Could primaries work in the UK?

Published on Wednesday 9 January 2008 19:51

THE American presidential primary elections seem to have a fascinating ability to throw up surprises. Candidates condemned as no-hopers emerge to trounce the rest of the field; front-runners crash and burn.

New Hampshire, a very untypical state – whiter than the US as a whole, being less Hispanic and African-American, and more prosperous than the average – has done it again.

In 1960, it launched the presidential chances of John Kennedy; in 1964 it forced Lyndon Johnson into retirement; in 1972, Edmund Muskie broke down and cried. For both the Clintons, New Hampshire has now been the scene of famous comebacks and Hillary must hope that Bill's triumph of 16 years ago sets a precedent for the rest of her campaign.

Yet, despite this capacity for creating mayhem, there is something that is rather appealing about the way in which such apparent levels of interest in the political process are stirred up by primaries in New Hampshire and caucuses in Iowa.

This is particularly the case when, in the UK and Scotland, we are struggling to encourage citizens to take part in the political process of elections, whether to Westminster, Holyrood or our local councils.

So are there lessons for Scotland to be learnt from the impressive spectacle we have seen over the past week?

Perhaps the first thing that needs to be stressed – since it is often overlooked by many commentators – is that the UK is not the America. The US has a federal system of government with 50 states, each with its own system and culture of administration, politics and government. That is why there are so many variations in so much of public policy in the US.

Take two contrasts between Iowa and New Hampshire. In the first state, at the Democratic caucuses, any notion of a secret ballot was not even an option. People gather in different parts of the room to signal their preferred candidate for president and each group tries to persuade people to join it. The arrangements are like something from the Pickwick Papers, even down to the importance attached to free food and refreshments.

In New Hampshire, "independents" – members of no party at all – can sign up for the party of their choice on the day of the primary election. It is clear that the difference between Obama and Clinton, and McCain and Romney, was the proportion of such "independent" voters that opted for each of the winners on the day.

Similar patterns of primary voting operate in many states in the US, with almost half of all states having "open" primaries or caucuses.

So would any of these approaches work here? Where might we start?

Curiously enough, and despite the caution demonstrated in their very name, the Conservative Party has been the first major party to experiment with a broader form of democracy.

There have been occasions when that party has run "closed" primaries – only involving party members – for choosing and dropping parliamentary candidates.

Most recently, the Conservatives went the whole hog and ran an "open primary" to choose their candidate for Mayor of London. Registration in that election was possible on the day, through calling a premium-rate telephone line (at 1 per call) and a little under 20,000 people ended up selecting Boris Johnson as the candidate to run against Ken Livingston.

Perhaps Johnson will be successful in the main event, but perhaps his primary win illustrates one other feature of such "open" events: your opponents are tempted – and able – to cast a vote for the opposition candidate they think least likely to win the main event against their own candidate. In the US, they have a word for this, which is "raiding".

All in all it is hard to see such an arrangement catching on in the UK. Neither David Cameron nor Gordon Brown would be very keen on allowing supporters of other parties or no party to chose whether they should be their party's candidate in Henley or Kirkcaldy, and if they won't wear it then why should they impose it elsewhere in their parties?

The Johnson experiment also suggests that such innovations alone are not the answer to growing political apathy. After all, 20,000 people choosing the candidate in an election where last time round the winner clocked up more than 800,000 votes is not a lot better as a proportionate figure than is the number of people involved in selecting candidates in the way most parties do now: through members only.

In most parties, such selection now involves all members who can be bothered to be involved and have shown their commitment and interest through signing up to membership.

There are ways in which parties could give such a system a try, but if you accept that an "open" primary is not best suited to our national culture then the requirement for involving more citizens in choosing political candidates poses another even greater hurdle in the UK.

It seems to suit Americans, but might be hard to gain acceptance here, that the condition for running such primary contests is that people declare themselves as supporters of a party – they "register" their support because they pick up a ballot paper printed with the names of candidates for only one party. So registration is a kind of half-way house between complete independence and party membership, but still might be hard to persuade people on.

So there is a paradox here: if a wider group of citizens are to be involved in selecting party candidates for elections, then they actually cannot do it in secret – they must declare their party interest in some way. In a culture where some people are happier to talk salary or sex life rather than how they might vote, that might be hard to achieve.

&#149 Richard Kerley is professor of management and vice-principal for international strategy and commercialisation at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.