The thread on Parliamentary leaders losing their seats disucsses situations in which party leaders are “planted” in relatively safe districts, or when newly chosen, must be expressed into a vacancy created by the resignation of a party member. These practices must lead to leaders serving districts in which they don’t live.
Is this considered an anomaly? Do British, Canadian, and Australian members of Parliament normally live in their districts? Is there a strong tradition of choosing party candidates from among the local community?
[In the United States, members of Congress are constitutionally required to “inhabit” the states that they represent, and there is a strong tradition that Representatives live in their districts as well. Exceptions are all but unknown.]
It’s considered a plus if they do, and those that are local residents make a lot of that fact. They’re supposedly more likely to understand local issues. It’s not a requirement, of course, but it helps. There have been plenty of examples of ‘outside’ candidates ‘parachuted’ into seats by the party HQ. This can sometimes backfire - especially in safe seats - if the local voters feel used and a well-known local candidate was passed over in favour of a party hack. The spurned local candidate often ends up running as an independent and winning the seat.
Local members who get elected and then ‘trade up’ to better addresses in more salubrious seats are particularly disliked.
Leaders are a bit different. The PM, of course, gets an official residence in both Sydney and Canberra, and is therefore unlikely to live in his old house in his own electorate. The current PM, Kevin Rudd, is the member for a Brisbane-based suburban seat, and he wouldn’t spend very much time there at all. When it’s necessary to get a leader into the lower house in order to form government, the party HQ will choose the most expedient way of doing this. John Gorton, elected head of the Liberal Party in 1968 after Harold Holt’s presumed drowning death, was a Senator, and therefore had to move to the House by constitutional convention if he was to become PM. He stood for, and won, Holt’s seat in the by-election. Another example is that of Barry Unsworth, a premier of NSW. He was elected by the Labor party as its leader on the resignation of the previous premier, Neville Wran. Unsworth was in the state upper house (the Legislative Council) and needed to move to the lower house (the Legislative Assembly). A compliant Labor backbencher resigned his seat, and Unsworth contested the by-election. He won, but with a drastically reduced majority - a good example of the voters’ dislike for ‘parachuted’ candidates that I mentioned above.
I know New Zealand wasn’t listed in the OP, but we’re similar in situation to Cunctator’s reply. One factor which over rides the “local guy or gal” thing, though, is the party-safe seat. The leader of the opposition here, John Key, is a case in point. He’s MP for Helensville, but as far as I’m aware he doesn’t live there. His electorate office is about 20 km away, and his main home is in Parnell, more than 40 km away. But, Helensville is blue-ribbon, and he’ll get in without a sweat.
The situation in the UK is similar. A local background will invariably help someone be selected by the local party branch as their candidate and also tends to play well with the voters, but neither is necessary. Once elected, the MP is expected to at least conduct a weekly “surgery” in the constituency to allow anybody to come along and raise pretty much any issue - often practical matters of immediate concern that they hope their MP can help about - with them face-to-face. Most MPs will thus spend their weekends in a constuency home dealing with such matters. (And their expense arrangements cover the costs of running the second residence if necessary - with the extra one being regarded as their London one rather than the constituency one.) There’s no requirement that they actually do so, never mind actually live in the constituency, but it’s usually convenient for them to do so.
There is a sort of exception for the PM, in that they are excused the expectation of doing the weekly surgery. (Typically a close local party official does it for them.) But they will usually maintain a house there. Thatcher’s constituency was in north London, so she didn’t have to and moved elsewhere when she left No. 10. Major still lives in his house in Huntingdon. Blair quickly moved to sell his constituency home when he left office. Offhand, none of the three had had close connections with the constituency prior to being selected as their party’s candidate there (though Blair had to the general area).
Brown maintains his old house in his Fife constituency and visits regularly, but it’s also the town he grew up in.
One possible exception is, as always, Alec Douglas-Home. He’d served as a normal MP in Lanark, but was a member of the House of Lords by the time he became PM. He immediately resigned his peerage and was parachuted into Kinross and West Perthshire, where there was a convenient by-election due. Whether he ever developed any close ties with the constituency or bought a house there, I don’t know.
usually, yes, but there are exceptions. for instance, where a major city has several ridings, it wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows if a candidate lived in the city near the riding, but not quite in it. less likely to happen in a large rural riding.
sometimes happens when a new party leader needs a seat to get into the House. For example, when Brian Mulroney was elected leader of the PCs in 1983, Elmer MacKay (Peter’s father) resigned his seat, which was in Nova Scotia, and Mulroney stood for election there, even though he was a Montrealer. That was just temporary, to get Mulroney into the House. In the general election in 1984, Mulroney ran in a Montreal constituency.
It can also happen that a new leader in this sort of situation actually moves to the new riding. For example, in Saskatchewan, when Premier Romanow retired, the new leader of his party, Lorne Calvert, didn’t have a seat in the Assembly. He was from Moose Jaw and had held a Moose Jaw seat in the past, but had been out of elected politics for a while. Once Calvert was elected leader, Romanow resigned his seat in Saskatoon and Calvert ran there. He was elected, and moved to live in his Saskatoon riding.
Many years ago, someone (was it Ian Tetley?) living in Ottawa (in Ontario) ran and won a seat in Westmount on Montreal Island (in Quebec). As an American, I was astonished, but a Canadian colleague was surprised at my astonishment. So there is no requirement of even being a resident of the province.
