The 2026 local and devolved elections have delivered a big redistribution of power – but many of those now in charge rely on vote shares that raise real questions about the strength of their mandate. The results are a reminder that in a more fragmented, low‑trust politics, winning office is no longer enough – leaders also need better ways of building shared support for the hard decisions ahead.
Over recent local election cycles, the combined vote share for Labour and the Conservatives in English contests has fallen from comfortably over half of all votes to just 36.8% in 2025 – the lowest two‑party share on record. In many of this year’s contests, the winning party again secured barely 40% of the vote – and sometimes far less – meaning most voters chose another party and many simply didn't vote at all. The May 2026 results have not reversed that trend – and the devolved results in Scotland and Wales point in the same direction, with more parties in play and fewer straightforward mandates.
Whilst the “main” parties of the past tend to their wounds, and commentators speculate about what this means for the prime minister and UK politics as a whole, those taking office after these elections should be seeking to answer a different question: how do you hold and build support when you represent just one slice of a very fragmented electorate, in communities where many people already feel they haven’t had a real say for a long time? That challenge is sharpened by the nature of the choices ahead: on care, housing, climate, public services and the future of the Union, there are no easy wins, only difficult trade‑offs in increasingly polarised debates.
Incoming administrations will need answers fast. Recent research published in the Economic Journal and work by the OECD point in the same direction: governments with weak backing and low public trust can find it harder to turn ambitious promises into visible, significant changes or to hold a steady course – exactly what new leaders are under pressure to show they can do.
Faced with that pressure, the pull will be towards short‑term fixes: sharper messaging, tighter discipline, highly targeted offers to core voters. Those may buy time, but they don’t answer the underlying question of how you grow a coalition in places where a shrinking share of residents feel that voting – or politics at all – gives them any real voice. If that doesn’t change, the risk is a politics defined by protest votes and ever thinner mandates, whoever happens to be in charge.
Evidence shows that giving people a meaningful role in shaping what happens next can help build trust and support. Across the UK, local authorities, devolved governments and parliament have used citizens’ assemblies and juries, residents’ panels and participatory budgeting to bring a cross‑section of the public into real decisions on some of the most contentious and challenging questions we face. These are not rebadged consultations; done well, they give people time, information, space to hear one another, and a clear route for their recommendations to influence what happens next.
Evaluations from these processes show that when people are given time, balanced information and a clear link to real decisions, they come away better informed, more willing to accept difficult trade‑offs and, crucially for incoming leaders, more confident that decision‑makers are listening. In a new landscape of thin mandates and fractured party support, that kind of engagement isn’t a “nice to have” – it’s one of the few tools that can genuinely help leaders hold and build support beyond their core vote.
We know that these approaches work, so now is the moment to scale them in a way that actually changes how decisions are made. That means using deliberation not just once, but across more of the big questions that we need to grapple with; building it into more of our institutions, from local authorities, to devolved governments and parliament; and making sure the outcomes are connected to real decisions; and making sure it is supported by the right skills and infrastructure.
This moment matters beyond the fortunes of any one party. The 2026 elections do not have to be read simply as the end of an old pattern of politics and the beginning of endless instability. They can also be the point at which we accept that elections on their own cannot carry the whole weight of democratic legitimacy – and start to build a culture of shared decision‑making alongside them, so that more people can see themselves reflected in our democracy.