James Graham (Bournemouth, Unlock Democracy): Last night's Make Votes Count fringe meeting at Labour conference was slightly disappointing because none of the speakers seemed compelled to actually make the case for proportional representation. Stella Creasy from Involve in particular made the claim that although she accepts the moral case for electoral reform, campaigners should resist the temptation to claim that it would lead to greater participation levels in the electoral system and that if we want to see increased participation parties should change the way they campaign.
I've heard this claim made before: Meg Russell made a similar argument back in July on Comment is Free. I'm a little wary to question the views of two such respected academics, but as a campaigner I can't help but feel they are missing the point.
I agree that engagement is more down to social norms than rational choices and that therefore changing the political culture is ultimately going to have a greater impact than changing the system. But I can't see how the former can be achieved without the latter. It's not the rational choices of the electorate we should be concerned with, but the ultra-rational choices of political parties. Our current political system places so much importance on both elections to the House of Commons and voters in marginal seats that any party which decided to fundamentally change the way they campaign is likely to face electoral disaster. In many respects, modern technology is the enemy here: all the main parties have now got targeting down to a science and are locked in a zero-sum arms race. Let's not pretend that the occasional online policy forum is in any way equivalent to the all-pervasive impact of Mosaic profiling.
How can you change that without, at the very least, changing the way parties are funded - or better still a change in the electoral system? The crucial factor is not how voters behave but how parties do. Until we change the cold, hard electoral arithmatic, extolling them to significantly change the way they campaign is unlikely to be listened to.
