Michael Steed
Encyclopedia
Michael Steed is a British
psephologist, political scientist, broadcaster, activist and Liberal Democrat politician. He was born in 1940 in Kent, where his father was a farmer. He has written extensively on parties and elections.
He was educated at St. Lawrence College, Ramsgate
, and at Corpus Christi College
, Cambridge. In 1960 the South African authorities refused him entry to Sharpeville to deliver food aid to victims of the Sharpeville shootings
.
From 1963 to 1965 Steed undertook postgraduate research at Nuffield College, Oxford, under Dr David Butler. At the same time he was active in the Young Liberals
, particularly on the issue of apartheid in South Africa. He became national Vice-Chairman of the Young Liberals.
In 1966 he became Lecturer in Government at Manchester University, a post he held for many years until taking early retirement through ill health. As a psephologist he became a specialist in the detailed analysis of election results from a sociological point of view, for many years providing media such as The Observer and The Economist with texts making such complexities as "percentage swing" accessible to the lay reader. In the later 1960s and throughout the 1970s he made regular television appearances on "election night" programmes, often at the side of Bob McKenzie who popularised the "swingometer" based on the concept of swing
devised by David Butler. Steed was to develop a more complex formula for calculating swing, sometimes known among psephologists as "Steed swing" to differentiate it from "Butler swing".
From 1964 until 2005, Steed - latterly in conjunction with John Curtice
- was responsible for the statistical analysis in David Butler's regular Nuffield election studies entitled "The British General Election of ....".
Steed was a leading member of the "radical" wing of the Liberal Party which in the late 1960s and 1970s found itself at odds with the parliamentary party and its leader Jeremy Thorpe
over a number of issues. In particular, Steed and his colleagues felt that "the party must shift attention away from personalities to a wide-ranging debate about ideology, principles and policies". He contributed several articles to the radical monthly, New Outlook. For a time he was an elected member of the Party's national executive.
Michael Steed has always been an ardent pro-European, and his study of parties and elections soon came to embrace continental as well as UK politics. In 1969 he called for a common European currency.
At the 1971 Liberal Assembly, he successfully moved the major pro-European resolution, noting however that the then EEC, in which decisions were taken by "a secret cabal", must be made more democratic. National sovereignty, he argued, would "die away as a European democracy of widely diffused power was created and exercised at all levels" in "a close political union of the people of Europe".
Michael Steed has consistently called for wide-ranging constitutional reform, including devolution all round, with elected regional governments, a more proportional election system, and the abolition of a Prime Minister's right to dissolve Parliament on a whim.
He stood as Liberal Party candidate in the 1967 Brierley Hill
by-election and the 1973 Manchester Exchange
by-election, in which he pushed the Conservatives into a poor third place. In the 1970 general election he was the party's candidate for Truro. In the February 1974 general election he stood in Manchester Central. In the 1979 European elections, he was the Liberal candidate for Greater Manchester North, where he was defeated by Barbara Castle
. In the 1983 general election he was the party's candidate in Burnley.
In 1976 Michael Steed designed the new system for the election of the Leader of the Liberal Party.
Steed was elected President of the Liberal Party 1978-79.
For many years Michael Steed was a leading light in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality
, serving on its Executive Committee and for a time as its Treasurer. At a time when there was still great hostility to gay rights, he spoke out at public meetings, including an acrimonious one in Burnley
in 1971 over the proposed establishment of a gay club, at which he shared the platform with Ray Gosling
. This meeting has come to be seen as a watershed in the emergence of a national grass-roots gay rights movement in Britain.
In 1975, with his former CHE colleague Paul Temperton, he founded Northern Democrat, a magazine calling for democratic regional government. This later developed into the Campaign for the North, an all-party group pressing for devolution for the English regions as well as Scotland and Wales, with Steed as Chairman and Temperton as Director, using funding from the Rowntree Trust.
In retirement, Michael Steed has returned to his native East Kent, where he remains active in local Liberal Democrat politics. In July 2008 he was elected to Canterbury City Council.
