27th October 2022
Here is a brief post on a constitutional topic that I have avoided on this blog: the electoral system.
This is a topic on which many of you will have Very Strong Opinions – and, as with a codified constitution and membership of the European Union, it may be difficult for you to comprehend why someone could possibly not be in favour.
But.
The value, at least for me, in the current system is twofold.
First, I think there is merit in one person being the representative for a distinct, meaningful area – for example, Birmingham Edgbaston, or the Isle of Wight, or the Western Isles, and so on.
This is especially so given the convention that Members of Parliament refer to each other by their constituencies.
It means that parliamentary debate is itself a congress of places and local identities.
One member constituencies also mean we have by-elections, which provide a form of accountability between general elections that can be surprisingly effective – for example, Johnson’s fall from office followed two huge by-election defeats.
Second, many systems of proportional representation seem to give disproportionate power to party lists and party managers, breaking the direct link between the voter and the candidates.
But, but.
Those two factors are not overwhelming, and perhaps can be offset by other factors.
It cannot be right for certain parties, such as the Green Party, to have so low a parliamentary presence given their national share of the vote.
The current party system is also somewhat artificial, and the parties are themselves faction-ridden coalitions kept together by the needs of the electoral system, and this just causes different political problems – as we have seen with both the Conservative and Labour parties in recent years.
The current system has not even avoided hung parliaments – for example, in the late 1970s, the mid 1990s, and between 2010-15 and between 2017-19.
And the powers of party managers and party lists is just exercised in different ways, with certain candidates benefiting from safe seats.
*
So my mind is not made up, and recent experiences have tested my assumptions in favour of the current system.
(I do not have Very Strong Opinions on every constitutional issue!)
Can a case be made for electoral reform which (a) does not involve name-calling of those opposed, (b) keeps the geographic links without giving party lists and managers too much power, and (c) keeps the possibility of by-elections as a potent political device between elections?
I open to persuasion – and so may be many others who have hitherto been wary of electoral reform.
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Good question. Can I suggest that the voting system used for the devolved Scottish Parliament addresses your concerns. It’s a version of PR that is fairer and gives link between SMPs and constituencies.
Scottish system is not truely proportional. 2011 gave SNP an absolute majority of MSPs whereas SNP had less than 50% popular vote. This is caused by the top-up balancing NOT being across the entire electorate but within a number of regions. If you are going to the troupble of replacing FPTP with PR, its important that it is truely proportional.
The Additional Member System can be proportional. The reason it’s not completely proportional in Scotland is because the number of list seats is smaller than the number of FPTP seats(after independence is achieved, the number of list seats could be increased by around 60 to do just that).
The problem in applying AMS to Westminster and maintaining 650 constituencies is that there would need to be at least 400 list seats. This pushes the Commons quite a bit beyond a thousand MPs. Politically, it seems a tough sale.
If the whole system isn’t being thrown out and rebuilt from ground up, it makes sense to work with as much of the existing framework as possible. That’s why I believe any viable route to PR has to come in by replacing the 800-900 member House of Lords with a PR-elected ~400-member body.
As for national vs regional party lists – I think there are at least two serious downsides to the former. First, the ordering is wholly in the control of the central parties. We then end up with the cabinet and shadow cabinets snapping up the first hundred places and nobody gets to know the real listers before they’re elected. Second, it forces any new parties to compete on a national scale which is quite a high bar to reach. Regional lists give local movements a chance to cross that chasm, as well as potentially decentralising party list selection into regional collections of constituency branches.
Replacing the second chamber with PR does feel like the best of both worlds.
Longer tenure in the second chamber could incentivise less politicing but that’s maybe wishful thinking.
The challenge is in the detail of what role and powers that second chamber has and how we prevent deadlock a la US Congress. Do bills pass through both houses in the same way they do now? Do we abandon the Salisbury convention?
A bigger question is who forms the government. Still the party that can command a majority in the Commons, or across both houses?
I prefer PR for the lower chamber as that is where the real power is. The upper chamber could be elected along the lines of the US senate, with longer terms of office and only part of the chamber up for election every 2 years.
I like the idea of a direct PR upper chamber too.
