Graph How Often People Throw Out Their Governments, and Watch the Ideology Disappear

This is a proposal for a graph I have not made. I am putting it here because I think it would settle an argument that is otherwise conducted entirely in adjectives, and because I do not know where to get the data and would like to.

The Graph

On the horizontal axis, time, from the first elections in a country to the present. On the vertical axis, how often the electorate replaces its government: the frequency with which the party or coalition in power is thrown out at the next opportunity, smoothed over a few cycles so that the line means something.

Do this for every representative democracy with a long enough record. Britain, the United States, France, the Scandinavian countries, the older Commonwealth democracies, and then the later ones, Israel, post-war Germany and Italy and Japan, the post-1989 democracies, as far as the records allow.

My hypothesis is that the line goes up. That as time passes, electorates change their governments more and more often, and that this holds across countries with very different party systems and very different cultures.

What the Line Would Mean

If the hypothesis is right, it means something about what voters have learned, and it is not what either side of the political argument wants to hear.

The conventional story of elections is a contest of ideologies. The public is choosing a direction, left or right, more state or less, and a change of government means the public changed its mind about where to go. On that story the frequency of change should track the frequency of ideological shifts, which are slow, generational things. The line should be flat or nearly so.

A rising line says something different. It says the public has learned that the problem is not which ideology is in office but that whoever is in office becomes the problem. Voters who throw out governments faster and faster are not oscillating between philosophies; they are applying the one tool they have, removal, more and more aggressively against a target that keeps regenerating. They have concluded, without anyone teaching them, that it is the minority in power that needs taming, not some doctrine that needs installing.

That is a conclusion about the structure of government rather than its direction. It is the conclusion I have been arguing for in a hundred ways on this blog, and the graph would show the electorate arriving at it on its own.

Why the Alternative Readings Fail

There are other ways to read a rising line and they should be stated.

Voters have become more fickle. Perhaps. But fickleness is a name, not an explanation, and it does not say why fickleness would rise steadily across a century in unrelated countries.

Parties have converged, so switching is cheap. This is closer to the truth and it is part of the same story. If the parties are similar, throwing one out costs the voter nothing and buys a fresh set of faces. But that is only worth doing if the voter believes the faces, not the doctrine, were the problem. Convergence makes the behaviour possible; the diagnosis makes it happen.

Media and the internet have shortened attention. Then the line should be flat until the 1990s and then jump. If it rises steadily from far earlier, this is not the driver.

The graph would distinguish these, which is why it is worth making.

Where the Data Would Come From

This is the part I genuinely do not know, and the note I made to myself years ago ends with the same question mark.

The raw material exists. Every democracy has a record of its elections and of which party or coalition formed the government afterward. Political scientists maintain databases of government formation and duration, and comparative election archives cover most of the twentieth century for the older democracies. What I have not found is anyone who has taken that material and asked this specific question: not how long governments last, which is well studied, but how the electorate's willingness to remove them has changed over the whole history of the franchise.

The complications are real. Coalitions change without elections. Parties split, merge and rename. The franchise itself widened over the period, so the early electorate is not the later one. Any honest version of the graph would have to make choices about all of this and state them.

I am not going to pretend to a result I do not have. The claim in this post is a hypothesis and a method, and I would rather publish the question than manufacture the answer. If someone has built this line, or knows where the pieces are, I want to see it.

Why It Matters

Because the argument about systems of government is usually held as an argument between ideologies, and this would be evidence that the public has quietly stopped having that argument. A population that changes its rulers ever faster is telling you, in the only language elections allow, that rulers are the issue. The next step, letting the population decide the questions instead of choosing who decides them, is the step that language cannot express, which is exactly why the line would keep rising and never resolve.