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Why not ask the audience? Understanding the public's representational priorities

British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

If one accepts the case for descriptive representation and the politics of presence – as so much of contemporary political discourse does – then the question of which groups deserve, or require, descriptive representation is far from trivial. Britain is a good case study for a discussion of this issue, both because the debate there is a politically live one and because that debate is increasingly diverse in terms of the range of characteristics it covers. This article examines the relative importance to Britons of a range of potential identities. It shows, first, that the public's concerns about descriptive representation operate at the collective level, not the individual, but, second, that this does not stop them wanting to see a more diverse parliament, across a range of different characteristics. However, third, the representational characteristics that matter most to the public are not the same ones that much of the academic literature has focussed on. Fourth, although there is some self-identification – with people disproportionately wanting more people ‘like them’ – this desire was especially strong within certain groups – most notably among the Muslim, Asian, Black and gay and lesbian respondents. And fifth, views on the desirability of increased or decreased representation appear, to some extent, to be based on a lack of knowledge, with the study revealing large-scale ignorance about the composition of the British House of Commons.

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Notes

  1. The ongoing debate within Labour's ranks also feeds into a wider concern that Britain is increasingly being governed by a small and socially elite political class, dominated by career politicians (see, for example, Oborne, 2007).

  2. In one sense, the only surprising thing about the return of social class to the menu of characteristics that require representation is that it took so long, given that the most striking feature of changes to political representation over the last 30 years has been the decline of working-class representation in the House of Commons, to the point where just 10 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 2005 could be classed as working class (Criddle, 2005). This decline is much sharper than the decline of the size of the working-class population in the population as a whole.

  3. By this, I mean merely the public's views about the importance or otherwise of the representation of particular characteristics. Lots of work on substantive representation is explicitly interested in the public's views on matters of policy, attempting to measure the congruence between mass attitudes and elite behaviour, but this is in some ways a second-order question to the question of which characteristics matter in the first place.

  4. Or as the same organisation put it (more succinctly) in its first interim report: ‘the absence of a wide cross-section of society in the House of Commons means that it suffers from a lack of legitimacy. If, in these circumstances, it appears to disregard the needs and concerns of specific groups … its decisions and actions may be considered less legitimate than they would otherwise be’ (House of Commons, 2009, Paragraph 7).

  5. Total sample size was 2373 adults, in England, Scotland and Wales. Fieldwork was undertaken between 19 and 23 March 2009. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted by YouGov's standard weighting and are representative of all Great Britain adults (aged 18+). Funding for the survey was provided by the Nuffield Foundation.

  6. Between 110 and 162 respondents selected ‘Don’t Know’ on any one of the questions.

  7. It proved impossible to construct a comparable individual-level question about disability that made much sense. Asking ‘do you want people to have the same disability as you?’ does not make sense to those who considered themselves able-bodied, and anyway someone who was disabled might want an MP who was disabled but would not object at all if the disability was of a different kind to their own. But it does make sense to ask whether, collectively, people want more disabled representatives in the legislature.

  8. A note to pedants: the fewer/less confusion in these tables is merely replicated from questions previously asked in other surveys.

  9. Between 264 and 576 respondents selected ‘Don’t Know’ on any one of the questions.

  10. The number of MPs has since gone up to 650, but it was 646 at the time of the survey.

  11. Between 157 and 421 respondents did not answer any one of the questions.

  12. In all, 21 per cent gave an equal priority to both options.

  13. Although we cannot be sure about this, it seems fair to assume that this is as a result of gays and lesbians being relaxed about the sexuality of their MP, whereas some straight respondents would not want a gay or lesbian MP (and therefore do want the MP to share their orientation). We perhaps see the same phenomenon in the (slightly) higher score that men give to wanting an MP who shares their sex, compared with women. This is possibly also a form of identity politics, although one that is usually considered to be a Bad Thing.

  14. Although it is worth noting that women were, overall, more in favour of the increased representation of every group, not just their own.

  15. Gay and lesbian respondents were also much less keen on Christians in parliament (a net score of −29), an issue where Black respondents were by far the most positive (+48).

  16. Given the relative geographic concentration of the British Black, Asian and Muslim population, it could be that these two characteristics may in fact be largely the same.

  17. Figures for the percentage of White MPs, working-class MPs, female MPs and those educated at Oxbridge are taken from Cracknell (2005); the figure for Muslim MPs comes from Criddle (2005), updated for any by-elections during the period. The average age of the members of any legislature increases between election periods, and therefore data from these standard works would have been out-of-date when the survey was conducted. I am grateful to Jo Swinson MP, who supplied the updated figures for MPs over-60 and under-30. The figure for working-class MPs is taken from Cracknell (2005), and is those with manual worker backgrounds; other definitions of what it means to be working class (or to have a working-class background) will produce different figures. The figure for the number of gay and lesbian MPs is also debatable. In its evidence to the Speaker's Conference, the lobbying organisation Stonewall claimed that there were then 13 openly gay or lesbian MPs, some 2 per cent of the Commons (Stonewall, 2009, Paragraph 4). This figure excludes MPs who are not out, but Stonewall's chief executive Ben Summerskill has elsewhere argued that by then ‘only a handful’ of gay MPs were not open about their sexuality. Data on MPs who represent the area they come from are similarly debatable; this article uses those from Michael Rush, reported in Childs and Cowley (2011). The Speaker's Conference report merely noted that ‘only a handful’ of MPs saw themselves as disabled, so no estimate has been given for this characteristic.

  18. Indeed, the mean figure for male respondents to the main sample was 25 per cent, marginally closer to the Westminster reality.

  19. The survey did not ask individuals what proportion of the nation was of each group and we cannot therefore assume from answers whether respondents necessarily believe a group is over- or under-represented.

  20. Space precludes examination of the many differences within these categories, of assorted sub-groups (for example, working-class women compared with middle-class women).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many individuals for comments on this article, including Sarah Childs, Rosie Campbell, Mathew Humphrey, Ed Page and Mark Stuart, and for the participants at the various conferences and seminars where earlier versions were presented. I am also grateful to YouGov, who carried out the survey work required, and the Nuffield Foundation who generously funded the research.

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Cowley, P. Why not ask the audience? Understanding the public's representational priorities. Br Polit 8, 138–163 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.28

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