FPTP lower chamber can be made fairer by changing boundaries to make the constituencies more even in numbers
Equal sized constituencies don’t affect much as the distribution of votes across constituencies is what causes the problem.
PR needs to be in the lower house, where executive power is.
The list ordering doesn’t have to be entirely under party control. Under the Dutch system you can put your first preference for anyone on the list, so it is possible for the order to be subverted. Not sure how much it happens now, but it did to the VVD in the 1980s
Any system that attempts to link seats to geographic regions will never be ‘truly proportional’ since there will always be differences between regional and National voting share.
However, almost any PR system is considerably more representative than FPTP. Today, one party can achieve a big majority with less and 40% of the popular vote, and another can be unrepresented with 10% of the vote.
So I disagree that the objective must be a truly proportional Parliament.
Achieving a considerably more proportional Parliament while retaining some of the benefits of the current system sounds like a perfectly reasonable, and achievable brief.
I should correct the point about by-elections under the system used to elect MEPs. By-elections don’t work in that system.
However, I’d argue that what matters is that voters can affect politics mid-term. By-elections are peculiarly important for this in FPTP but they’re random, unrepresentative, and not the only mechanism available.
In a world where Parliament was elected by PR, the sensitivity of MPs to the public mood, and the importance of local election results would change. Our representatives would still be influenced mid-term.
Additional Member Systems like those used in Scotland, Wales and Germany fail DAG tests (b) and (c) in my view:
* yes, the local MSPs have a constituency link, but the list MSPs don’t;
* if a list MSP stands down, they are replaced by someone from the list, and there is no byelection;
* the lists are closed – the electorate gets no choice which candidate is chosen as a top-up member. That could mean that someone who is roundly defeated in constituency seats could be forced on the electorate via the list (albeit it might be at a different election).
Open list systems do exist and can be used.
Your first point isn’t entirely true. List members are tied to EU constituencies, in my case Highland and Islands. So I can write to them all about a local issue and at least one of them is likely to be sympathetic. cf writing to my fptp MP on an issue about which their party might disagree with me.
@Richard – that’s true. But if we adopted a Scotland-style AMS for Westminster, the list seats in parts of Scotland would cover an absolutely huge area, so I’m not sure there’s that much of a local link.
@Kevin – yes, but I was specifically talking about Scotland and Wales, which have closed lists. I believe Germany has a closed list too.
“That could mean that someone who is roundly defeated in constituency seats could be forced on the electorate via the list”
Common joke on Holyrood is that Murdo Fraser (Tory list MSP) is the least elected Parliamentarian. Stood for constituency 8 times, but never elected. 8 times appointed from the list.
The democratic deficit is the voters CAN’T get rid of him, only his party.
@steve, I think you may have impacted the fastening on the head…
Once installed, if you can’t effectively ‘hold them to account’ for their actions or inactions, as is currently the case from Parish Council up to Westminster, then “Who cares how they got there?”
The fact that Vox Pop still yearn wistfully for Boris’ return must show that any Knave willing or able to spin a good yarn is likely to be elected, under any system.
When was the last time you actually knew what any given candidate actually stood for or would actually do? “They’re all the same…” is a common refrain during most elections, local or otherwise.
I think the better question is: “How can we construct a fair AND efficient mechanism for removing those in power unwilling or unable to follow Nolan?”
One only needs to look to Russia or China to find leaders that are regularly elected with implausibly large popular votes. The question is not how do you get the right person for the job but, how do you get rid of the wrong one, once they have shinned up the greasy pole?
To quote Douglas Adams:
“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
How to get rid of a leader is an equally challenging conundrum since, if it is made too easy, then you are probably doomed to the revolving door of Premiership we have seen most recently, or the Northern Irish issue.
However, it may be easier to contrive proper rules and regulations to control behaviour – based on an assessment of fact or Actions, than the spuriously simple methods for counting votes – in fact we may already have most of the necessary rules in place…. It’s just the ability for aggrieved citizens to enforce them, without the need for them to take excessive and significant personal risk, that is missing.
Why are those in power so keen to remove our access to Human Rights?
Why can Government and public bodies freely spend thousands of taxpayer’s pounds to defend the indefensible and then claim crippling costs from individual citizens trying to hold authority to account if they somehow win on a technicality?
