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Introduction
The office of the directly elected mayor was introduced into the United Kingdom by the Labour government elected in 1997. The implementation process began with a referendum in London in 1998 followed 2 years later by the first mayoral election, won by Ken Livingstone standing as an Independent. The principle of the mayoral executive was then offered more widely, subject initially to approval by local referendum. Despite the rather limited take-up throughout Labour's years in office, the policy was one that the new Conservative/Liberal Democrat (LD) coalition also embraced after May 2010. Indeed, the Localism Act (2011) strengthened central government's role and gave powers to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to instruct named local authorities to hold a mayoral referendum. This resulted in a further 10 referendums being held in May 2012.
However, despite such cross-party support among national parties, the principle of elected mayors remains unpopular with most local politicians (see Copus, 2004, Chapter 9). Judged both by the level of their participation in these referendums and by their propensity to vote against the proposition, electors also show some antipathy towards executive mayors. Such low referendum turnout means that a crucial issue determining the future administration of an area can be decided by relatively few voters. Similarly, low turnout has been a characteristic of mayoral elections in the small number of local authorities that have adopted the reform and this has consequences for the strength of the mayor's mandate.
A further problem surrounding mayoral elections relates to the voting system used. The Supplementary Vote (SV) allows simple 'X' voting but unlike parliamentary elections gives voters two votes rather than one. SV permits the transfer of second votes if no candidate succeeds in winning more than half the first votes cast. In practice, many second votes that are cast are ineligible for transfer. Both the individual-level survey data and aggregate-level election results suggest that a significant proportion of voters continue to be unaware of the precise way in which SV determines the winner. Shortly before the London mayoral election in 2012, the fourth occasion that voters in the capital had the opportunity to use SV, YouGov reported that only 47 per cent of respondents knew and understood the voting system,...