He is currently Honorary Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent
. He has also been Senior Research Fellow of the Federal Trust.
He is a Trustee of the Arthur McDougall Fund and of the Canterbury Commemoration Society, and a Vice-President of the Electoral Reform Society
.
"Voting in Cities: The 1964 Borough Elections", in Urban Studies, 5, no. 3 (1968): 351-352. Sage, London. ISSN 0042-0980
(with Bryan Keith-Lucas and Peter Hall) The Maud Report (Royal Commission on Local Government), New Society Publications, London, 1970, ISBN 0900438010
(with David M Clark and Sally Marshall) Greater Manchester votes: a guide to the new metropolitan authorities, Stockport, 1973, ISBN 0950293202
Who's a Liberal in Europe?, North West Community Newspapers, Manchester, 1975,
"Parties in the European Parliament", in Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 15, Oxford, 1976. ISSN 0021-9886
(with Ralph Bancroft and Ben Sawbridge) Self-government for the British, Prism, Watford, 1976.
Fair elections or fiasco?: Proposals for a sensible voting system for the European Parliament, National Committee for Electoral Reform, London, 1977.
(with S.E. Finer) "Politics of Great Britain" in Roy C. Macridis et al. (eds.), Modern Political Systems: Europe, (4th edn), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978. ISBN 978-0-13-597187-1
"The Liberal Party" in H. Drucker (ed.), Multi-Party Britain, Macmillan, London, 1979. ISBN 978-0-333-24056-4
(with John Curtice
) From Warrington and Croydon to Downing St.: How to sort out the psephological details of a Liberal-Social Democrat alliance, North West Community Newspapers, Manchester, 1981. ISBN 978-0-907803-00-3
(with David Faull) First past the post: The great British class handicap sponsored by Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party, LAGER, London, 1981.
"Voters, Parties and Money" in Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 35, Oxford University Press, 1982.
(with John Curtice) "Electoral Choice and The Production of Government: The Changing Operation of the Electoral System in the United Kingdom since 1955", in British Journal of Political Science, vol. 12, Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISSN 0007-1234
"The Formation of Governments in the United Kingdom" in Political Quarterly, Blackwell, Oxford, vol.54, 1983. ISSN 0032-3179
"The European Parliament" in Bogdanor and Butler (eds), Democracy and elections: Electoral systems and their political consequences, Cambridge, 1983, ISBN 0 521 25295 4
"The Alliance: A critical history", in New Outlook vol. 22 No 3, Prism, Guildford, 1983.
(with John Curtice) One in four: An examination of the Alliance performance at constituency level in the 1983 general election, Association of Liberal Councillors, Hebden Bridge, W. Yorkshire, 1984. ISBN 978-0-901651-05-1
"Dr Reece and the proportional loss hypothesis" in Representation, vol. 25, Routledge (for the McDougall Trust), London, 1985. ISSN 0034-4893
"The Constituency" in Vernon Bogdanor (ed.), Representatives of the People? Parliamentarians and Constituencies in Western Democracies, Gower, Aldershot, 1985. European Centre for Political Studies. ISBN 978-0-566-00878-8
(with John Curtice) "Proportionality and Exaggeration in the British Electoral System" in Electoral Studies, vol. 5, No 3, Butterworths, Guildford, 1986.
"The core—periphery dimension of British politics", Political Geography Quarterly, Volume 5, Issue 4, Supplement 1, October 1986, Pages S91-S103, doi:10.1016/0260-9827(86)90060-1
(with Raymond Plant) PR for Europe: Proposals to change the electoral system of the European Parliament, Federal Trust, London, 1997, ISBN 0901573663
"Will devolution change British parties?" in Representation, vol.36, Routledge (for the McDougall Trust), 1999, ISSN 1749-4001
(with John Curtice
) "And now for the Commons? Lessons from Britain's first experience with proportional representation", in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, vol.10, 2000, ISSN 1745-7297
(with Roger Morgan) Choice and Representation in The European Union, Tauris (for the Federal Trust), London, 2002, ISBN 0901573736
(with John Curtice and Stephen Fisher) "An Analysis of the Results", in British Politicians and European Elections 2004 (Ed. Butler and Westlake), Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, ISBN 9781403935854
"Defining Democracy" in Representation, vol.41, Routledge (for the McDougall Trust), 2005, ISSN 1749-4001
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
psephologist, political scientist, broadcaster, activist and Liberal Democrat politician. He was born in 1940 in Kent, where his father was a farmer. He has written extensively on parties and elections.
