve representatives choosing to hold one, what would it be?
Mine would be to specify that if reputable polling institutions (either certified by the British Polling Council or the Electoral Council) found there was ¾ support for the question "There should be a general election" for a continuous period of one month then one should be held.
75% because it should only be only in very unusual circumstances where the government had gone very wrong, and continuous for a month to make sure that a couple of statistical anomalies didn't throw things off.
You?
If you were to institute a mechanism for triggering a general election that didn't involve representatives choosing to hold one, what would it be?
Mine would be to specify that if reputable polling institutions (either certified by the British Polling Council or the Electoral Council) found there was ¾ support for the question "There should be a general election" for a continuous period of one month then one should be held.
75% because it should only be only in very unusual circumstances where the government had gone very wrong, and continuous for a month to make sure that a couple of statistical anomalies didn't throw things off.
You?
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Date: 2022-10-21 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 03:54 pm (UTC)How quickly - was July-December 2019 quick enough ?
Other than Brexit (for which she had some sort of mandate*) which manifesto policies did May dump ?
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* I wish Cameron had said
"The country has decided that ... it is divided and a large part of it wants something different, but I have no clue what it wants."
and banged a bunch of heads together (including Johnson and perhaps Farage) telling them to come back with a plan for Brexit, which he could take to the country.
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Date: 2022-10-22 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-10-21 10:59 am (UTC)I agree that recruitment and data analysis are open to hackery. Would replacing a polling company with the ONS make you any happier?
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Date: 2022-10-21 11:13 am (UTC)For a decision of this magnitude, you either need an election (to actually determine what the public wants) or give the appointed representatives the powers to do it.
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Date: 2022-10-21 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 11:00 am (UTC)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman
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Date: 2022-10-22 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 10:26 am (UTC)Couple of reasons
1) Bringing in such a mechanism has some pretty big implications for other parts of the constitution and I think if we are making big changes to the constitution we should do so in a holistic and bottom up way.
2) Specifically, the constitutional position is that constituencies elect personal representatives to sit in Parliament and those representatives are personally responsible to their constituents for their conduct in office. Representatives have the ability to change their political support inside the House and are accountable to their electors if they do or don't support a government which is failing. It is the responsibility of representatives to assess the quality of the government and of the governing process and vote accordingly.
3) Because representatives are representatives and not delegates it is important that we find the right balance between them being accountable to the electorate but not permanently and acutely dependent on the electorate for their office. They should be able to do difficult and unpopular (or unpopulist) things without too much of a threat of an immediate election.
Basically, it's the job of representatives to sort this stuff out in our current constitution.
On your specific proposals that sounds like an insecure method of triggering a general election. Polling samples are pretty small. I don't think people hack or manipulate them generally because a) polling companies actually make their money polling for other things, like brand awareness and product perceptions. Political polling is a shop window for them. If they keep getting it wrong they will lose business in lucrative areas. and b) if you want a poll that supports your political position you don't have to hack the poll, you can manipulate the question. Should Scotland break free of the chains of Westminster Tory rule and claim its ancient rights as a great place to live? or Should Scottish separatists and that horrible Sturgeon woman be allowed to force ordinary decent Scots to join them on a risky, uncosted, pipe dream and cut themselves off from our largest market in Britain? Different question, different results.
No direct political consequence arises from the polling. So the fact that they have a couple of vulnerabilities doesn't matter. Bad polls might undermine a government but they don't automatically trigger the government to resign.
However, if there were a direct political consequences i.e. a general election, it would be worth a hostile foreign actor or organised domestic groups hacking or manipulating the poll in order to disrupt British governance or remove a legitimate government.
There are some options available to us.
