(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If Brexit has taught us anything, it is that control of the agenda is everything. It is Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s critical weakness that he doesn’t control the agenda and must let others — the courts, the speaker of the House of Commons, other European Union leaders — set it for him.
I suggest, then, that the key to understanding the Brexit imbroglio is in the ideas of a great political scientist named William Riker. The head of the University of Rochester’s political science department for many years, Riker — who died in 1993 — pioneered the application to politics of social choice theory first conceived by economists.
For Riker, breaking down politics into a series of decisions revealed that power resided in setting the agenda. He even coined a word for the ability to frame the political agenda: heresthetics. Derived from the Greek words for choosing or electing, heresthetic now has a definition in the Collins English Dictionary: “a political strategy by which a person or group sets or manipulates the context and structure of a decision-making process in order to win or be more likely to win.” He applied heresthetics to the study of committees, elections, and grand partisan alignments. Even history’s greatest political shifts, Riker argued, came not when many people changed their minds, but when politicians shifted the agenda to give priority to new questions.
Riker was at the peak of his influence when David Cameron was studying politics at Oxford, and this shows in Cameron’s political career. His time as prime minister was book-ended by two referendums, which were arguably the best and worst examples of heresthetics in British history.
The first referendum, now practically forgotten, took place in 2011. Cameron’s Conservative Party had failed to win an overall majority in the 2010 election, and he could only take power by convincing the centrist Liberal Democrats to form a coalition. The Lib Dems had for decades been underrepresented in Parliament thanks to Britain’s “first-past-the-post” voting system, under which the candidate capturing the most votes in any given district wins, even if it’s with the slimmest of pluralities. Their greatest priority, by far, was to move to a system of proportional representation (PR). Cameron’s heresthetic masterstroke was to offer them a referendum on PR, an offer they couldn’t refuse, but stipulate at the outset that the option put to the public would be the alternative-vote system.
As any public-choice theorist knows, no electoral system is perfect, but the alternative vote — a complicated system in which voters rank candidates, and second and further choices are taken into account when no clear majority winner emerges — is particularly flawed and easy to ridicule. The Lib Dems’ own leader was on record as calling it a “miserable little compromise.” The referendum attracted little attention, and was presented as a vote on AV. It was roundly defeated, and the Lib Dems, by now very unpopular, had no choice but to prop up the Cameron government for another four years.
This may have made Cameron overconfident when it came to his promise later in his tenure to hold an “in-out” referendum on membership within the EU. If the AV referendum had seen off the Lib Dems, the EU referendum was meant to quell the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party, whose polling numbers were rising menacingly. It worked. Ukip failed to break through in the 2015 election, and Cameron won an overall majority, moving him on to his personal Waterloo at the Brexit referendum the following year.
In both cases, Cameron had control of the agenda. On PR, he could have asked: “Should we get rid of First Past The Post?” Had he done so, it would have been easy to corral the votes to change the voting system. (To name just a few absurdities and injustices, Tony Blair once won a comfortable overall majority with 35.2% of the popular vote, while his predecessor Clement Attlee was booted from power in 1951 despite winning 48.8%, which was more than the victor, Winston Churchill, and more than Attlee himself had won in his historic landslide victory of 1945; parties with the most votes can easily fail to win the most seats). But, following Riker, Cameron had controlled the agenda so that he could win.
When it came to the EU, however, he set a question that maximized his chance to lose. The EU is a flawed institution that has been ridiculed in British culture for generations. Setting a question that made clear that Britain would remain in the customs union (but no longer have a say over rules it had to obey), or that Northern Ireland would be severed from the U.K., or that Britain would forsake the advantages of the EU single market if it left, might have set him up for victory. Making the choice “the EU or something else” set him up to fail — as did his failure to apply reasonable safeguards, such as that all four countries of the U.K. should vote yes, or that a minimum proportion of the total electorate should vote to leave before the referendum became binding.
More recently, Cameron’s successor Theresa May lost control of the agenda as numerous players insisted on interpreting the referendum, and indeed the concept of democracy itself, in a way that suited them. Johnson then tried to re-gain control of the agenda, but in a monstrously clumsy way. His stratagem to close Parliament for several weeks to deny MPs the chance to veto whatever plan he came up with was an overreach. It led the courts to overrule him, and prompted many Conservative colleagues to leave the party, losing his majority in the Commons. With no single party in a majority, control of the agenda now rests with Speaker John Bercow, who at this point is de facto the most powerful man in Britain.
Brexit was originally about “taking back control.” Now, it is about finding some British politician who is a good enough heresthetician to take back control of the agenda and either see Brexit to a conclusion or navigate a path to reverse it. That person might emerge from the general election that will probably happen before the end of the year. But deadlock is possible — which, per Riker’s thinking, could place singular importance on the outcome of a different election that takes place next week.
Bercow will step down as speaker on Oct. 31, the same day Britain is due to leave the EU, barring an extension of the Brexit timetable (which seems likely). Candidates to succeed him, from both major parties, include names like Sir Henry Bellingham, Dame Eleanor Laing, Sir Edward Leigh, Chris Bryant, Meg Hillier, and Dame Rosie Winterton. Most are unknown outside the U.K., and little known at home. Before the Brexit referendum, the same was true of Bercow.
If the winner is a good heresthetician, it could effectively fall to them to decide the ultimate relationship between the U.K. and the rest of Europe.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Beth Williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
John Authers is a senior editor for markets. Before Bloomberg, he spent 29 years with the Financial Times, where he was head of the Lex Column and chief markets commentator. He is the author of “The Fearful Rise of Markets” and other books.
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