Should the right to Legal Aid or Cost Capping apply equally to Public Law issues, so as to produce a more level playing field, as it does to Aarhus Convention claims?
Why have government failed to implement the reforms that could have brought this to pass?
https://consult.justice.gov.uk/judicial-review-reform/judicial-review-proposals-for-reform/
[Answers on a post card please…]
Party Lists would benefit from involvement by regional memberships votes setting the order (perhaps allowing the parties to pick 1 or 2 first?).
And you can preserve constituencies by having two types of MP – a constituency one (covering a slightly larger patch) and a regional one (elected from the lists to balance proportionality).
The precise design would need some wargaming to see what the balance between those two would need to be and how much larger each constituency becomes to keep MP cohort the same size.
Or even better use STV. No need for careful design. It’s proportional, maintains constituency links without lists and is easy for voters to understand.
Whatever it’s shortcomings, STV would be a considerable improvement on FTP
I really dislike STV, because at its heart it’s not a single vote, but a multiple one if you lose. After your first vote fails you aren’t voting *for* your preferred candidate any more but just trying to vote *against* someone.
Your are voting for your second-favourite candidate, surely? And so on. Of course, you don’t have to vote for more than one person if you don’t want to, and many people don’t – that was certainly my experience when I voted in Ireland.
That is just not true, Chis. It does what it says on the tin. Note the name.
One vote. If that vote is not needed, by the candidate who has your first preference because he already has enough votes to get elected, it is transferred to your second preference who might need it to get elected.
Or if your first preference vote turns out is wasted because the candidate just cannot get enough votes to cross the line, then your second preference comes into play. Voters can rank all the candidates until they can no longer express a preference. This means that many fewer votes are wasted.
STV is only one vote, hence the name. A vote only gets transferred if your first choice has enough votes to be elected. But it remains one vote. Your vote only gets to count against one candidate.
Surely that is not true.
In Ireland, STV, if your candidate is eliminated, then their votes are redistributed.
Your vote counts again, which is good as if your 1st choice doesn’t make it, your second choice may.
Your vote didn’t count again, as it was transferred because your first choice had received enough votes to ve elected. It only counts once. It will be transferred in successive rounds until it does count.
I would like a constituency MP elected by STV for a pop u l’action of about 100000 and perhaps three regional MPs. representing a population of about a million chosen by party list. That way I am likely to be able to contact at least one representative who is sympathetic. And the total number of MPS. does not need to increase.
The Irish/Northern Irish system – 4 or 5 member constituencies elected by single transferable vote- has both (b) and (c).
As to (b) the parties will present several candidates – but voters can choose to rank them how they like. So if you are a Tory supporter and we’re presented with (say) Rees-Mogg and David Gauke as your candidates, you can rank them as you like – and if you are a Gauke supporter nothing stops you choosing a Lib Dem as your 2nd preference over Rees-Mogg. Irish voters have got very good at understanding and using their preferences in this way: and if a party tries to discipline a popular MP (Gauke again) the system makes it easy for him to stand as an independent and get re-elected. MPs also have strong incentives to work hard for their area (to get precious 1st preference votes). And every MP would be for an area: there might be five or six members for Birmingham (better, perhaps, to be one of five members for Birmingham than the only member for Edgbaston?)
As to (c), it’s easy: if a member dies or resigns, the whole constituency elects 1 member to replace them (inevitably on first past the post, as there’s only 1 slot). So you’d have a “Birmingham bye-election”. Which might be a rather important political event.
PS – 2 member constituencies were of course the norm for most of our history – and survived well into the C20. So having 1 MP for a constituency is hardly a constitutional fundamental.
An added advantage of the Irish system of multiple seat constituencies is that there are multiple counts per constituency, going on for an entire weekend. Greatly expanded punditry and no more staying up until 4am
Yes, the 3 day (or thereabouts) media election-fest is great fun. During which – gratifyingly – political rivalry is generally set aside and for a short period the politicians are both candid and gracious to one another for a change. And it gives the voting public time to slowly absorb the consequences of what they have done.
