The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Polls, politics and policy ~ Why less MPs are being ‘parachuted in’
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Streisand Effect from their Hydra Effect.
This week we look, in our politics section, at new research, which shows that MPs have become increasingly locally rooted in the past decade. We ask whether the idea of MPs ‘parachuted in’ is a red herring.
And of course, there’s the local lad make good that is Charlie’s Attic, this week including Port Talbot’s Baked Bean Museum and the art of the awkward conversation (to be soon updated by Oliver Dowden’s tips on how to tell your boss they should resign).
Parachuted in?
Listen to many activists and commentators, and you will hear about a growing tendency, over the past few decades, for parties to ‘parachute’ policy wonks and party apparatchiks into safe seats, often at the expense of local candidates who know the area.
Yet according to new research by academics, the true direction of travel is something close to the opposite – in the past decade, at least (see table below). Phil Cowley et al find that, over the 2010s, MPs became increasingly likely to have been born in the same regions as the seats they have come to represent. (The study is behind a paywall, but the academics behind it could potentially be emailed, to see if they will provide a PDF version)
There are methodological caveats to this, of course, which Cowley acknowledges in a Twitter thread on the subject. (One interesting question is the SNP and Tory surges of 2015 and 2019 respectively, which may have ushered in many who were not expecting to win). But the study is a rebuff, nevertheless, to the impression we sometimes get, that Westminster politicians are becoming less and less locally rooted.
This is only one decade, of course. But if we rewind to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, there are often anecdotal accounts of MPs only visiting their seats a couple of times a year. That is a slightly different question to whether they come from the area in the first place, of course. Certainly, the expectation that they should live in the seat or hold regular surgeries is relatively new.
This is not to say that the disconnection that people currently feel from politics is not real or is not justified. But we wonder, reading this study, if the idea of the ‘career politician parachuted in’ is a red herring in the effort to explain the present dearth in political trust.
And finally this week, the political BASE-jump that is Charlie’s Attic:
