James Crouch is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Opinium.
All the evidence is pointing to a major defeat for the Conservative Party on 4 July, and Conservative candidates will rightly be incredibly concerned about a return to some 1997-style collapse (or worse).
But they should be even more frightened by an electoral phenomenon that could help a Starmer government hold onto power for more than five years: a first-time incumbency bonus.
An incumbency bonus is a pretty standard (if slightly dull-sounding) concept in the study of elections: the electoral advantage enjoyed by a party that has held office during a previous term when it fights for re-election.
But you do not really notice it from election to election. Half of the seats in England and Wales have essentially never changed hands, or at least not in recent memory. This advantage is just built into what we know about their vote share; it is hard to measure and discern.
But there are occasions when we can see the impact of incumbency in British politics, and that is in elections where a major seat change takes place. When a large number of seats change hands, it is possible to crunch the numbers and get a feel for the scale of impact that incumbency has.
Put simply, when a Labour candidate defeats a Conservative incumbent candidate in this general election, they will do so despite that Conservatives benefiting from incumbency. When they come round to fighting for re-election in five years’ time, that Labour MP will have an incumbency bonus of their own, and the Conservative candidate will no longer being able to rely on it.
Labour will win despite the Conservatives’ incumbency – but if they stay in office for two terms it will be because of their own.
First-time incumbency bonus has proved itself to be an incredibly potent force. We have seen this effect twice in recent times: the re-election of David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2015, and the re-election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 2001.
Both elections took place with a large number of government MPs who had only been elected for the first time four or five years’ earlier and were then coming to their first attempt at re-election.
After the 2010 general election, the Conservative Party found itself in England and Wales with 89 MPs representing seats it had newly taken off the Labour Party. In most of these cases, these were constituencies which had been Labour for the whole New Labour period from 1997 to 2010.
When Cameron made his ultimately success attempt at re-election in 2015, it is still worthwhile remembering that the Tories lost ground nationally and there was a one per cent swing back to Labour.
Here is where the first-time incumbency in those 89 seats came into play. First, the evidence this effect exists: while across England and Wales one in a hundred people swung to Labour, in these specific seats there was a 1.6 per cent swing to the Conservatives, building on the substantial swings they achieved in 2010.
Second, the 2015 example also demonstrates how this effect has its biggest impact when a party comes into office. By definition, the 89 seats the Conservatives took off Labour in 2010 to kick them out of office became the entire battleground between the two major parties.
Thus, not only did first-time incumbency give the Conservatives a boost in these seats, but it also gave Cameron an extra layer of protection in precisely the places Labour needed to take back. Ed Miliband’s path to Number 10 – even without the dramatic losses in Scotland – was firmly blocked.
The other example, which will resonate in a more ominous way with Conservative MPs, is the example from the 2001 general election that followed Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide. In the 1997 general election Labour took 139 seats from the Conservatives in England and Wales, meaning when it came to Blair’s re-election there were 139 constituencies where a Labour candidate had first-time incumbency.
Once again, these seats were now the entire battleground for the Conservatives and the first-time incumbent got a bounce that made the opposition leader’s life a misery.
When William Hague made his attempt to win back at least some of those 139 constituencies in 2001, he found the swing in his favour was a pitiful 0.25 per cent – this is despite the national swing of 1.6 per cent. This resulted in a net get of four seats from Labour, instead of 15 that a uniform national swing might have suggested.
Let this lesson be learned: an opposition leader who lets their party stand still after they are flung out of office will be dealt with a double blow.
However, this does not mean that first-time incumbency will always see a new government returned for a second term no matter what.
Edward Heath successfully walked into Downing Street only four years after Harold Wilson’s 1966 landslide. This is not to say that Harold Wilson’s new cadre of Labour MPs did not benefit from first-time incumbency in the 1970 election, just that it wasn’t enough to fight
The swing in the 47 seats where Labour had a first-time incumbency bonus in the 1970 general election was 3.6 per cent instead of the national swing of 4.3 per cent. Heath was able to win the 1970 general election despite this effect (although it probably dented the size of Heath’s majority in that election considering some the extraordinary swings elsewhere in his favour).
This was the election where the BBC had to bring someone on mid-broadcast to paint extra numbers onto the swing-o-meter because of the scale of movement in the Conservatives’ direction; it still only resulted in a Conservative majority of 30 or so seats.
The warning for the Conservatives in opposition is not to let the party stand still. Be prepared to do whatever it takes to win back Labour voters at the next election – or there is a danger that the party will find itself consigned to a second round of devastatingly disappointing results in 2029.
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Author: James Crouch
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