In October, Sir Geoffrey Cox gave a speech at the Oxford Union that contained everything that defined the Johnsonian age of British politics. Cox spoke loudly and with great bravura as though he were giving an inspirational pre-battle speech, yet failed when it came to content and argumentation. When defending his confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, Cox barely touched policy matters; a government to have confidence in was, for him, not necessarily a government that governs well. Instead, it is a government that wins elections, that demolishes the Red Wall, and that does—electorally speaking—what before was thought to be impossible. A good government, in the world of Cox’s speech, was a winning government.
This insight, on first consideration, may seem obvious: democratic politics is about winning elections and overcoming rivals. Before governing, one needs to win. Yet, what the notion masks—and what Cox’s speech highlights—is a dichotomy which all governments subject to the competitive game of democratic elections face. This dichotomy is between winning elections and governing well, where the ambiguous well encompasses both implementing good policies and sticking to minimal standards of honesty and integrity. Every democratic executive must make a hard decision of where, in the spectrum between the two poles of the dichotomy, to place itself.
The story of Johnson’s premiership is, from an institutional viewpoint, of such a decision made unacceptably close to the side of a purely election-winning government—a decision that has allowed the destruction of political integrity, downplayed the role of good governance, and led a country already facing almost insurmountable policy issues to the brink of political turmoil. It’s a story of the Conservative Party tolerating and of an institutional environment permitting, facilitating and incentivizing such a decision.
Towards an institutional focus
One way to explain this phenomenon is to draw upon claims of rotten Conservative Party inner politics, moral failures of individuals, and a mistaken general electorate. But from an institutional and structuralist viewpoint, this understanding is too simplistic. It fails to recognize that the actions political agents take—which includes everyone from ministers, to MPs, to party leaders—are influenced by the system of institutional incentives they face.
Recognizing the importance of the institutional dimension does not mean ignoring the responsibility political agents have for their actions: to lie or not to lie, to cover up evidence or refuse to do so, to build one’s career on meaningless promises or to choose a less-pleasing but more realistic position. But it does mean taking the issues plaguing the system—in this case, British government—seriously. In analysing Boris Johnson’s leadership, it means taking a step back from the contest of who-comes-up-with-most-creative-criticism and focusing instead on the institutional causes and incentives that produced the kind of government and the kind of prime minister with which Britain (unfortunately) found itself.
Much has been said and talked about the socio-cultural factors that formed the current British ruling class: the arrogant Oxford Tories of the 80s and 90s who, with a help of powerful rhetoric and creative political engineering, won the recent general election and failed to deliver good governance, forcing the country into disarray. Yet, such explanations, while surely valuable, aren’t necessary to understand the core factors shaping Johnson’s premiership. It is enough to look at the institutional environment of the British political system.
The crux of the matter is already visible in Cox’s speech: British electoral institutions have resulted in a system in which a good (or, at worst, tolerable) government—for its support coalition—is solely an election-winning government. The greatest problem of Johnson’s premiership was not a lack of integrity or policy under-deliverance. The problem was a failure of the government’s supporters—primarily the Conservative Party, its ministers and MPs—to acknowledge these problems and force the prime minister to go before it was too late. Only when it became clear that there was no alternative left did the support coalition decide to act. While Johnson’s government was already something close to a disaster for a long time in terms of policy, the support coalition chose to act only when it also became a disaster in terms of electoral potential and damage to the party’s image.
Victory over policy
The reasons behind these decisions are the prevalence of institutional tendencies and incentives that result in a political system which is increasingly personalized and tolerant of breaches in conduct, provided that electoral victory is ensured. The first-past-the-post electoral system means that the electoral process is a skewed zero-sum game. Scoring enough votes ensures victory and a seat in Parliament; scoring any less condemns one to life in the political wilderness, with a desperate hope for better luck in the next general election. Applying this to the level of parties does not change much; in the game of the British political system, losers (however close to victory) are punished, while winners (however close to defeat) are rewarded.
