The Professor Will See You Now: The politics of presence
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: the politics of presence
Most British political parties are – to varying degrees – signed up to the principle that political institutions should broadly reflect the social characteristics of the people they represent. In a ground-breaking book published in the 1990s, Anne Phillips referred to this as “the politics of presence”, as opposed to a politics of ideas.
One of its key arguments is that the type of people elected to Parliament – as opposed purely to their party label or political beliefs – is consequential. It leads to changes either within Parliament (different issues raised, different laws passed), or outside (as people become more engaged, people see politics as more for them, and so on). Three recently published pieces of research demonstrate the latter neatly – and across four different characteristics. They also demonstrate that the effects are not always straightforward or predictable.
First, new research on the representation of young people finds that as the percentage of young people in Parliament increases, so the gap between the turnout of the young and the old at the ballot box narrows. It’s worth pointing out here that the UK has some of the largest age-related turnout gaps seen in any of the 19 West European countries studied. The paper examines turnout at 57 elections; of the 11 largest turnout gaps, the UK is responsible for five of them.
Other new research finds that as more women are elected to Parliament, there is an increase in women’s sense of political efficacy – the sense that they can influence politics. But using data from 31 OECD countries, the researchers find that working-class and middle-class women react differently. Until female representation hits 20 per cent, there is no difference. But get past about 20 per cent and, as the authors note, “low-skilled workers are more likely than high-skilled workers to believe who is in power is irrelevant”.
A third article shows that the election of ethnic minority MPs to Westminster has the effect of boosting electoral turnout. You might think this could be ethnic minority voters, previously disengaged with politics but now enthused by their new representative. Except that in this case it appears that the turnout being boosted is primarily that of white voters, as part of a backlash against the election of an ethnic minority MP.
Using data from the four elections from 2010 to 2019, the research found that, where an ethnic minority candidate won their seat against a white candidate, turnout in the subsequent election was some 4.3 percentage points higher than if the seat had been won by a white candidate. This difference holds only where the election is narrow (in other words, where higher turnout next time might perhaps make a difference) and is driven by differences in white-majority constituencies. A supplementary individual-level analysis of the behaviour of voters rather than of constituencies seems to confirm that this is a backlash against the election of non-white MPs.
To reiterate a point I have made before in these pages, when reading this sort of research it’s important to keep a sense of perspective. Increased representation may reduce the problem of low youth participation, for example, but it does not remove it. Similarly, while a 4.3 per cent rise in turnout isn’t trivial, even if all these voters came out for the second-placed candidate (and they wouldn’t), they won’t swing many seats. Most of these effects are fairly small.
Further reading: D Angelucci et al, ‘No Participation Without Representation’: The Impact of Descriptive and Substantive Representation on the Age-Related Turnout Gap, Political Studies (2024); Y Kweon, We see symbols but not saviors: Women’s representation and the political attitudes of working-class women, Political Psychology (2024); S Zonszein and G Grossman, Turnout Turnaround: Ethnic Minority Victories Mobilize White Voters, American Political Science Review (2023)
