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One very obvious impact of proportional representation is that there are many more councils with no overall control when compared with the ‘first past the post' system it replaced. Tactical voting is not readily available in traditional voting systems. Proportional representation allows voters to offer support to minority interest issues in the safe knowledge that their vote is not ‘wasted', but reallocated to a second preference. So some interesting results crop up as a result and the complexity of community wishes can be more clearly expressed. This shift from ‘first past the post' sits rather uneasily with the polarisation of politics in local government, which followed the introduction of the cabinet system and elected mayors in England and Wales. The Westminster tradition that the winner takes the spoils of government was imported into local government. This makes operating under ‘no overall control' more difficult. In a number of local authorities, chief executives will now be working hard to help establish arrangements where decisions can be made and momentum maintained in a ‘hung' council, where no single party is able to form an administration. This requires diplomatic skills and building trust and understanding among members. In some councils this will prove difficult, particularly where a strong political tradition has been rudely interrupted by the voters. There will also be extensive time given over to predicting how different elements of a mixed-party administration will respond to different proposals and how robust the alliances will prove to be. This will involve thinking about how individuals vote on different issues and how two or more different political groups can work together in a joint administration. The political wisdom is that the larger group gets destabilised from within by the smaller group(s). Voting systems affect behaviour in other ways and it is worth looking at two examples outside the traditional machinery of political democracy, which offer insights into voting behaviours over time. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has 111 members. In deciding where to stage future games, a simple vote is taken. If a venue achieves more than 50% of the available votes, then the issue is decided. If not, then the venue with the lowest number of votes cast is eliminated and a second ballet is held. The process is repeated until one venue achieves the necessary absolute majority. This process enables individual IOC members to honour commitments made to individual cities, at least for the early rounds and, subsequently, to transfer allegiances to finally get a result. A second example of serial voting is the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. Every month the committee reviews the evidence and votes on whether to amend interest rates as a mechanism to control inflation. The votes are recorded by name and reviewed avidly by commentators to identify ‘hawks' and ‘doves'. The vote of the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, is of particular importance. He puts to the meeting the policy which he thinks will command a majority immediately prior to the vote. The governor has a casting vote in the event of a tie and always votes last. This position needs closer examination. Mr King is actually in a fairly uncomfortable position. If he is hawkish in terms of interest rates – worrying about the housing market, household debt and savings – he will want to move to higher interest rates to dampen enthusiasm and keep a tight grip on inflation. But the nine members of the committee comprise a mix of less hawkish characters and some committed doves. So, if Mr King voted for an increase in interest rates month after month, he would risk appearing to be fundamentally out of sympathy with the committee. With four upward movements in the last 10 months, the frequency of changes in interest rates is high. This implies the need to time his interventions carefully – a form of tactical voting. The inference is that there is no point in his voting for a change in rates if the committee is showing little inclination to agree. This is hardly surprising since it is he who has the obligation to write to the chancellor explaining why the committee has been unable to contain inflation below 3% – a letter he recently had to compose. This feels a bit like a local authority chief executive having a vote in cabinet and subsequently having to explain why it was the wrong call to make. So, observing and analysing serial voting patterns is an interesting and worthwhile past-time, at least as valuable as plotting the history of numbers coming up in the National Lottery – another exercise in bogus predictions and the misuse of statistics. For most of us, voting is a sporadic and episodic activity. Increasingly, we do not vote for a party ticket for life and we look at a range of issues before we stop ‘floating' and place the pencil cross in the box of our choice. And if we choose not to exercise our right to vote, we have less reason to bemoan the outcome. Given that electoral turnouts for local elections are low and falling, we need to be concerned about issues of trust in politicians and whether there is a correlation between voting and sense of local community and ‘place. There is hope in Northern Ireland, where turnout levels regularly exceed 60%, even when local elections are not timed to coincide with parliamentary elections. Jim Brooks is executive director of Sector Treasury Services, and a former chief executive of Hull City Council

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WHITEHALL

Pulling the levers without the controls

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