Third Party Politics In The UK:on The Rise And Fall Of The Liberal Democrats (2001-2015)

As the third party the Liberal Democrats have for a long time played a peripheral role in the UK political arena, having attracted less media coverage or scholarly debate in political science compared with the two main parties. Nonetheless, this well-established UK political landscape featuring a two-party system took on several new characteristics at the beginning of the new millennium:the third party gained momentum in terms of both votes and seats, and the Liberal Democrats eventually made it to the government by way of the 2010 Con-Lib Coalition. However, the party's success turned out to be transient and ephemeral:the 2015 General Election result was a complete fiasco.In order to explore the reasons behind the electoral undulation of the Liberal Democrats (2001-2015), the author has organized the body of the paper into four parts. The first part discusses several theories pertaining to third party politics, and the second part reviews the development of the Liberal Democrats and Liberalism in the UK. The theoretical foundation of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system and the historical context of Liberalism and Liberal Democrats laid out in the first two parts are prerequisites for understanding the reasons for the party's rise and fall discussed in the third and fourth parts. On the one hand, the party's relative rise is a combined result of its popular education policies, its popular stance against the UK's involvement in the Iraq War, and people's craze for party leader Nick Clegg. On the other hand, a string of broken promises rendered by intra-party differences, the unfavorable Coalition arrangement resulted from its lack of office experience, a paucity of staunch party followers and the surge of several new political forces, have, to varying degrees, dealt a blow to the Liberal Democrats, leading to the party's debacle in 2015.