And yet we nearly lost all that. Dutch voting machines were brought in about 15 years ago that could calculate everything to the very last count within an hour of the polls closing. They were never used due to “technical issues” but in reality nobody trusted the results if votes weren’t cast in pencil on paper ballots and counted manually in vast count centres with “tallymen”, the eagle-eyed party-appointed observers, watching every ballot paper being sorted and generally getting within a few votes of the official count results.
Famously Bertie Ahern thought (or claimed to think – things were never as they seemed with Bertie) that Ireland would be “a laughing stock with our stupid aul’ pencils”, but Ireland ultimately decided that a sacred process is all the better for being grounded in simple historic roots.
Manual counting solves a very important problem – how to prevent subversion of the electoral process by a small number of people. By having a large number of people involved, subversion would require subverting many of them making it extremely difficult and virtually impossible to do so secretly.
Additionally, automated counting suffers from the problem that the automation itself could be subverted. It’s extremely difficult to subvert a pencil, paper, and a box.
When was the last time the Stormont Assembly actually did anything useful, that could be considered governing?
I think the question is not how they get there, so much as what do they do when they are there, and how you [fairly] get rid of those only willing to work in their own interest, rather than in the public’s interest, so as to achieve some sort of stability.
Northern Ireland is a special case. It relies on power sharing to function. When one party refuses to engage, as is currently happening, it becomes deadlocked.
The comments above are about the Republic of Ireland, not Northern Ireland, so no veto can be applied if a majority of TDs agree to form a government
This is also the system I prefer. I like the way it gives voters the ability not only to influence the balance of parties in Parliament but also the balance of opinion within parties as you describe.
Another advantage of STV is that there is a single category of MP. With additional member systems there are MPs with a constituency and MPs without.
Indeed the idea of supporting individual candidates rather than “the party” was an issue my late father enjoyed trying to explain to me in terms of the Irish PR system.
He was delighted to be able to say to each and every candidate who called during the election canvass, ” Yes indeed, I will definitely vote for you on the day.”
He then proceeded to give each of the numerous candidates a vote in the order of preference he had for the individual or their policies. If there were twenty candidates in his constituency, he used each number from one to twenty.
I thought it was a very clever way of avoiding telling a mistruth….
My pet system, for discussion:
Dual Representative Proxy Vote (DRPV)
Elections are held as now with candidates standing for constituencies, voters selecting their single preferred candidate etc. All exactly the same as now.
The difference comes in declaring the winner.
The candidate with the most votes is returned as MP for the constituency as they are now.
However the MP with the 2nd most votes is also returned as MP.
So each constituency has 2 MPs.
The other crucial difference is each MP no longer has one vote, they have the number of votes they polled at the election.
Eg
Candidate A 3,000 votes
Candidate B 12,000 votes
Candidate C 18,000 votes
Results in
MP C with 18,000 votes in Parliament
MP B with 12,000 votes in Parliament
The government would be formed from the party with the most votes.
This keeps all the local representative advantages of FPTP. It even enhances them as more of the voters will have an MP who they voted for and provides a direct link between the voters and the votes in parliament as the MP is effectively wielding their constituents’ votes directly (by proxy)
It keeps by-elections as a mechanism (albeit a bit more complex as both MPs would need to be recalled)
But it also makes the number of votes in parliament much more representative of the popular vote.
+ The local representative is kept
+ Independents can still stand
+ The % of voters who have an MP (either 1st or 2nd) they voted for is much higher than now, typically over ⅔
+ Elections happen exactly as now
– Votes in parliament are more complex
– More MPs (or fewer constituencies)
As in so many things, the German system (and the process in Scotland even more so) addresses this in a way that combines the advantages of local representatives and national lists that complete, rather than replace, the locally elected MPs. A combination of single seat circumscriptions plus added members from a national list could have many advantages. I noticed that you have only indirectly mentioned the other traditional objection: that this would very often lead to coalition governments, as no party would have absolute majority.
I agree. The German AMS has much to recommend it. It combines a FPTP element with a party element which ensures proportional representation of parties.
If you feel it’s essential for MPs to be popular enough to get popular votes, it could be tweaked to reduce party lists, eg by selecting the additional members from those who came closest to being elected via the FPTP system.
See eg https://peterenglish.blogspot.com/2017/06/on-politics-and-political-representation.html for my previous comments on this.
