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The Mediatized Manifesto (Or the Strange Case of Nick Clegg)

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The Mediatized Manifesto (Or the Strange Case of Nick Clegg) The mediatized manifesto (or the strange case of Nick Clegg) Prepared for the Political Studies Association Annual Meeting, Cardiff, Wales, March 2013 ####Please note that this is a very early draft. Comments and suggestions welcome. Please contact me if you wish to cite#### Nick Anstead Department of Media and Communications London School of Economics and Political Science The mediatized manifesto (or the strange case of Nick Clegg) Abstract Election manifestos are an important object of study for political scientists. Work in this area has largely focused on two research questions: quantifying the relative positions of political parties on a left-right spectrum and assessing the success of parties in achieving their legislative agendas. What is not really discussed in the literature though is the broader question of the relationship between the party manifesto and political communication. In other words, what happens to the content of the manifesto when it enters the public sphere in press releases and news reports, and how do the priorities laid out in the formal document differ from the policy emphasis in political coverage? Using the 2010 Liberal Democrat campaign as an example, this paper will employ the computer aided content analysis program Wordstat to analyse the Liberal Democrat manifesto, party and leader press releases, and election news coverage, to ask whether the manifesto has been mediatized, and if so what does this mean for traditional ideas of political accountability? The mediatized manifesto (or the strange case of Nick Clegg) Enoch Powell famously noted that “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs” (Powell 1977). Never has that statement proved more apt than in the case of Nick Clegg, the current leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government. Clegg’s decline in popularity was positively Icarus-like as he fell from the heights of so- called Clegg-mania during the election campaign in Spring 2010 to being called the most hated politician in Britain by the end of the same calendar year (Oborne 2010). This impression is backed up by polling data taken over the period and beyond. During the peak of his election campaign boost on the 16th April 2010, 68 per cent of those surveyed in an Ipsos-Mori poll were satisfied with the job that Clegg was doing as Liberal Democrat leader, compared with just 15 per cent who disapproved, giving him a net approval rating of +53 per cent. By the end of the year, only 38 per cent of people asked the same question were satisfied, in comparison with 50 per cent who were disapproved. This was not the end of the matter though - the figures kept getting worse, reaching their nadir (thus far at least) in October 2012, when 23 per cent of citizens said they were satisfied with Clegg’s performance, in comparison with 68 per cent who disapproved, a net approval rating of -45 per cent, giving Clegg a good claim to being the most unpopular British politician of all time (Ipsos-Mori 2013). These numeric are certainly impressive due to their sheer scale. They do however raise a broader question as to the cause of Clegg’s unpopularity. This question can more broadly be placed in the context of two understandings of the post- election period and the coalition government. The first interpretation is very simple: Nick Clegg lied to the electorate, articulating a policy agenda during the election campaign that was promptly dumped when the party entered coalition government, leaving supporters feeling betrayed. Nowhere was this reading of events better illustrated than in the very public u-turn on university fees. Prior to the election the Liberal Democrats had said that “we will scrap unfair university tuition fees so everyone has the chance to get a degree, regardless of their parents' income” (Liberal Democrat Party 2010). When in government though, the Liberal Democrats enabled legislation that increased the cap on fees from £3000 to £9000. It is certainly not hard to see how this reading of events would prove very damaging for Clegg’s popularity. Aside from the formal manifesto pledge, the Liberal Democrats had placed great emphasis on their tuition fees policy during the election campaign, pouring resources into university towns such as Cambridge and Norwich. 400 of the party’s candidates had signed an NUS pledge to oppose any increase in University fees (National Union of Students 2010). The seeming effectiveness of this approach was reflected in the support the party received from students, where they were by far the most popular choice receiving 45 per cent of the vote, in comparison with 24 per cent support for Labour and 21 per cent for the Conservatives. Likewise, the ramifications of supporting the coalition’s proposal for increased fees in the 2010 parliament seem clear: by November 2010, the Liberal Democrats were only receiving 15 per cent support from students, with Labour receiving 42 per cent and the Tories 26 per cent (Wells 2010). The Liberal Democrats did offer a defence against this reading of events, however. This was based on two arguments. First, that the hand the electorate had dealt the parties by voting for a hung parliament where no party wielded an overall majority prohibited the programmatic implementation of the manifesto. This argument was reflected in Nick Clegg’s claim following the election that a Liberal Democrat majority would have led to the implementation of the tuition fees pledge, but as a junior coalition partner, the party was too weak to realise it. The second claim related to the hierarchy of priorities embedded in the party’s election manifesto. This claim was articulated by former party official and media surrogate Olly Grender on the Today programme as early as the morning after the General Election, when she claimed: “He [Nick Clegg] was very clear about the package of four issues as he went into the election. Now that wasn’t made up on the hoof, that was four issues that everyone in the party knew and completely understood would be the basis for any kind of discussions, and they are on the front cover of the manifesto” (Grender 2010). The four pledges on the front of the parties manifesto were: fair taxes that put money back in your pocket; a fair chance for every child; a fair future creating jobs by making Britain greener; and a fair deal by cleaning up politics. Not only are these major commitments relatively ambiguous in nature (although they do relate to more specific policies included in the broader manifesto text), but it is notable that the signature policy of capping tuition fees is not included in anyway. The idea of the manifesto and the role it plays in contemporary electoral politics is at the heart of the difference between these two accounts, and debating that issue with reference to the Liberal Democrats will allow us to consider which version of events is most convincing. Manifestos occupy an important role in British politics as they, in theory at least, fulfil a number of important institutional functions (Kavanagh 1981). However, these roles seem to have been outpaced by developments in contemporary electoral communication practices. This is the gap that this paper will seek to address. In particular it will ask what happens to the formal document of the manifesto, and it is transformed when it enters into the political communication space and, as an extension of this, what this means for political accountability? The Study of Party Manifestos Manifestos are much studied objects in political science. The magnum opus of this type of research is the Comparative Manifesto Project, which has been responsible for coding more than 3500 manifestos written by 905 parties in 55 countries (Volkens, Lacewell et al. 2013). These data have normally been deployed to address one of two research questions. The first of area of study relates to the nature of the political spectrum, with the aim of positioning parties on it, or comparing platforms in different countries or times (see, for example(Laver and Garry 2000; Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009; Dinas and Gemenis 2009)). This approach is theoretically grounded in classic spatial approaches to political competition, where it is assumed that parties can be arranged along a political left-right political axis, reflecting their policy prescriptions (Downs 1957). The second research question addressed through manifesto studies deals with the “success” of parties in government, and in particular focuses on their ability to achieve the policy platform that they laid out when seeking office. Studies of this kind, employing some methodological variation, have aimed to measure the relationship between what is said in the manifesto and what parties actually do when they are in office (Royed 1996; Laver and Garry 2000). This second area of study points in the direction of this research - if it is acknowledged that manifestos are not guarantees of policy outcomes, then it raises the important question of how both the manifesto itself, and the parties and politicians running on them, communicate their hierarchy of policy preferences. Of course, this is not a new idea - British political scientist S.E.Finer noted that the development of longer programmatic manifestos had led to what he termed “manifesto moonshine” (Finer 1975), on the ground that parties knowingly made promises that they were incapable of fulfilling. However, the question still stands: with limited political capital, what are politicians actually going to seek to achieve in their legislative programme? This issue is especially fraught, as Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, have discovered in the eventuality of a coalition government, when policy objectives necessarily have to be prioritized as part of the negotiation process.
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