Second paragraph of third chapter (and the quote that it illustrates):

The pattern and character of local government must be such as to enable it to do four things: to perform efficiently a wide range of profoundly important tasks concerned with the safety, health and well-being, both material and cultural, of people in different localities; to attract and hold the interest of its citizens; to develop enough inherent strength to deal with national authorities in a valid partnership; and to adapt itself without disruption to the present unprecedented process of change in the way people live, work, move, shop and enjoy themselves (Royal Commission on Local Government in England, 1969a, p. 1).
This is a typical statement about the functions of local governments. Sharpe (1976), for example, recognizes three major functions for local governments. The first is the liberty function, with a strong local government system providing a division of power and responsibility and preventing the growth of a centralized autocracy. Secondly there is the participation function, with local government allowing individuals to participate in local democracy-often as a training-ground for later service in higher levels of government—and diffusing power amongst the populace. Finally, there is the efficient provision of services function. Certain services are local in scope, being concerned with local consumers only, and are best provided by local governments.

I had some very friendly correspondence with the late great Ron Johnston, professor of geography at Bristol, back in 2015-2016, culminating with him sending me an old paper of his, in which I spotted that he quoted from a document I had written twenty years earlier. Sadly he died in 2020, two months after his 79th birthday. (Though not from COVID, I understand.)

This is a basic undergraduate-level textbook looking at the politics of human geography, examining political systems in the UK and USA, getting deep into the weeds of why more government money is spent in some places than others, and the difficulties of designing good systems for the sharing of resources. I got it for the bits about electoral systems and gerrymandering, but I stayed for the wider analysis of the role of state and local governments in society. It’s all stuff that I more or less knew, but it was helpful to have it laid out like this. It would have been good to see some nods towards gender and geography, and some more countries than the USA and UK, but it is what it is. You can get it here.

I got this second hand (obviously) and, to my delight, I spotted that the previous owner is a retired Cambridge don who was a university official during my years in student politics. I have sent him a note but he hasn’t replied; he must be in his eighties by now.

This was the last of the stash of books acquired in 2016 that I had mislaid when I thought I had reached the end of that pile. Though I am still looking out for a couple that have not turned up yet.

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Party Systems and Structures of Competition”, by Peter Mair):

The most conventional and frequently adopted criterion for classifying party systems is also the most simple: the number of parties in competition. Moreover, the conventional distinction involved here has also proved appealingly straightforward: that between a two-party system, on the one hand, and a multiparty (i.e., more than two) system, on the other (see Duverger 1954). Nor was this just a casual categorization; on the contrary, it was believed to tap into a more fundamental distinction between more or less stable and consensual democracies, which were those normally associated with the two-party type, as opposed to more or less unstable and conflictual democracies, which were those associated with the multiparty type. Thus, two-party systems, which were typically characteristic of the United Kingdom and the United States and invariably involved single-party government, were assumed to enhance accountability, alternation in government, and moderate, center-seeking competition. Multiparty systems, on the other hand, which usually required coalition administrations and were typically characteristic of countries such as France or Italy, prevented voters from gaining a direct voice in the formation of governments, did not necessarily facilitate alternation in government, and sometimes favored extremist, ideological confrontations between narrowly based political parties. And although this simple association of party system types and political stability and efficacy was later challenged by research into the experiences of some of the smaller European democracies, which boasted both a multiplicity of parties and a strong commitment to consensual government (e.g., Daalder 1983) and thus led some early observers to attempt to elaborate a distinction between “working” multiparty systems (e.g., the Netherlands or Sweden) and “nonworking” or “immobilist” multiparty systems (e.g., Italy), the core categorization of two-party versus multiparty has nevertheless continued to command a great deal of support within the literature on comparative politics.^2
2 See, for example, Almond, Powell, and Mundt (1993, 117-20), where this traditional distinction is recast as one of “majoritarian” versus multiparty systems; see also the influential study by Lijphart (1984) where one of the key distinctions between majoritarian and consensus democracies is defined as that between a two-party system and a multiparty system.

This was another of the books that I got at the end of 2016, lost and then found again, to prepare a talk that I gave in Belfast that December. It was published in 1996, but it seems a bit dated even for 28 years ago; most of Eastern Europe was already two cycles into the new democratic system by then, and more could have been made of the test bed for democracy. In addition, there’s almost nothing about the actual subject of my talk, which was electoral boundaries. Still, I only paid £3.88 for it, so I can’t really complain.