I think DAG did refer to this (at least obliquely). Labour & Conservatives are coalitions of different factions. Though sometimes a particular faction may end up in almost complete control, for a while at least. Conservatives at the moment balancing fiscal orthodoxy adherents, ERGers, libertarians and a few one nationers.
One advantage of PR may be that the general public can more directly control the balance of these factions (if they became separate parties).
PR may enable the public to select the mix, but it doesn’t give them any say in the deal that is reached between them. At least in the current system, the public gets the final choice between the products of the two coalitions.
Though, I suppose, recent Tory antics show that the programme of said coalition can still change after the vote!
But are coalition governments worse than those with absolute majorities?
At least a coalition forces internal scrutiny / challenge / debate of policy before starting legislation which is beneficial in my opinion. Recent events in Conservatives where libertarian free marketeers won the leadership, picked a cabinet of the likeminded (or supporters), rushed into a budget without proper deliberation / scrutiny and caused major financial turmoil should be a lesson that absolute majorities may not be ideal.
Like other respondents I’d suggest that the Additional Member System used in Scotland, which combines constituency and list members, would address the issues you raise while giving a suitably accurate reflection of votes cast.
It’s always interesting to have one’s assumptions challenged, mine being that PR is inherently better! So, thinking cap on…
Firstly, to your specific point about the two by-election defeats. I think this actually counters your own argument: i.e. that those two MPs lost their seats because of Johnson and a vote against the government. It was not a vote against the local party and candidate MP.
Secondly, to your point about representation. You mention the Greens but in 2015 UKIP won 12.6% of the vote, which under PR would have given them 80 seats. Much as I (strongly) dislike UKIP, if they had won those seats, maybe we would have taken them (and the threat of Brexit) more seriously.
My final point is that I think it’s near impossible to be a good Westminster MP and a good constituency MP: there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week. We do need some local representation alongside PR. I’ll leave it to wiser heads to suggest how that might work!
> I think it’s near impossible to be a good Westminster MP and a good constituency MP: there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week.
That’s a very good point, and does indicate a potential advantage to the “direct plus list” mix.
Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone here…
A constituency MP isn’t working for their constituents if they are doing other roles…So remove other (ministerial) roles from them and say those roles must be filled from AMS members first
Eg.
– Reduce number of constituencies slightly
– Party lists used to correct proportionality
– Parties put their best and brightest ministerial material at top of lists
That removes the accountability of ministers to voters. They are automatically in safe, uncontested list sests.
Much as many of us enjoyed the “Portillo moment”, I can see that it actually does make sense for parties to be able to list at least a few “top” MPs, so that they can be sure that key individuals are guaranteed a place (as long as the party isn’t totally wiped out, of course).
I don’t agree that some are so talented they must be given a free pass. That way ends up with a government frontbench made up of political careerists who’ve never won an election and are completely safe in their position.
I think that to become a minister in a government you must first be elected to Parliament. It follows you must continue to be elected.
Could the party be better judged as to its true character, by a careful assessment of those it chose to allocate ‘Safe’ [List] seats?
This is almost possible under the present system, but a clear list, and the need for the party to allocate those to the chosen few may be instructive for the floating voter…
A really interesting solution.
Presumably that could create some discontent among run-of-the-mill constituency MPs who don’t have a promise of a ministerial job on the horizon. Potentially in effect guaranteeing duds.
The counter to this is that I’m practice parties may expect you to warn your stripes as a constituency MP before being promoted to the premier league.
I think one strength of current system is that Ministers are also constituency MPs. At least the system allows a direct link of Ministers with constituents. When it works, any widespread issues can quickly get the attention of Ministers via their surgeries, without bureaucracy filtering out bad news.
Does anyone have statistics to show how often the current system does actually work?
As resident of a ‘Safe seat’, with incumbents elevated to senior roles in Government, without fail, our MPs for the past 20-years have been widely considered ‘absent and largely ineffective’, from a constituent’s point of view; unless you consider the odd PR photo-op just before an election, a valid use of public money.
I don’t think that’s generally true. MPs usually strive to increase their majorities, even in safe seats. Those in government have less time to work for constituents and may rely on their profile as a minister to boost popularity.
I live in a safe seat. My MP is politically opposite to me but he is a good constituency MP and he has responded to emails I’ve sent. He holds regular surgeries, etc. I’d never vote for him though.