He was educated at St. Lawrence College, Ramsgate
St. Lawrence College, Ramsgate
St. Lawrence College is a co-educational independent school situated in the town of Ramsgate in Kent.- History :It was founded in 1879, known as South Eastern College. The school rapidly outgrew the single house, leading to the main building of the present day college by 1884. The chapel was...
, and at Corpus Christi College
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It is notable as the only college founded by Cambridge townspeople: it was established in 1352 by the Guilds of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary...
, Cambridge. In 1960 the South African authorities refused him entry to Sharpeville to deliver food aid to victims of the Sharpeville shootings
Sharpeville massacre
The Sharpeville Massacre occurred on 21 March 1960, at the police station in the South African township of Sharpeville in the Transvaal . After a day of demonstrations, at which a crowd of black protesters far outnumbered the police, the South African police opened fire on the crowd, killing 69...
.
From 1963 to 1965 Steed undertook postgraduate research at Nuffield College, Oxford, under Dr David Butler. At the same time he was active in the Young Liberals
Young Liberals
Young Liberals can mean the following:*Young Liberals , the youth wing of the Liberal Party of Australia* Young Liberals , a liberal party in Austria...
, particularly on the issue of apartheid in South Africa. He became national Vice-Chairman of the Young Liberals.
In 1966 he became Lecturer in Government at Manchester University, a post he held for many years until taking early retirement through ill health. As a psephologist he became a specialist in the detailed analysis of election results from a sociological point of view, for many years providing media such as The Observer and The Economist with texts making such complexities as "percentage swing" accessible to the lay reader. In the later 1960s and throughout the 1970s he made regular television appearances on "election night" programmes, often at the side of Bob McKenzie who popularised the "swingometer" based on the concept of swing
Swing (politics)
An electoral swing analysis shows the extent of change in voter support from one election to another. It is an indicator of voter support for individual candidates or political parties, or voter preference between two or more candidates or parties...
devised by David Butler. Steed was to develop a more complex formula for calculating swing, sometimes known among psephologists as "Steed swing" to differentiate it from "Butler swing".
From 1964 until 2005, Steed - latterly in conjunction with John Curtice
John Curtice
John Curtice is an academic who is currently Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde. He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour, researching political and social attitudes, and is an acknowledged expert on the call for Scottish independence.- External links :*...
- was responsible for the statistical analysis in David Butler's regular Nuffield election studies entitled "The British General Election of ....".
Steed was a leading member of the "radical" wing of the Liberal Party which in the late 1960s and 1970s found itself at odds with the parliamentary party and its leader Jeremy Thorpe
Jeremy Thorpe
John Jeremy Thorpe is a British former politician who was leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976 and was the Member of Parliament for North Devon from 1959 to 1979. His political career was damaged when an acquaintance, Norman Scott, claimed to have had a love affair with Thorpe at a time...
over a number of issues. In particular, Steed and his colleagues felt that "the party must shift attention away from personalities to a wide-ranging debate about ideology, principles and policies". He contributed several articles to the radical monthly, New Outlook. For a time he was an elected member of the Party's national executive.
Michael Steed has always been an ardent pro-European, and his study of parties and elections soon came to embrace continental as well as UK politics. In 1969 he called for a common European currency.
At the 1971 Liberal Assembly, he successfully moved the major pro-European resolution, noting however that the then EEC, in which decisions were taken by "a secret cabal", must be made more democratic. National sovereignty, he argued, would "die away as a European democracy of widely diffused power was created and exercised at all levels" in "a close political union of the people of Europe".
