Robert McIlveen is on the approved list of candidates and a part of the CSI in Sheffield. He is at the end of writing his PhD on Conservative Party strategy. In this post he asks if CSI stands for "Crap System Imposed or Cities Selecting Innovatively"?
The City Seats Initiative (CSI) has been getting a bit of stick on ConHome lately (here and here). As part of my PhD I did some analysis of the CSI in 2006, which forms a chapter of my PhD. I am also now one of the likely candidates in the Sheffield CSI, giving me a practical as well as academic interest in it.
For those who don’t take an obsessive interest in Conservative candidate selection processes, the CSI is a project whereby candidates for the cities taking part are selected as a team and allocated to constituencies later on. The reasons are varied – it is much nicer fighting a “challenging” seat with other people around you going through the same thing. The weakest constituencies never had particularly competitive selections either – two or three applicants, with the candidate selected by a similar number of members is hardly ideal. The CSI is partly to do with hopes of rejuvenating the party in the cities, which in some cases are extremely weak.
My research, an earlier version of which is available here, tested whether the CSI had any effect in the cities it was used in at the last election (Birmingham, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and Sunderland).
The most effective aspect of the CSI was with regard to candidates. The CSI seats had more women than comparable seats, and these women did particularly well in getting onto the A-list and getting selected for winnable or safe seats. Given that it was run from the candidates department it is not all that surprising. The associations were impressed with the quality of the candidates overall, suggesting that those sent up were good, promising future prospects for the party.
I was surprised to discover that the CSI constituencies actually did worse overall than comparable seats. While the CSI might mean that candidates were called away to nearby target seats or concentrated in one seat in the city, compared to earlier campaigns it should not have been that different – there always was a minimal campaign in truly hopeless seats. The underlying reason for the CSI being associated with a negative effect on the vote share is where it was used. The same seats performed significantly worse in 2001 as well, when the traditional selection method was used, suggesting that the CSI is a product of the decline, not the other way around.
So why on earth (as a man) would I want to be involved in the CSI? First of all, I live in Sheffield and have been campaigning here for the last three years, so it’s a natural place for me to stand. Having seen the problems facing the local party, I want to get stuck in and recruit some members and get things moving – candidates should be the best placed people to do this.
Secondly, the cities do matter. While it is true that we can win a majority without winning any constituencies in the CSI (in fact it would take a uniform swing of just under 24% to win our most winnable seat in Manchester or Liverpool, producing a parliamentary majority of around 500), the party of “One Nation” Conservatism can hardly abandon the poorest parts of the country. If we want to fight social breakdown, the deprived council estates of the urban north are a good place to do it.
The CSI is controversial – constituency parties do not like losing the power to select their candidates. However, it has advantages in the right places. For the next election, Sheffield has more local candidates than it has had for years – three of the five of us live or lived in the city and the others have business connections. Working as a team we can learn from each other’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as share the work of campaigning in difficult areas.
The CSI isn’t right for everywhere, but for cities where the party is very weak the advantages are significant. For the candidates it is better than being stuck in a Labour stronghold alone with only a handful of members. For the cities involved, it has the advantage of a focused team working together rather than candidates doing just enough to earn their stripes in a hopeless seat before looking for something better next time. It might be a good way to get more women into the candidate pool for winnable seats and we are all aware that that is the case, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.