And the three line whip rather undermines constituency interests I would have thought.
I am not sure that it is impossible to be both a good constituency MP and a good legislator, or even a good minister.
The secret is to delegate, and have a really good constituency team. One of the recent PMs used to be my MP, and he was surprisingly excellent as a constituency person – rather better than he was a PM.
There is no reason why in multimember seats that that would be any different.
Under STV/5 seats you need to get over a sixth of the vote to get elected. That’s 16.7%. However, that does not mean that UKIP would not have got an MP. It’s possible that their support in some constituencies would be big enough to reach this threshhold.
But under a party list variant of PR, yes very bad things can happen. That’s why the mechanism (STV vs party list) is much more important than the result (proportional representation).
And, of course, the electoral system should not be designed to achieve a specific result. If the people want a candidate, they should get that candidate – that’s democracy.
I disagree that the method of PR is more important. We shouldn’t decide on a method of PR purely because it excludes parties we don’t approve of.
I don’t like UKIP, but if they got proportional representation in parliament it would expose them to greatly increased scrutiny. That I think would decrease the party’s appeal as it would expose the worst moral aspects it represents. The whole point of PR is to give all political opinions fair representation in parliament according to their popularity.
Proportional Representation can result in stronger constituency links than what we currently experience. A good explainer of that can be found here:
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/does-proportional-representation-break-the-constituency-link/
I share your concerns about the power of party leaders, but do not believe that is unique to PR and is experienced in FPTP in equal measure.
Delegated democracy is not perfect, it’s practical. But voter representation by delegates of a majority of voters must, on balance be preferable to minority rule, particularly when that minority rule is absolute and leaves the losing majority unrepresented.
A further problem is that FPTP artificially keeps political parties together despite their ideological differences. This applies to both Labour and the Conservative Party, so that an even smaller minority has absolute power than voting figures show and large swathes of voters cannot or choose to not vote according to their political beliefs. This is something PR will definitely and instantly resolve.
Other countries have systems combining proportional representation for a First Chamber with with regional representation in a second chamber, so that the advantages of both systems are combined. It would mean converting the HoC into a proportional representation chamber, and the HoL into regional / local representation, or vice versa. It would be good to keep an element of expertise in the HoL (representatives selected based on skill and experience in an area like law (former judges), education, environment. foreign affairs, security, and even some religious representation, etc). But it should do away with the current system where the outgoing PM can nominate mates and family.
Seconded.
Thirded.
I think it is impossible to have a single member constituency and proportionality. The single transferable vote with say 3 members per constituency gives locality and competition for effectiveness between local MPs. However, although it will ameliorate the third party problem there is an effective threshold that would penalise parties with support around 5% nationally. The by-election could be engineered by a one out all out method requiring the constituency to re-elect the full complement at a by-election. By-elections are relatively infrequent so there would not be too much disruption.
Odd as it may seem, PR may be the only way to save the tories from electoral obscurity. Be careful what you wish for.
But they wouldn’t be the same Tories. Political parties inevitably react to the electoral system they operate in, react to the specific voters they need to attract.
And there will always be a large bloc of voters whose politics can be broadly described as small c conservative, as generally right-of-centre. In a more proportional system, many of them will back a conservative party – which might well be the same old Tory party, but adapted to the new circumstances.
For me, an example of a major flaw of FPTP is that the Liberal Democrats increased their share of the vote by 4.2% of the entire electorate from the 2017 GE to the 2019 GE. Somehow she had to resign after that election, as they lost a seat and she was seen as a failure. From the same election, Labour – 40.0%, Con – 42.4%… and an 80 seat majority? This makes it clear that opinion polls and election day popularity are next to worthless metrics, as they have far less correlation to the number of seats than is the case in a PR system. The only way to succeed in UK elections is either to be a already big or a concentrated regional party. That’s a lot of people to ignore.
I come from a country with PR. We have our own problems, but one thing I have never heard from any side is fundamental dissatisfaction with how the elections themselves work. Everything should start there, you should get what you deserve at the ballot box.
I do agree that the single-party constituency system does not mesh as well with PR. If party lists, for example, are considered to be a problem (and I don’t necessarily disagree, but there are other options), I guess the question is whether that would be a price to pay for the problems with the current system.