Michael Steed has consistently called for wide-ranging constitutional reform, including devolution all round, with elected regional governments, a more proportional election system, and the abolition of a Prime Minister's right to dissolve Parliament on a whim.
He stood as Liberal Party candidate in the 1967 Brierley Hill
Brierley Hill
Brierley Hill is a town and electoral ward of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, West Midlands, England. It is one of the larger Black Country towns with a population of 9,631 and is heavily industrialised, best known for glass and steel manufacturing, although the industry has declined...
by-election and the 1973 Manchester Exchange
Manchester Exchange
Manchester Exchange may refer to:* Manchester Exchange railway station* Manchester Exchange * Royal Exchange, Manchester...
by-election, in which he pushed the Conservatives into a poor third place. In the 1970 general election he was the party's candidate for Truro. In the February 1974 general election he stood in Manchester Central. In the 1979 European elections, he was the Liberal candidate for Greater Manchester North, where he was defeated by Barbara Castle
Barbara Castle
Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn , PC, GCOT was a British Labour Party politician....
. In the 1983 general election he was the party's candidate in Burnley.
In 1976 Michael Steed designed the new system for the election of the Leader of the Liberal Party.
Steed was elected President of the Liberal Party 1978-79.
For many years Michael Steed was a leading light in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality
Campaign for Homosexual Equality
The Campaign for Homosexual Equality is one of the oldest gay rights organisations in the United Kingdom. It is a membership organisation which aims to promote legal and social equality for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in England and Wales...
, serving on its Executive Committee and for a time as its Treasurer. At a time when there was still great hostility to gay rights, he spoke out at public meetings, including an acrimonious one in Burnley
Burnley
Burnley is a market town in the Burnley borough of Lancashire, England, with a population of around 73,500. It lies north of Manchester and east of Preston, at the confluence of the River Calder and River Brun....
in 1971 over the proposed establishment of a gay club, at which he shared the platform with Ray Gosling
Ray Gosling
Ray Gosling is an English journalist, author, broadcaster and gay rights activist. In February 2010, he claimed during a local BBC television programme to have killed a lover, in an act of euthanasia. He was arrested and released on police bail...
. This meeting has come to be seen as a watershed in the emergence of a national grass-roots gay rights movement in Britain.
In 1975, with his former CHE colleague Paul Temperton, he founded Northern Democrat, a magazine calling for democratic regional government. This later developed into the Campaign for the North, an all-party group pressing for devolution for the English regions as well as Scotland and Wales, with Steed as Chairman and Temperton as Director, using funding from the Rowntree Trust.
In retirement, Michael Steed has returned to his native East Kent, where he remains active in local Liberal Democrat politics. In July 2008 he was elected to Canterbury City Council.
He is currently Honorary Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent
University of Kent
The University of Kent, previously the University of Kent at Canterbury, is a public research university based in Kent, United Kingdom...
. He has also been Senior Research Fellow of the Federal Trust.
He is a Trustee of the Arthur McDougall Fund and of the Canterbury Commemoration Society, and a Vice-President of the Electoral Reform Society
Electoral Reform Society
The Electoral Reform Society is a political pressure group based in the United Kingdom which promotes electoral reform. It is believed to be the oldest organisation concerned with electoral systems in the world.-Aims:...
.
Publications include
(with Dan Mateer and Jon Steel) Charter for Youth, National League of Young Liberals, 1964."Voting in Cities: The 1964 Borough Elections", in Urban Studies, 5, no. 3 (1968): 351-352. Sage, London. ISSN 0042-0980
(with Bryan Keith-Lucas and Peter Hall) The Maud Report (Royal Commission on Local Government), New Society Publications, London, 1970, ISBN 0900438010
(with David M Clark and Sally Marshall) Greater Manchester votes: a guide to the new metropolitan authorities, Stockport, 1973, ISBN 0950293202
Who's a Liberal in Europe?, North West Community Newspapers, Manchester, 1975,
"Parties in the European Parliament", in Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 15, Oxford, 1976. ISSN 0021-9886
(with Ralph Bancroft and Ben Sawbridge) Self-government for the British, Prism, Watford, 1976.
