Elections Can Be A Jolly Good Show
So what is it like to experience an election with no 30-second attack ads? One in which candidates do not spend most of their time attending fund raisers or otherwise sucking up to wealthy contributors? Where top party leaders devote hundreds of hours answering substantive questions from journalists and voters? And in which, start to finish, the entire campaign lasts just six weeks?
The short answer is - refreshing beyond belief.
Such is the way British elections are conducted, as I observed at close hand for nearly three weeks. Unfortunately, British and American political systems are too different to permit some of the best features of British elections to spread to American politics. For one thing, British party leaders are selected at party conferences long before an election is called. This makes a three- or six-week campaign possible. Americans have essentially taken candidate selection - at least at the presidential level - out of the hands of party activists and given it to the people via presidential primaries. The primary campaigns begin nine months before the November election and sometimes years before that. This makes long campaigns inevitable.
Another major difference is that Britain offers free TV time for national party broadcasts, which means the absence of paid political ads.
But there is also a snooty insiderism to British campaigns - as though the real debates are being conducted and framed for an exclusive audience of political, media and business elites - that would never be tolerated, and shouldn’t be, in the more freewheeling United States.
Even so, the information does get out. Every political party in Britain that fields candidates for at least 50 seats in Parliament gets free five-minute TV ads, called Party Election Broadcasts. The top two parties, Labor and the Conservatives, get five such broadcasts on all the major TV stations. The other major party, the Liberal-Democrats, gets four and the minor parties get at least one each.
These broadcasts are covered extensively in the newspapers. Excerpts are shown and analyzed on television news broadcasts. But these broadcasts in no way replace informed debate and detailed questioning of party leaders, as 30-second ads often do in American politics.
Liberated from the constant need to raise huge sums of money to pay for TV time, top British politicians thus engage in conduct American politicians would find shocking: They routinely answer questions each and every day, sometimes for hours at a time. They think on their feet and speak in complete sentences.
They ride their “battle buses” into contested constituencies throughout the United Kingdom. They hold large indoor and outdoor rallies for their supporters. They publish how they would approach various issues and policies in “manifestos,” which people actually read and question them about. And candidates for Parliament, rather than holing up in an office dialing for dollars or listening exclusively to rich contributors at fancy fund-raising parties, spend a great deal of time “on the doorstep,” their term for walking precincts, talking with voters.
On election day, they are actually rewarded with votes. Indeed, there was much cluck-clucking in Britain over the 71 percent voter turnout in the May 1 elections, a decline of several percent from 1992. In the United States, election officials would die for a 71 percent turnout.
As Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, observes in the current issue of the Washington Monthly, voter turnout has declined here by about 25 percent between 1960 and 1996, giving the United States the lowest rate of voter participation of any advanced democracy in the world and a lower rate than most new democracies as well.
Meanwhile, the cost of all American campaigns has grown from $175 million in 1960 to some $4 billion last year, with the cost of presidential campaigns growing from $30 million to $700 million. The average cost of a U.S. Senate campaign, Gans writes, increased from just over $1 million in 1976 to $9.6 million in 1994, while the amount spent on television advertising increased from an average of $475,000 in 1976 to $5.7 million in 1994.
Most of what makes British campaigns so refreshing cannot be imported directly to the United States; the political and institutional differences are too profound. But it is also clear that one thing that has so dramatically driven up the costs of U.S. campaigns is television advertising - and the juicy commissions for political consultants and fund-raisers that accompany it.
Reforms always come with unintended consequences, and any reforms should have mechanisms to correct for them, if possible. But what has happened in American politics in recent years - the fund-raising scandals in Washington, the skyrocketing costs of campaigning, the skewing of the political dialogue to the interests of the wealthy, and the continuing drop in voter participation - suggest a system in deep trouble.
One relatively easy fix would be to require networks and independent stations to make available blocks of free air time to candidates and political parties at election time. This would reduce the need for paid ads and the constant scramble to fund them. Opponents can make the details of implementation sound daunting. But the alternative is further alienation and corruption of the system.
Such a change would not make Bob Dole sound like Winston Churchill. But then, President Clinton should not need to rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, either.
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