Jo Swinson had to step down as leader of the LibDems because she lost her seat, not because she was perceived as a failure: the leader of the LibDems is required to be an MP, a curiosity in a party that is promotes devolution.
No system is foolproof. Our system does not encourage working across party lines. It can happen but is in short supply when it comes to the big issues other than war.
Government by one ruling party depends on the party holding together. MPs co-operate, but ultimately loyalty is to the party, only exceptionally for the good of the country.
Working collaboratively requires compromise. The two party system works against that.
More equitable representation which encourages cross party working would be preferable. Only then will minority parties begin to have a say which ultimately will be for the good of government.
Single Transferable Vote at a constituency level for the lower chamber plus full party list for the upper chamber ?
I am old enough and fortunate enough to admit to being persuaded of the merits of preferential voting in multi-member constituencies by the late Enid Lakeman. She was formidable in her persuasive power born of the understanding that, if you account for fairness and add the fact it gives most power to the voter to differentiate between candidates, then it gives more power to the people and is as easy as 1,2,3…
Yep, old Enid is still right; STV is just so much better than X voting for a party list of one, as under FPTP. And STV is arithmeticly based on a widely understood and tested algorithm.
Some would say that STV weakens the party system and encourages independent candidates, but that is perhaps a small enough defect.
Thanks for asking and thanks for reading.
That’s not a defect – it’s an advantage. Parties are a necessary evil, whose influence should be minimised. Independent candidates can much more accurately represent exactly what constituents want rather than being a compromise of various policies, some of which benefit the party and not the country.
“(b) keeps the geographic links without giving party lists and managers too much power, and (c) keeps the possibility of by-elections”
Proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote (PR-STV), as practiced in the Republic of Ireland, easily meets both of these criteria.
The local geographical link is preserved very strongly, and is a prominent feature of Irish politics.
Vacancies are filled using a single-winner by-election. This slightly distorts the overall proportionality. But by-elections are in important part of Irish political culture, so that has been considered a price worth paying.
PR-STV is also used in many other places of course (e.g. Northern Ireland Assembly elections, Scottish local elections, elections to the Australian Senate). But most use other methods for filling casual vacancies, in order to preserve proportionality.
Also worth bearing in mind that PR-STV is a thoroughly British system, originally invented by Thomas Hare, who proposed that a version of it be used in the House of Commons. Apparently it used to be known as “British proportional representation”. That’s why it was the go to option when the UK parliament first introduced PR in Ireland (north and south).
This. Indeed, I was surprised at David’s concern about finding a PR system which “keeps the geographic links without giving party lists and managers too much power”. FPTP as practiced in the UK gives parties extraordinary power (at the expense of the voters). If parties having excessive power is a concern, then it’s one which militates strongly in favour of a move away from FPTP.
I agree. STV meets all the DAG tests. There is a conflict between proportionality and constituency size – the more members for a constituency, the more proportional the result is likely to be – but with a fairly small number of members per constituency I reckon you get a meaningful patch in most cases, and a degree of proportionality.
One question that DAG didn’t open up is whether there is an objective about the size and breadth of parties. FPTP favours those who can assemble large, broad coalitions (Lab/Con), or have highly concentrated votes (SNP); the more proportional the system, the more likely it is that those coalitions splinter. That might be a good thing for transparency – do electors want the English Nationalist end of the Conservative party, or the pro-business, more socially liberal end? Do electors want Corbynites or technocrats? Etc. But it can also allow tiny fragments to exercise significant power in coalition forming, and on policy areas they particularly care about, as seen in Israel, I would suggest.
Have a look at the german system.. with both local reps and list system…
You can have a mixed system, as Germany does, and, in a different way, Estonia. Some Mandates are personal, some are based on PR. The same operates in Scotland. PR does not have to mean D’Hondt in all its complexity.
Not all MPs actually serve their constituency. I have long thought that the PM should represent the constituency of Westminster Hall, so someone else can represent her actual constituents.
A mixed system allows for this. Ministers lose their personal or proportional mandate, and are replaced by a substitute from the party list, as again in Estonia.o
Hmm. I intended my post above to have blank space between paragraphs! Somehow that seems to have been lost in translation. Apologies for the wall of text.
