Last week, the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt argued that the Tories shouldn’t pitch to the right in response to Nigel Farage and Reform, because ‘elections are always won from the centre ground.’
It is one of the most widely-repeated ideas in political analysis that elections are won from the centre. It isn’t really true, but it isn’t a silly idea and it’s interesting to understand why so many people believe it and the reasons it’s wrong.
Its origins lie in economics, and in particular a model produced by an American economist called Harold Hotelling. That model is usually illustrated using the thought experiment of two ice cream sellers on a beach. The people on the beach are either distributed fairly evenly or tend to crowd towards the middle. To attract the most customers, the two ice cream sellers will set up almost next to each other in the middle of the beach, with one attracting all the customers from one side and the other the customers from the other half.
Another economist named Anthony Downs took this model and explored its implications for politics in a famous 1957 book called An Economic Theory of Democracy. He imagined a simple case with two parties, and an electorate that either had uniformly distributed political preferences or that was positioned in a ‘bell curve’, with lots of voters in the centre. In this model, he showed that political parties would behave like ice cream sellers on the beach. Each party would pitch policies near the political centre that appealed slightly more to its half of the political spectrum than the other. This is sometimes called the ‘median voter theorem’.
What is less recognised, however, is that for Downs this model was only a starting point, and he explored various cases in which it wouldn’t apply. A number of them are very important and relevant to our world today. One fairly straightforward case is when voter preferences are not evenly distributed and do not group in a smooth bell curve towards the centre either. If, for example, there are two peaks, with most voters either fairly left-wing or fairly right-wing (a situation perhaps particularly relevant when thinking about current US politics), pitching in the political centre may not be a winning strategy.
Another case where centrism may not win is when voters do not use their votes merely to pick the future government, but instead want to give a verdict on a party or government’s past performance, punishing what they dislike and rewarding what they like. That may well be particularly relevant in the UK today.
The same applies when there are more than two significant parties: with three or more parties centrism will again not necessarily win. The theory also suggests that centrism doesn’t necessarily win if voters factor in the implications of election results when it comes to a party implementing its programme. So a voter, for example, might prefer a political party to have a majority of one rather than winning a landslide and implementing its political platform in full. Again, this may well be very relevant today.
Lastly it’s worth mentioning that centrism may not win if voter preferences run along multiple independent axes. Some voters, for example, are ‘right wing’ on economic issues but ‘left wing’ on socio-cultural issues.
It is easy to see that in practice the most centrist parties frequently do not win in democracies. This is sometimes unfairly presented as a criticism of Downs — though as we have seen he explored many cases in which the ‘elections are won from the centre’ result does not apply.
It should be no surprise that the result frequently does not apply in the UK either, though in the UK there is a twist. Labour wins majorities from the centre but the Conservatives usually win majorities from the right. Its victories in 1970, 1979, 1983, 1987 and 2015 were all victories from the right; 1992 was arguably the one exception and in 2019 the picture was muddied by Brexit.
This also means that since quite a lot of commentary on political positioning comes from centre-left analysts (such as former members of Tony Blair’s team like Alastair Campbell), when they say ‘elections are won from the centre’ they may implicitly be thinking of Labour election victories, and as such be correct.
Parties fighting to win from the centre makes sense in certain scenarios. But Jeremy Hunt, and Tory members, should be mindful that it is not a universal truth and in particular it doesn’t typically apply to the British political right.
Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews for a post-election live recording of Coffee House Shots in Westminster, Thu 11 July. Bar opens 6.30 p.m, recording starts 7.15 p.m. www.spectator.co.uk/shotslive
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