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The Declining Representativeness of the British Party System, and Why it Matters

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 December 2014
Published date01 December 2014
AuthorHeinz Brandenburg,Robert Johns
DOI10.1111/1467-9248.12172
Subject MatterEditors' Choice
Editors’ Choice
The Declining Representativeness of the British Party System, and Why It Matters
Heinz Brandenburg and Robert Johns
In this paper, the authors give us one more reason to think that contemporary voters are
discontented with the quality of representative democracy in Britain. And this for one of
the most primitive of reasons: because the system is (increasingly) unrepresentative of
voters’ diverse beliefs. As the Conservative and Labour parties have moved closer together,
so have voters tended to f‌ind themselves increasingly distant ideologically from either of
the two major parties. As the authors note, ‘vote-seeking parties have left the British party
system less representative, and thus made at least some voters miserable’. This is a paper
which skilfully combines the conceptual and the empirical to make a telling point about the
declining quality of representative democracy.
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12172
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 703
© 2014 The Authors. Political Studies © 2014 Political Studies Association

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