Andrew Hindmoor's New Labour at the Centre: Constructing Political Space is a work of political theory, and while Hindmoor says that he hopes the book will appeal to a general as well as a specialized audience, it is a book primarily for political scientists. For the central purpose of the book is to revise a classic of political theory—Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957)—and the so-called median voter theorem that is derived from it. In the process, Hindmoor is challenging the whole “rational choice” approach to voter analysis, which also is derived from Downs. In developing his argument, Hindmoor takes nearly all of his evidence from Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party, with occasional looks back to the era of Neil Kinnock. Thus, the interest of the book to the historian is as a reinterpretation of the tactics of New Labour, and while it is a major reinterpretation of one of the principal voter-behavior theories, from the historian's standpoint it is useful mostly for complicating our understanding of what it means to say that Blair (and Kinnock) pulled the party toward the center.

The median voter theorem is derived from utility analysis and general equilibrium theory in economics. (Downs was a student of the Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow.) It assumes that voters are rational decision makers. They have ordered preferences from left to right, shaped by what Downs calls their “fixed conceptions of the good society” (Hindmoor, 127), and they seek to maximize utility based on those preferences. It assumes that voters can make accurate calculations about both where their own preferences and where party policies fall on a left-to-right scale. They vote for the party that is closest to their preferences. Parties must move to the center (the median voter) in order to maximize their votes and so to win elections. The underlying assumptions are that voters behave rationally and that they (and the parties) have perfect information that enable them to make rational decisions—although Downs himself recognizes that there is no perfect information, which he believes is one reason parties may not actually move to the center.

Hindmoor denies that there is an objective center toward which parties can move. “Policies and parties are not inherently centrist. They are constructed as being such. A party that wants to present itself as being at the political centre will promote a definition of that term and a corresponding account of its policies that best supports [sic] such a description” (63). In arguing that the political center is constructed, Hindmoor clearly is borrowing from postmodernist theory; however, as he points out, unlike a postmodernist, he believes there is such a thing as the center, and like the rational choice theorists, he believes that parties aspire to claim the center in order to win elections. He is simply denying that political space is prearranged and fixed along a straight line, so that there is an objective center that can be rationally determined by measurement, and he is denying that policies are inherently left, right, or center. Rather, the center has to be constructed by the parties themselves. Indeed, the competition to construct alternative conceptions of the center and to persuade voters that theirs is the real one is the main focus of political activity in a democratic political system.

After laying out Downs's theory and his critique of it, Hindmoor devotes the rest of his book to showing ways in which parties and politicians construct the center. He does so with four pairs of chapters, one theoretical and one applying examples from New Labour. The first two argue that parties use rhetoric to persuade voters that their policies are moderate and that their opponents’ are extreme. The next two show how parties innovate (develop new policies) in order to claim the center. Then he shows how parties frame issues, which shapes how voters view policies, as a means of redefining the center without having to change their policies. In the final chapters, Hindmoor argues for the crucial role of the leader and his own record in persuading voters that the party will be true to its promises. In constructing his arguments against rational choice theory, Hindmoor uses a wide range of alternative theories, including (but not limited to) theories of rhetoric, the economist Joseph Schumpeter's theory of innovation, psychological theories on how people deal with complexity (for framing), and principal-agent theory in economics (for the role of leadership).

To a historian like me who is not very theoretical, Hindmoor's argument seems eminently sensible—so much so that I consulted a political scientist colleague to make sure he is not constructing a straw man in challenging Downs. He isn’t! Indeed, my colleague assured me that Hindmoor is offering a radical revision that is not likely to be acceptable to rational choice theorists. However, I suspect most historians will be far more comfortable with Hindmoor's constructed center and his analyses of what New Labour is trying to do than they would be with rational choice. Indeed, Hindmoor is offering a theoretical explanation of what many perceive to be at the heart of New Labour's approach to politics: “spin.”

The main problems with Hindmoor's book are mostly small irritants. He repeats himself much too much (probably part of his effort to appeal to that general reader). Most annoyingly, over and over again he uses a straight line with zero at one end and 100 at the other to illustrate Downs's application of his theory to property ownership. The constant repetition of this example with each set of chapters becomes strained, and it sometimes confuses rather than clarifies. More important, his theoretical discussion of leadership is significantly less persuasive than his other concepts; indeed, the leadership chapters are the weakest. Overall, however, Hindmoor adds some very useful nuance to the straightforward claim that Labour moved to the center under Kinnock and Blair in order to become electable once again.