The tragedy of turnover

Guest post from Greg Power

In July the UK witnessed its highest ever rate of electoral turnover, with 335 MPs – or 51% – elected to the House of Commons for the first time.  This is exceptionally high by UK standards, which usually has a rate of around 20%.  But many parliaments routinely lose at least half their members at every election, and in countries like Iraq, Malawi, and Kenya it is often over 70%.  It is difficult to overstate the connection between the rate of churn at each election and a country’s long-term political stability.

The conundrum for campaigners is, partly, how to navigate such continually shifting terrain and still promote lasting policy solutions.  But it is also about whether anything can be done to mitigate the causes of electoral turbulence.

There are no straightforward answers, but there are three questions which may provide new insights and entry-points. 

First, what does all this look like from the inside, as an MP affected by such high turnover?  Second, what does this do to the politician’s behavioural incentives?  And third, given that, are there ways of aligning the interests of advocates and MPs around new ways of working?

The cardinal rule of all effective lobbying is to start by viewing the world through the eyes of the person you are trying to influence: what matters to them, what motivates them, what problems are they managing today?  And, critically, what have you got that will address these things?

Viewed from this angle, it doesn’t take long to realise that turnover is arguably more of a problem for elected politicians than it is for anyone else.

To begin with, how do you learn the job in an organisation which is in an almost permanent state of flux?  No company could cope with half of their workforce starting on the same day.  But parliaments are routinely expected to cope with such numbers every 4-5 years. 

And if upwards of 50% of your colleagues are changing every time there’s an election, there is almost nothing to work from.  There is limited institutional memory, the standard practices and behavioural norms that shape every workplace are poorly developed, and there are few experienced senior figures from whom you can learn.  Each new cohort is effectively starting from scratch. 

Reflecting on this pattern, one Malawian MP told me that the biggest problem in his parliament was that MPs had no incentive to learn the ‘art of politics’.  As he explained, if you believe you are only likely to be in parliament for one term there is not enough time to build the deft and dextrous procedural skills that enable you to influence institutional politics and policy.  But there is also little reason to do so.  Given the time it would take to learn such skills, there would be a little opportunity to use them, and an even smaller chance of achieving anything meaningful.

A frequently changing cast of elected politicians rarely offers much for advocacy groups to hang on to within the formal policy process.  But it does create opportunities elsewhere, provided you follow those incentive structures.

The logical response when faced with such a high attrition rate is to focus on activities which offer the best hope of avoiding the cull: activities which earn the MP some personal credit and maximise their vote.  They exist, almost entirely, at the constituency level.  

Where the state is failing, the local MP is expected to fill the gaps.  Voters want MPs who are able to get around a dysfunctional system in order to fix the things that matter.  And they are often adept at doing so, finding immediate and inventive solutions to constituents’ problems – either by offering direct and immediate help (getting them jobs, covering their hospital bills or simply giving them money) or by drawing on their influential friends to find more strategic solutions.

The very nature of politics means that any successful parliamentary candidate will routinely be finding workarounds, tapping into numerous local networks and have tremendous convening power amongst a wide group of stakeholders.

As a recent TWP webinar highlighted, MPs therefore provide advocates with a potentially powerful and skillful ally in achieving tactical developmental objectives.  Although they may not be proficient in formal parliamentary procedure, they are often highly skilled in the sort of informal influencing and networking roles that have emerged in other GELI posts. 

The problem is that whilst these informal activities might get some important short-term wins, they are unlikely to provide permanent or lasting solutions.  

Here though there is one other dimension that might help campaigners alter that dynamic.

Every voter who asks an MP for help is exposing a gap in public services or a failure of policy and legislation.  It means that the MP sits on a ton of evidence about how government is working on the ground.  That evidence would be invaluable for the civil servants and ministers at the centre of the system whose job it is to make the policy to fix such problems.  However, the informal, ad hoc and largely undocumented nature of such work means that it usually stays local.  MPs are left to their own devices, frequently working in isolation to solve their own pressing problems. 

A more effective policy process would routinely draw on the local experience.  By helping MPs to collate and analyse such information, advocacy groups could create a level of granular data about state provision that does not currently exist in many countries, improve the policy process and give their own efforts valuable evidence from which to make policy recommendations. 

There are emerging examples of MPs ditching electoral handouts as their principal campaign tool, and instead basing their appeal to voters on evidence of wider local development.  This is often a difficult pitch to constituents who need immediate help today.  But with time and effort it may offer the best template for MPs seeking to elude routine electoral upheaval. 

Advocates could both improve the prospects for long-term policy solutions, and mitigate the effects of high turnover, by aligning their interests with those of the MP in this way.  The key point is that a strategy to do those things has to give MPs the motive to invest more time in their formal institutional roles, and the means to strengthen the policy infrastructure.  Unfortunately, in too many places, neither currently exists.

Greg Power is the Founder and Board chair of GPG, a social purpose company that has worked with MPs, Ministers and officials in more than sixty countries to support their systems of governance.  The themes in this article are developed further in his recently published book “Inside the Political Mind: The human side of politics and how it shapes development”