We already have two formal constitutional options available for dealing with a dysfunctional government in a dysfunctional governing process. The King can remove the Prime Minister and appoint anyone he likes. The King can dissolve Parliament. These tools are not used and almost certainly can never be used because we removed the de facto legitimacy for the King to use them and have not moved that legitimacy to anyone else. So you could return the legitimacy to the current head of state. You could create a second power base which had some legitimacy which could advise the current head of state to dissolve Parliament. (Some ideas below). You could replace the current unelected head of state with an elected head of state who had the explicit powers to dissolve Parliament and who therefore had some formal democratic legitimacy. You could bring in a set of rules such as the Scottish Parliament has that if a certain set of conditions is met (or not met) then a general election is triggered (In the Scottish Parliament it is a vote of no confidence in the FM with no vote of confidence in a new FM within 2 weeks). This could include things like failing to pass a Finance Bill within 18 months of the previous Finance Bill or failing to pass a certain number of Bills from the Kings Speech in a certain period of time. Some set of measures that puts a ticking clock on the institution of Parliament to sort things out if it has become dysfunctional.
In terms of legitimate advisors to the King - you could have a system where the Privy Council (all 700+) could vote on whether to trigger a plebiscite on holding a general election (or 650 individual recall petitions at a constituency level). You could build in some additional safeguards to the process. The Privy Council can vote (e.g. by a super-majority) to convene a Citizens' Assembly to consider a plebiscite or some way for the House of Commons to stop the process with e.g. a super-majority vote against the plebiscite taking place.
Or as an alternative an elected second chamber which has the power to trigger a referendum on whether there should be a general election for the lower chamber under certain conditions. Or if the UK were a federal state some process involving the heads of government of the federal substructures.
I'd be very very sceptical about giving private organisations a formal role in the constitution.
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Date: 2022-10-21 10:52 am (UTC)I agree that there could, absolutely, be hackery. But hackery to trigger a general election when people's minds hadn't actually changed would be pretty self-defeating, I'd have thought.
Happy to pass the choice over to a privy council or a second chamber. But not our current prive council or second chamber, neither of which is more democratic than the primary chamber.
I agree that *theoretically* people are voting for local person Susan, who represents her home area, is known to them, and whose personal qualities are a large factor in their voting. In practice, people's votes are clearly massively connected to a party, and I think that anything which ignores that isn't going to work well.
And I'm largely thinking of the kind of situation where you vote in Honest, Jolly, Friendly David Cameron, and he pulls off the mask and it's actually Liz Truss underneath. Or where you vote for solid centrist Keir Starmer, and he pulls off the mask and it's eeeevil communist Jeremy Corbyn underneath. The party you've voted for has veered strongly in another direction, and you feel that this current government isn't going to do what you want. And, for instance, looking at the interview with the Minister for Veteran Affairs, lots of MPs will go along with horror in order to save their jobs or achieve some minor thing that they think will help the one bit they actuallycare about.
Should there be a mechanism for "The government has lied about what kind of government it will be, and we'd like to swap them out for a better one ASAP"?
(I totally understand your worry about involving private companies in the process - happy to have the ONS do this instead.)
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Date: 2022-10-22 04:27 pm (UTC)If you can spin it that the public were influenced by someone else ("the Press" springs to mind, though how you would get them to report your spin ...) you might get the sympathy vote and a bigger majority.
Or, if the opposition (especially a Tory opposition) can trigger an election they can then spin it that there must be a change in public opinion and reduce a large majority ...
If you can nobble the polls, you can sow disagreement and make your opponents appear divided ?
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Date: 2022-10-21 10:59 am (UTC)I'm cautious about polling. I agree that polling solves a big problem of finding out what people want if they don't bother to turn out for a petition or election. But I'm wary of legally relying on it as that can distort how the poll is run. And it's hard to weight polls to include different demographics fairly.
Possibly a binding petition? The government websites are pretty good now, if they try to function rather than prevent people functioning, you could have people register a "recall request" the way they register to vote or whatever. And accept it's not completely private, but that if an election is triggered spuriously people can still vote the way they want (and must have been on the cusp of being triggered anyway). Or have some sort of officially-run random sampling akin to voting registration.
