Brexit and the Changing Party System: Turmoil and Tensions Behind Conservative Predominance

The paper analyses the dramatic changes that the party system is experiencing in the last years, with a specific focus on the impact of Brexit. The strong inter-relation between the majoritarian electoral system (plurality) and two-party politics has been a distinctive trait of Britain since 1945. Brexit has further exacerbated tensions which had already emerged inside the party system in the previous years. The ‘Brexit effect’ on the party system is mainly assessed on three ‘card-giver’ events, i.e. the three general elections (GE) hold in 2015, 2017 and 2019. The same fact that three elections have been held in less than five years speaks volumes about the turbulence that Brexit has created inside the political system. Similarly, Brexit has already brought down two Prime ministers (Cameron and May), triggering unprecedented levels of unpredictability in the electoral landscape. As a complement to the main focus on general elections, the paper will also trace the influence of Brexit in determining a more volatile electoral market. A specific focus on the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament election, won respectively by UKIP and the Brexit party, allows to underline the importance of the ‘blackmail potential’ exercised by the two iteration of Nigel Farage’s ‘personal parties’. Combining different indicators traditionally used by the literature on party system change with survey data (as well as insights coming from interviews with experts and party elites), the paper will help make sense of the role of Brexit in determining a profoundly mutated the electoral and party landscape, behind the apparent continuity provided by the decade of predominance of the Conservative party.