There’s a very good article over at Westminster Wisdom about the longevity of the US two-party system – a dominance of only two largely unchanged political parties since 1860 – “a record unmatched by any other Democracy.”

A comparison with the UK, in which the period from 1945 until the late 1960s marked a fairly rigid period of allignment along party and class lines, and the subsequent fragmentation of voting paterns is interesting. There’s an entertaining gap-fill exercise here where you can test your knowledge of this, but it’s often hard to recognise just how much things have changed since 1966.

If you look at the general election results, you see only two very major parties, a very marginal Liberal Party, nothing that could be called a Green Party, tiny Nationalist parties and a miniscule far-right (Union Movement). 

Of the 630 MPs, all but 13 were Labour or Conservative. And of the remainder, 12 were Liberal and one was Republican Labour – the late Gerry Fitt in West Belfast.

The expectation among politicians that they should advance particular policies – as opposed to a general approach – in order to attract votes is a fairly new one in the UK. When Labour lost power to the Conservatives in 1970, a relatively small number of voters switched allegiance. In addition, it is often argued that this reflected a demographic shift (people leaving the Labour-voting class and joining the strata that vote Conservative) more than any reflection on the actual polcies of the political parties.

In 1970, Labour went into the General Election with a fair degree of optimism – their defeat was an unpleasant surprise to them. All of this following a period that included the devaluation of Sterling and Harold Wilson’s famous ‘Pound in your pocket‘ sophistry. 

All of this raises the question: Do we have an electoral system that reflects voters’ expectations of representation? If the main system of voting did so in 1970, by definition, it can no longer do so in 2009 because those expectations have changed so dramatically.