Paul Baines
Interview: Dr Paul Baines Explaining Cameron’s Coalition Steve Macaulay Hello, I am Steve Macaulay; today we are going to interview Paul Baines about his book, Explaining Cameron’s Coalition. Now, he has co‐authored this with Sir Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimer and Mark Gill. Now, Paul, give me an overview of the book. Paul Baines Steve Macaulay Well the book is really a treatise on public opinion in the General Election and the period preceding the General Election and interestingly enough, about nine months after the election into the first year of the coalition. So it is very much an outline of the public mind. So it is regularly testing the temperature there and reporting on those and picking some trends from that? Paul Baines Yes, the idea is that if you ask the electorate what they think about various things, that they have the understanding to some degree of their own mind and they are able to put across their views on both issues and policies, their view of how they perceive different political parties and importantly, in this election, how they perceive specific personalities and politicians. Steve Macaulay This election was really rather different from previous elections – can you explain what were the key features? Paul Baines Well this election was different in many ways, but one key difference was that voters were much more interested in personality this time around. So what they were particularly looking at was attributes on which specific politicians differed. And that is different from previous elections, because in most previous elections, voters, when MORI has asked a question, what is the most important: is it a party’s policies on issues, is it party image or is it leader image? In the past, a party’s policies on issues has always been the most important – for thirty years of research that has usually been the case. This time, party policies on issues and leader image were neck and neck; and that is not a function of this specific election, that was happening before. So something happened around 2005/2006 where voters suddenly started to think it is not about the parties any more, it is about the leaders and their image. www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com© Cranfield University
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Paul Baines
Steve Macaulay So let’s pick one of those leaders, the Labour Party and Gordon Brown. Now one of the key things that I noticed in the book was a myth that has grown up that said Gordon Brown lost the election. Now say some more about that from what you found. Paul Baines Well, since 2005 – Labour won the 2005 election relatively comfortably, a much smaller majority, but there was very much a contention about the fact that they had won it and I don’t think the electorate were particularly comfortable with voting them in. At the time, though, they didn’t see a better option – the Conservatives were nowhere near, Michael Howard leading the Conservatives was just not sufficiently strong for the vast majority of the general public to give him that chance. So had Tony Blair continued in power, there is a good chance – well there is not a good chance, it is very probable, highly probable that Labour would also have lost. Probably have lost more seats than they did with Gordon Brown. So the idea that Brown lost the election is wrong because it suggests that he alone had a negative effect and actually that is not the case, because interestingly enough, if you look at certain dimensions on which the electorate vote for politicians – things like ‘best understands the problems facing Britain’ and ‘is a strong leader’, those sorts of dimensions – Brown actually comes across very well, better in some cases than some of the other leaders. So it is not the case that he was universally liked, I am not trying to pretend that that is the case and in fact his own positioning was I may not be the most media savvy leader in town, but I am the most capable leader in town. That was his positioning. I think to some degree that actually came across to voters and probably shored up the Labour vote a little and that is part of the reason that we ended up with a coalition rather than a definitive choice by the electorate. Steve Macaulay Now, in contrast what were the perceptions of Cameron and the Conservatives? Paul Baines For a long time in the pre part of the election the public perception, fuelled by the media to some degree, was that Cameron was light on policy – very light on policy. But later on, as we got into the election, Cameron started to come across more positively, as more dynamic and as a capable leader leading a united party– which is interesting because the Conservatives had never been united before. And the cracks were appearing in Labour with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair neck and neck at each other’s throats. So the contrast was very clear, I think, to voters and for that reason they started to perceive him more positively. www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com© Cranfield University
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Paul Baines
Interestingly enough though, the real leader story is not about either of those two, the real leader’s story was about Nick Clegg and Nick Clegg’s image was substantially improved as a result of the debates. Steve Macaulay So the leaders’ debates on the television attracted huge audiences and tremendous interest and it did shift opinion didn’t it? Paul Baines Well that is a good point because it shifted opinion, but it didn’t shift behaviour. In the first election what we saw was this tremendous uproar about Clegg and people actually realised well here is a Lib Dem who is actually a national leader, who looks, talks and acts like a national leader. And we have seen it a bit, we have seen strong Lib Dem leaders in the past, but they have not had universal appeal. So what we saw this time was a Lib Dem leader with universal appeal and that first debate where he spoke directly to camera in a way that Cameron and Brown didn’t – Brown was almost gauche in front of the camera really. Cameron less so, but clearly nervous. This chap, Clegg, not nervous at all; very well prepared and delivered, I think, the speech of his life to some degree and came across incredibly well. The result was that that fuelled Clegg mania and we saw this positive intention suddenly developing to vote Lib Dem and the result was that the Lib Dems actually came into second position in voting intention, but that never fed through to votes on election day. Steve Macaulay Now, if we look post‐election, there is a section in the book that looks at how things were afterwards – what came out there? Paul Baines What came out was that part of the reason why the Lib Dem vote failed to materialise was because Lib Dem voters tend to be less loyal anyway to their party. There is a fairly sizeable group of Labour and Conservative voters who are incredibly loyal to their parties and they were unlikely to shift actually to any other party. The Lib Dem vote has, to some degree, traditionally been a protest vote, so it is a vote against one of the other parties to some degree rather than a vote for the Liberal Democrats. I think what we saw this time was a shifting of that – that people started to realise that Nick Clegg illustrated a Lib Dem Party in its own right and the possibilities for voting Lib Dem, but they weren’t quite convinced because in the second and third debates Cameron in particular picked up, but so did Brown to some degree. Steve Macaulay So if we look at the methodology that you have used, which is sussing the public opinion at regular intervals, what does that say about using this in future elections? www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com© Cranfield University
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Paul Baines
Paul Baines Well the value of polling is that it gives us this ability to check the mind‐set of the public. I don’t think any decent government in a democratic society would not measure public opinion. So what it allows us to do is to see what the public thinks about a range of different things. Another question though, Steve, might be are there any differences in the way that we did it this time? And I think that what was specifically different was the way that – it is a relatively old technology reapplied in the new circumstances – the fact that we had debates this time and the fact that voters’ views were evaluated as those debates were in progress , it was called ‘the worm’ – we called it ‘the worm’. So voters were asked their reactions live as the politicians were speaking and responding to questions and what we were able to see was the public reaction. Of course, this is qualitative research – it gives you insights, it is not representative but it is incredibly useful and I think what we will see for next time, I think the parties will be rehearsing much more than perhaps they did this time and they will be using this sort of technique to evaluate how they do before they go out and do the debates because of the strategic importance of the debates in the election. Steve Macaulay Paul, thank you very much. Paul Baines Thank you very much, Steve. www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com© Cranfield University
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