Great Cleggspectations: A Cleggstravaganza of Cleggcitement!

Howard Dean speculated at the end of March that Nick Clegg (the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the perennial third party of British politics) could be the UK's next prime minister. And that was before Clegg surged in the polls after last week's debate with David Cameron and Gordon Brown, with most putting the Lib Dems ahead of Labour and one poll even putting them ahead of both major parties. OK, the idea of the Liberal Democrats actually winning a parliamentary majority still seems a bit far fetched. But this is a good time for British voters (and us curious onlookers) to ask, why exactly?

Sure, part of the answer is that the quirks of Britain's electoral system mean that the Lib Dems' share of seats in Parliament is usually less than its share of the vote. But the real problem is the classic dilemma faced by any third party in a system dominated by two parties: people don't want to throw their vote away on a party that can't win. As Clegg himself acknowledge at his party's conference last September, "I know there are people who agree with a lot of what we've got to say, but who still don't vote Liberal Democrat. You don't think we're contenders."

Of course, sometimes voting for a third party really is a waste, like when Ralph Nader ran for president in 2000 on the Green Party ticket. America's Green Party commands such low levels of support that even if everybody who wanted a Nader presidency had voted for him, he would still presumably have lost.

But the Lib Dems have considerably more support than the U.S. Greens. If Clegg's thinking is right, the portion of British voters who want a Lib Dem government is probably even higher than the 30% or so who currently plan to vote for them. Other evidence bears this out. A recent YouGov poll found that Clegg has a net approval rating of 72%, higher than anything Tony Blair ever achieved, and lightyears ahead of Cameron at 19% and Brown at negative 18%. And 53% of Britons now say they would like to see a hung parliament, in which no party had a majority and Clegg would likely get to choose between a coalition with the Tories or with Labour. If all the people who really preffered the Lib Dems voted accordingly, they might actually win. At the very least, they would certainly hold the balance of power in Parliament.

So what we have here is a failure to communicate, or what nerdy social science types like myself call a coordination problem: a lot of British voters would vote Lib Dem if they knew a lot of other people would too. But of course others might not vote Lib Dem, because they don't know how everyone else is going to vote, in which case voting Lib Dem would be a waste. It's a chicken and Clegg problem.

In Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge, UCLA political scientist Michael Chwe discusses how to get a group to act in its collective self-interest in these maddening situations. The key is for everyone to know that everyone else is willing to act (and for everyone to know that everyone knows it). Public rituals are a great way to create this common knowledge because you can see that a lot of other people are watching what you're watching and thus know what you know. And in the modern age, one of the most widespread public rituals of all is watching TV. (Even though you are watching in the privacy of your own home, you know a lot of other people are watching too.)

The Lib Dems seem to have figured this out when they ran an interesting ad in 1997 starring John Cleese (dug up by the New York Times blog The Lede). In it, the ex-Python tells viewers that polls show half of them would vote for the Liberal Democrats if they could win. A Lib Dem voter might wonder: Why is he telling me whom I support? But of course he's really telling you millions of other voters want to vote Lib Dem if they can win -- and quite a lot of them are watching this ad and now know they can. So, Cleese implies, you ought to vote Lib Dem after all.

Obviously this stratagem didn't work out in '97. So if most Britons want a Lib Dem government -- or might again some day -- how does the party get from here to victory? Chwe's theory suggests that the recent media frenzy over the Lib Dem surge will lead to common knowledge that the party is actually pretty popular. Voters will realize that voting Lib Dem isn't a waste at all because there's a real chance of them joining a coalition government. If Clegg pulls off that feat, especially if his party comes in at least second place in the vote share, the outcome will reinforce the common knowledge that the Lib Dems really are electoral contenders. And in the next general election, the Liberal Democrats' supporters may be sufficiently emboldened to send their leader all the way to the Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street.