What it does have is quite a wide range of essays picking out different aspects of the democratic process – not just the legal framework of the vote and the political party system, but also the roles of what we would now call civil society, opinion polls, media, the economy, and the impact of leadership, recruitment of candidates, and campaigning – the chapter on actual campaigning by David Farrell is probably the best in the book.

A useful snapshot of where research stood in the mid-1990s, but with massive gaps even then in the Global South. I hope that there is a more up to date volume out there. Meantime, you can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter (“MPs and their Constituents in Britain: How Strong are the Links?”, by Ivor Crewe):

This argument has made an impact in recent years. According to a June 1983 Gallup poll, a 62 to 26 per cent majority support proportional representation in principle, but half the sympathisers would become less favourable if the change involved ‘merging several existing constituencies into a much larger constituency which would have more than one MP’.¹ Reformers share these misgivings. In 1976 a Hansard Society Commission on the electoral system, chaired by Lord Blake, in deference to strong feeling for the single-member constituency, broke with a long tradition of electoral reform agitation and rejected STV in favour of an AM system.² Conservative Action for Electoral Reform, a Conservative Party ginger group, takes the same line for the same reasons.³ Even the Liberal Party has been affected, as the emphasis and phrasing of the 1982 Report on Constitutional Reform by the Joint Liberal/SDP Alliance Commission revealed.⁴ In an attempt to reconcile the Liberal Party’s long established commitment to STV with its latter-day tradition of community politics, it proposed ‘Community Proportional Representation’, which retains STV but in multi-member constituencies whose size varies markedly in order to encompass `natural communities’ such as shire counties and major cities.
¹ Gallup survey conducted on behalf of Sunday Telegraph and Channel 4’s A Week in Politics, 18-21 June 1983, Table 6.
² Hansard Society, Report of Commission on Electoral Reform (chaired by Lord Blake), 1976.
³ See, for example, Anthony Wigram (Chairman of CAER), ‘Electoral Reform: Cure for economic ills and a cause for Conservatives’, The Times, 6 December 1974.
⁴ Electoral Reform: Fairer Voting in Natural Communities, First Report of the Joint Liberal/SDP Commission on Constitutional Reform (London, Poland Street Publications, 1982).

The last of the books about election systems that I got back in 2016, apart from several which I cannot now find. This list of authors is a who’s who of British political science of the early 1980s, 15 men and one woman, with 13 of the 15 men based in the UK (one in Ireland, one in Austria, and the woman contributor is Australian). The editor, Vernon Bogdanor, used to be generally respected as an authority on the British constitution, such as it is, but has gone very Brexity recently. That was all far in the future in 1985, of course.

The book starts with two chapters on the UK, and then goes in sequence through the USA, Australia, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Ireland, before finishing with a couple of chapters on the theory of representation. I must say I found it a bit frustrating. I would have put the two theoretical chapters up front, to contextualise the specific information about each country; I would have put Ireland, whose political culture is much closer to the UK’s than any of the others, much earlier than last in the sequence.

In general I found the authors far too ready to accept uncritically the British paradigm of MPs as constituency representatives, and inclined to rate other countries positively or negatively depending on how well they approached the ideal. The two exceptions here are the cheaper on Ireland, written by Brian Farrell and quoting the likes of John Bruton, Michael D. Higgins and John Whyte and drawing on deep analysis of theory and practice over sixty years of independence; and a completely bonkers and hilarious chapter on Switzerland by Christopher Hughes, who had already retired as Professor of Politics at Leicester but lived another twenty years.

As usual, Malta, which has had both proportional representation on a similar basis to Ireland since 1921 and a rigid two-party system since 1966, doesn’t exist as far as the writers of this book are concerned.

Several writers approvingly quote Burke’s Address to the Electors of Bristol:

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament. 

It is worth pointing out (as only one of the authors quoting him does) that when Burke made this speech, he had just been safely elected, so it was not an argument that he actually put to floating voters; and when he defended his Bristol seat at the next election, he came dead last with only 18 votes.

I think that the question of relations between members and constituents is one which would be treated very differently today. The representation of women and minorities is barely addressed here; also in 1985 we had no idea of the intense democratisation that was about to hit central and Eastern Europe, or the devolution settlements of the late 1990s in the UK. And there had been only two elections to the European Parliament, which was still a curiosity rather than a feature. So it’s a book of its time, perhaps telling a surprising amount through its omissions as well as its content. You can still get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest book (at 320 pages) that I had acquired in 2016 but not got around to. Next on the first pile is Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Bantam, and next on the second is the Ace Double of Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett, which I found after thinking I had lost it for good.