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イギリスにおける政党システムの変容—社会文化的対立軸とマルチ・レベル化

The UK’s Changing Party System: a new fault line at the cultural dimension and the multi-level party politics

Japanese (日本語)

国際文化学研究 : 神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科紀要

55

1*-38*

神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科

2021-03

2021-03-31

As Mair acutely pointed out, we should distinguish between party system change and changes at the level of the individual parties. While various actors may come and go, it may leave the pattern of interactions, namely the structure of party competition intact. The aim of the paper is to analyze the UK’s changing party system from the view of following two points: changing fault lines among party supporters and multi-level party competition. Based on the analysis of survey data, it is confirmed that there is a growing importance of a new fault line at the cultural dimension which crosses the traditional left-right divide at the economic dimension. The party supporters have become far more polarized with respect of social conservative-liberal divide since 2015. Labour support increased among social liberals around young voters, while failing among social conservatives which was illustrated by the drastic fall of the ‘red wall’ in the 2019 general election. The Labour party face their identity politics dilemmas owing to the rise of social conservative-liberal divide. Since the devolution of 1999, the UK’s party system has been characterized by the multi-level party politics which have different electoral rules and party competitions according to different political levels. The concept of territorial symmetry of party systems refers to similarities in the process and outcomes of party competition at various political levels. While the electoral dissimilarity between statewide and substate elections has been around 10 per cent level in Wels politics since 2000, we have seen an increase and drop of dissimilarity in Scotland over time. After having reached nearly 30 per cent in 2010, the figure for Scotland declined to 11 per cent in 2015. The main reason is that the SNP became a dominant party not only at substate elections, but also at statewide ones in Scotland. On the other hand, the Scottish Labour party, which had won the majority of Scottish seats in every election since 1959, lost its most votes and seats and fell into third place behind the Scottish Conservatives since the 2015 general election. Quinn regards the UK party system from 1979 to 2010 as an ‘alternating-predominant system’ because of the growing gap in electoral support for the parties finishing first and second. As empirical data show, the rise of new fault line at the cultural dimension and the multi-level party competition in UK have an unsymmetrical effect on main parties and they work in Labour’s unfavour. It is, therefore, concluded that the UK party system is changing from two-partism to not a mere multi-partism, but the Conservative predominant party system.

政権交代のある優位政党システム

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