I'm not sure if 75% is too high. I agree it needs to be high, and polling means you don't need to worry about turnout as much. But I worry that we'd never reach that. Do we know if it's that high now?
I realise that I had assumed there was SOME mechanism to recall an individual MP if they were truly dire, but apparently there never was. And there is now, but only if they're committed of some specific things or reprimanded by parliament, not if they just keep voting for things the electorate don't want.
I think there's always a balance of, if the politicians have to get validated by the electorate too often, then you end up with government-by-sounds-good, and if too rarely, then you get government-by-politicians-doing-whatever-they-want. And I'm not sure the best way to balance it.
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Date: 2022-10-21 11:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 11:07 am (UTC)I cannot think of another country that can do this either, though in many countries the executive is not chosen by and from the representatives.
Around 2010 and 2020 Belgium twice went 580+ days without a government; I have never heard of any problems this caused. Is it our two party system that means we need to have a mechanism for this, or the fact that the PM stays in office until a replacement is found ?
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Date: 2022-10-21 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-21 01:40 pm (UTC)So they're safe unless they do one of those things.
Johnson, of course, might well be suspended...
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Date: 2022-10-21 01:35 pm (UTC)My mechanism would be that it should be a bit easier for constituencies to force a recall leading to a by-election. So it would require a significant amount of coordination across local politics to have enough by-elections in a short period for the government to actually fall. It would be a lever that could only be pulled by people already part of the political system, so it would be harder to manipulate via Twitter and Facebook shadowy campaigns. It fulfils your criterion of something that would only be possible in very unusual circumstances, it would require a massive consensus that the current government is a disaster. But it would take away the awful prisoner's dilemma wrangling that happens at the moment, where MPs do everything they can to avoid a GE when their party is performing poorly, and the worst MPs are the most reluctant to expose themselves to a vote. Instead, the worst individual MPs would be most at risk, so they would have an incentive to clean up their act, and hold the government to account if it's causing such dissatisfaction that everybody is calling by-elections all over the place.
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Date: 2022-10-21 01:37 pm (UTC)What change would you make to the recall system?
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Date: 2022-10-21 03:34 pm (UTC)Oh, wait, that was Australia in 1975.
No Confidence Motion
Date: 2022-10-21 06:27 pm (UTC)https://www.ourcommons.ca/marleaumontpetit/DocumentViewer.aspx?Language=E&Sec=Ch02&Seq=3
It basically means that any party currently forming the government who fails to win a no confidence motion must call a general election. It is tricky and avoidable, but it does force a government's hand. No polls needed; it is based on how all the members of parliament vote on the issue.
Re: No Confidence Motion
Date: 2022-10-21 06:29 pm (UTC)That's why I asked for a mechanism that didn't involve representatives choosing to hold one.
Re: No Confidence Motion
Date: 2022-10-21 08:08 pm (UTC)I doubt that any polling service would be trusted. Also, anonymous grumbling to a pollster doesn't translate into rebellion in the house. If the polls are not anonymous, then people will still butt cover.
Re: No Confidence Motion
Date: 2022-10-22 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-24 01:05 am (UTC)Does the UK have ballot initiatives, where a sufficient number of voters' signatures gets a question onto the ballot in the next general election? If you have such a mechanism, then I would probably look for a way to remove barriers there -- like, if it needs to be done district by district, a way to register one wording that everyone will use.
This does presume that there are elections on a regular basis, like to elect local governments and stuff. Obviously a ballot question on whether to hold a new general election for parliament/PM can't wait until the next scheduled general election for parliament/PM. Are there other elections that ballot initiatives can use?
(Outsider here, obviously.)
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Date: 2022-10-24 06:12 am (UTC)The nearest we have is the petitions website, where a popular-enough petition gets debated in parliament (and largely ignored by the government)
We do have lots of local elections, but only the general election happens across the whole country at the same time.