Reflections on the 2005 General Election: Some Speculations on How The Conservatives Can Win Next Time
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Reflections on the 2005 General Election: Some Speculations on How The Conservatives Can Win Next Time David Sanders Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
It is widely believed that the Conservatives can significantly improve their chances in the next general election by ‘moving to the centre of the political spectrum’. This paper uses data from the 2005 British Election Study to simulate both the direct and indirect consequences of such a move. The simulations show that the Conservatives would undoubtedly benefit from moving to the ideological centreground of British politics. However, they also indicate that a move to the centre, on its own, would probably add only 5 percentage points to the Conservatives’ share of the vote in 2009/10 — clearly insufficient to ensure a Conservative victory. One way in which the Conservatives could garner the additional votes they need is to target the large number of public sector workers who have been alienated from Labour by its emphasis on public sector micro-management. British Politics (2006) 1, 170–194. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bp.4200015 Keywords: conservatives; general elections; ideological centre-ground; public sector reforms
Introduction The Conservatives’ third successive general election defeat, in May 2005, was a reflection of their failure to make any real electoral progress since the ERM crisis of September 1992. The fracturing of the Conservatives’ reputation as the party of economic management competence in the wake of that crisis dealt them an electoral blow from which they have yet to recover. Three changes in leadership failed to make any serious impression either on the Conservatives’ medium-term opinion poll ratings or on their electoral performance. To be sure, part of the explanation for the Conservatives’ difficulties derives from Labour’s continuing popularity, and in particular from its success in managing the macro-economy. However, the Conservatives’ failure in 2005 to capitalize on the misfortunes of an incumbent government that could muster only 36 percent of the popular vote suggests a deeper malaise within the party that requires serious attention. A key problem that the Conservatives face, of
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course, is the one that besets any opposition party. It tends to be governments that lose elections rather than oppositions that win them. In this sense, the Conservatives — like the Liberal Democrats — must simply wait for the government to make enough policy errors for the electorate to lose confidence in Labour’s ability to manage the country’s affairs. What an opposition party can and must do, however, is to make enough voters believe that it is a plausible government in waiting. At the time of writing, this is something that the Conservative Party has persistently failed to achieve. This article explores some of the ways in which the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, might be able to reposition his party in order to render it ‘elect
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