Trudeau did live in his riding (Mt. Royal, but includes Outremont where he lived) and regularly got 80% of the vote. This may still be the safest Liberal riding in the country.
that’s right - no residency requirement, as the Mulroney example shows. If you check the thread on parliamentary leaders who lose their seats, there’s also info on the cases of Prime Minister Macdonald, a resident of Ontario who served one term as MP of Victoria, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a resident of Ontario who represented Prince Albert, Saskatchewan for 20 years.
In Britain (as others have said) it’s fairly standard for parties to assign candidates to constituencies. The vast majority of people in this country vote for a party rather than a candidate so who the MP is is often incidental. In the safer seats it’s remarked that people will vote for a chimpanzee as long as it’s of the appropriate party.
This means that people who the leadership want to have included in government are “parachuted” into the strongest seats as they become available. Two good examples of this are David Miliband and Ed Balls, currently Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Both worked for New Labour in a political advisory capacity (the former as the PM’s head of policy and the latter as a special advisor for Brown when he was Chancellor) and when they decided they wanted to have a political career they were put into good seats, duly elected and then placed into ministerial positions. This doesn’t mean that they don’t take their roles as MPs seriously though and they have to do all the requisite travelling to their constituencies and surgeries that bonzer mentioned (Miliband got the short straw though, his constituency is in South Shields, 300 odd miles away from London which he has to travel to by train every week). But it does mean that rank and file members of the party who want to serve as MPs will have to fight for the more marginal seats because the safest ones go to people with connections to the top.
Personally I think the system we have currently isn’t great as it means that parties are effectively oligarchical and that people can become MPs based on patronage to the party leadership and not because of popular vote. When that happens we cease to have a representative democracy (if indeed we ever really had it in the UK, but that’s another debate).
The british example summarized by Illuminatiprimus sounds much more top heavy than the Canadian experience. it depends of course on each party’s own constitution and traditions, but by and large, the local riding associations take their responsibility/power to nominate their candidate very seriously. being told from the top whom to nominate doesn’t usually sit very well. and since the riding association has the party’s most dedicated supporters, if the party leadership alienates them, they run the risk of losing their core of local party workers just before the election. forcing a candidate on the local riding may be counter-productive, if it contributes to the party losing the seat in the election.
I’m curious about this term “surgery.” From the context, I get the idea that it is basically open office hours for constitutents. However, the term “surgery” makes it sound like that the elected representative is in a (metaphorical) position of having to save the life of his or her district. Is that it? The district is always on the brink of death, eking out another few months of precarious life, weak and pathetic, waiting to go under the knife once again?
there was a bye-election earlier this year in Saskatchewan where the Liberal leader, Dion, overrode the riding nomination and put in his own candidate. his candidate lost the bye-election, losing a seat that the Liberals had previously held.
this time, for the general election, the riding re-nominated their candidate, beating the candidate preferred by Mr. Dion, and it looks like the leadership has accepted the nomination: David Orchard, Liberal of the North (yes, the David Orchard who ran for the leadership of the PCs…)
In the UK a ‘surgery’ is the place where a GP can be consulted by his or her patients. The word has simply been extended to MPs’ consultations by analogy.
Good thread. I highly recommend Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals, a novel about three MPs’ rise to power in the 1960s-90s, with quite a bit on the tactics of selecting or being assigned a constituency, and the preference many voters have for a “local boy [or girl].” Archer is a former MP. It’s a great book and has a lot of insights into British politics at that time.
Ah. But that seems even more confusing. A G.P.'s everyday job is to be consulted by patients. The way it’s being used in the political sense makes it seem like “opening one’s surgery” only happens once every so often. Or maybe British G.P.s spend a lot more time playing golf than American ones do.
A GP’s surgery is open for all members of the public and is the first port of call for problems they have. People come to discuss either new or ongoing problems and the GP advises them on what action they need to take or refers them on/up if the situation requires it.
An MP’s surgery is similar to that, it’s a combination of a citizen’s advice bureau (although personally I wouldn’t see it as a replacement for one), a local forum for discussion/complaint, a miniature court of redress etc. It’s mainly for MPs to demonstrate that they will do what they can to help their constituents and the majority of the time what they offer is advice and information on where to get further help, not direct action. Sometimes MPs will take up campaigns on behalf of their constituents, especially if they feel the issue is representative of a larger problem.
Outside of their legislative and parliamentary roles MPs only have as much power as people decide to confer on them, they have influence and persuasion but they can’t make things happen by waving a magic wand (something that a lot of members of the public don’t understand. Some people will come to a surgery to talk about local issues, some about national issues, some about personal bugbears (from the sublime to the ridiculous - the best one I’ve heard to date being “All my neighbours are pakis now, what’s being done about it?”).
One of the MPs in First Among Equals was regularly visited in his surgeries by a loopy constituent who wanted to know just what Her Majesty’s Government was doing about a looming invasion of space aliens.
[ul]
[li]I think the horse races are fixed. My horses never win.[/li][li]There’s a dead cat on my doorstep. What are you going to do about it?[/li][li]We own a house in Spain and we’re having trouble with the bank. Can you get the Embassy to help us?[/li][/ul]
These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
There used to be much more power at the local level, and there’s been cases where the centralisation of this control has proved too much. In the 2005 election Blaenau Gwent went to a Labour party rebel standing as an independent against the official candidate, with a huge swing in the vote of a supposedly rock-solid Labour seat.