Add to this already polarizing picture the presidentialization of the executive and what emerges is a system of incentives in which every political agent—from a starting-out potential MP to a government minister—is encouraged to seek victory above else, as victory in their case means bare political survival. Furthermore, the presidentialized prime minister tends to act as an electoral workhorse through the association with which the political survival of other members of the party is ensured. The phrase leading the party to the general election is not entirely accurate. The party (and other relevant political agents) chooses to be led and represented. The moment electoral victory becomes uncertain, the support for the prime minister is withdrawn.
What this system of incentives suggests is the emergence of a prime minister who is concerned with winning above everything else; in other words, a workhorse tasked with delivering electoral success. To ensure his or her own political survival, the prime minister needs to be good at ensuring the survival of relevant members of his support coalition. To do that, he or she needs to win elections, and under the winner-take-all British system, winning is the only thing he or she needs to do. The British prime minister is permitted to fail to deliver policy changes, uphold political integrity, and provide an example of leadership when the government’s support coalition cannot find another feasible electoral workhorse. The outcomes of electoral defeat are so harsh that such a strategy—applied consciously or not—is the only viable one. Policy measures may still matter, but they matter only as a means to electoral victory. And if, as Johnson has managed to prove, policy is not necessary for winning, the party will be happy to turn a blind eye to it. Johnson’s premiership is not a bug in the system of British political institutions. It is its feature that can always arise. We might have just be lucky to not have observed it before to such a great degree.
This is a harsh conclusion and not an agreeable one. The dichotomy between governing and winning is applicable to all systems of government; politics in competitive democracies is, after all, popular. Yet what truly matters, in this case, is not the difference in kind, but rather a difference in degree. Certain institutions are just more likely to generate personalized, under-delivering executives more inclined to compromise political integrity than others. The harsher the outcomes of the electoral loss and the greater rewards for a victory, the greater the possibility that the kind of executive that emerges is the one disturbingly similar to Johnson—one that fails to govern, but succeeds in winning. Increasingly in the British political system, just as in Cox’s speech, a good government is simply a winning government.
The need for an institutional rethink
The outcome of this institutionalist conclusion is simple: Britain needs to reassess its system of political institutions. The threat to have in mind is the rise of another Johnsonian executive. Or, in other words, the one which fails to deliver policy (think, the mysterious ‘levelling up’ strategy), engages in risky political gambles (think, the Northern Ireland protocol), damages government integrity (think, Partygate), and is unable to respond to structural challenges facing the country (think, the cost of living crisis and the second slowest growth rate in the OECD).
There are many institutional options available for a hypothetical reimagining of British government. The major target is of course the electoral system which is primarily responsible for turning elections into zero-sum games. An alternative system which reduces the magnitude of electoral rewards faced by the winners and the punishments encountered by losers is possible and does not require sacrificing the government’s ability to act decisively. Single transferable vote systems, for example, give a chance for voters to rank their candidates, ensure more proportional representation, and remove extreme majoritarian incentives built in the current British first-past-the-post system.
Whatever the outcome of an institutional rethink, it is crucial to stress that it cannot fall for naivety. There is no perfect system of political institutions which prevents the tendency of politicians to substitute winning for governing. Political agents will need to win in every competitive democratic system, and they will often face incentives to circumvent good governance for a shorter path offered by the smoke-and-mirrors techniques of the Johnsonian kind. But the costs and payoffs of forming coalitions, of pursuing meaningful policies, and—most importantly—of refusing to sacrifice everything for electoral victory can be affected by institutional design.
In his resignation speech, Johnson remarked on the lack of alternatives in front of him: ‘them’s the breaks,’ he said. While that’s the case for Johnson, nothing could be further from the truth for the British political system. It did not have to turn this way; the balance of institutional incentives in winning and governing could have been different. It is time to think about that balance, and to conjure an institutional system in which the likes of Johnson are the bugs, not the features.