Fair elections or fiasco?: Proposals for a sensible voting system for the European Parliament, National Committee for Electoral Reform, London, 1977.
(with S.E. Finer) "Politics of Great Britain" in Roy C. Macridis et al. (eds.), Modern Political Systems: Europe, (4th edn), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978. ISBN 978-0-13-597187-1
"The Liberal Party" in H. Drucker (ed.), Multi-Party Britain, Macmillan, London, 1979. ISBN 978-0-333-24056-4
(with John Curtice
John Curtice
John Curtice is an academic who is currently Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde. He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour, researching political and social attitudes, and is an acknowledged expert on the call for Scottish independence.- External links :*...
) From Warrington and Croydon to Downing St.: How to sort out the psephological details of a Liberal-Social Democrat alliance, North West Community Newspapers, Manchester, 1981. ISBN 978-0-907803-00-3
(with David Faull) First past the post: The great British class handicap sponsored by Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party, LAGER, London, 1981.
"Voters, Parties and Money" in Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 35, Oxford University Press, 1982.
(with John Curtice) "Electoral Choice and The Production of Government: The Changing Operation of the Electoral System in the United Kingdom since 1955", in British Journal of Political Science, vol. 12, Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISSN 0007-1234
"The Formation of Governments in the United Kingdom" in Political Quarterly, Blackwell, Oxford, vol.54, 1983. ISSN 0032-3179
"The European Parliament" in Bogdanor and Butler (eds), Democracy and elections: Electoral systems and their political consequences, Cambridge, 1983, ISBN 0 521 25295 4
"The Alliance: A critical history", in New Outlook vol. 22 No 3, Prism, Guildford, 1983.
(with John Curtice) One in four: An examination of the Alliance performance at constituency level in the 1983 general election, Association of Liberal Councillors, Hebden Bridge, W. Yorkshire, 1984. ISBN 978-0-901651-05-1
"Dr Reece and the proportional loss hypothesis" in Representation, vol. 25, Routledge (for the McDougall Trust), London, 1985. ISSN 0034-4893
"The Constituency" in Vernon Bogdanor (ed.), Representatives of the People? Parliamentarians and Constituencies in Western Democracies, Gower, Aldershot, 1985. European Centre for Political Studies. ISBN 978-0-566-00878-8
(with John Curtice) "Proportionality and Exaggeration in the British Electoral System" in Electoral Studies, vol. 5, No 3, Butterworths, Guildford, 1986.
"The core—periphery dimension of British politics", Political Geography Quarterly, Volume 5, Issue 4, Supplement 1, October 1986, Pages S91-S103, doi:10.1016/0260-9827(86)90060-1
(with Raymond Plant) PR for Europe: Proposals to change the electoral system of the European Parliament, Federal Trust, London, 1997, ISBN 0901573663
"Will devolution change British parties?" in Representation, vol.36, Routledge (for the McDougall Trust), 1999, ISSN 1749-4001
(with John Curtice
John Curtice
John Curtice is an academic who is currently Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde. He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour, researching political and social attitudes, and is an acknowledged expert on the call for Scottish independence.- External links :*...
) "And now for the Commons? Lessons from Britain's first experience with proportional representation", in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, vol.10, 2000, ISSN 1745-7297
(with Roger Morgan) Choice and Representation in The European Union, Tauris (for the Federal Trust), London, 2002, ISBN 0901573736
(with John Curtice and Stephen Fisher) "An Analysis of the Results", in British Politicians and European Elections 2004 (Ed. Butler and Westlake), Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, ISBN 9781403935854
"Defining Democracy" in Representation, vol.41, Routledge (for the McDougall Trust), 2005, ISSN 1749-4001