The ideal would be non partisan constituency representatives elected on the basis of the majority vote of their constituents. These representatives would vote in Parliament on issues in line with their constituents best interests.
However, idealism doesn’t work in reality and the representatives would coalesce into similar interest groups or Parties.
If we are to have parties I think PR gives the most representative view of the electorate, as a party with 37% of the votes wouldn’t have absolute power.
While this is the European model it’s unlikely that the major parties would go for this in the UK as they prefer the adversarial system which is fundamental to the two party system. It’s interesting that when the UK has been involved in developing parliamentary systems for other countries, post war Germany springs to mind, it’s the PR model that’s been adopted. This is also the system used in the devolved assemblies in the UK, except England which hasn’t got round to having a devolved National Assembly.
Maybe England should have a PR National Assembly, and the UK a PR Parliament??
Another excellent email – thanks.
I think the best answer is multi-member constituencies. No lists and the maintenance of links to the locality. It fails in that small parties are still likely to get fewer MPs than their votes demand but I doubt there is a perfect system.
Some would argue that it allows the likes of Nigel Farage and the BNP to win seats – as Farage did as an MEP – but these minorities do have a constituency and are entitled to representation.
I have only relatively recently come around to the idea that the current electoral system needs change, based on 2 main realisations.
1) the political makeup of our national parliament is simply not representative of the political makeup of the population (e.g. an 80 seat majority with a minority of the vote)
2) not all votes are of equal value – in a marginal constituency my vote might swing the election; in a safe seat it might have no value and have literally no bearing on the makeup of parliament.
These features seem to me now to be fundamentally unfair and yes, undemocratic!
With respect to your questions, these do not seem insurmountable problems. The Scottish system for MSPs addresses some of them, as far as I understand it ? That said, I am not knowledgable on voting systems. I tend to think that everything other than FPTP is some form of PR, which is almost certainly untrue. But what I believe is undeniable is that FPTP is long past its use-by date.
Interesting post. Thank you. I do understand the resistance to PR; but, the flaws in first-past-the-post system have been hugely highlighted in recent years in Northern Ireland. I have found it interesting the influence the DUP has wielded in coalition situations in the past, a power which appears to be well beyond what the size of their electoral base would indicate in a first-past-the-post system.
The principal disadvantage of our present system is the discrepancy between the share of the national vote and the share of the seats in Parliament. E.g. 1 green MP for 600k national votes, while only about 30k votes for Tory and Labour MPs.
The golden rule of politics is counting so let’s retain all the advantages of the present system by counting votes in Parliament differently. Instead of counting the number of seats/MPs for and against a motion, count the national vote represented by each MP. This means the sole green MP ends up having more weight in parliament due to picking up the share of the national vote from green candidates who didn’t get over the line in other constituencies.
The effect of this is that votes in Parliament end up matching more closely public opinion, and smaller parties aren’t artificially squashed in favour of the big parties.
It would also mean an effective end to single-party governments in the UK; it’s vanishingly rare for any party in the UK to get more than 50% of the vote, so all governments would need the support of at least one other party.
(Which you may be fine with. But we need to recognise that this is a consequence of the proposal.)
I think every form of PR
I think every alternative to the current system ends up leading us towards coalition Governments. I would be interested to learn of alternatives that don’t do this.
Coalition governments are inevitable if you wish to prevent what we currently get, majority rule by a party without majority support. That was OK when parties weren’t so ideologically driven, but a left or right wing populist party can do serious damage to democracy under the present system. Coalitions will have to respect the views of all parties involved, which should moderate extremism.
What an interesting suggestion. This system would favour parties which could stand a candidate in every seat, and put independent candidates at a huge disadvantage. Votes for independent candidates would be wasted if the candidate was not elected.
Is there any country in the world which uses a system like this?
Could there be a way to divide the voting population numerically, rather than geographically, by constituency?
For argument’s sake, say:
To be an MP you must achieve X number of votes. Where X is the current number of voters divided by the current number of seats.
It may be necessary to reduce this to account for non-voters, or simply divide unused votes equally amongst all candidates… An incentive for people to use their vote? Any different to what happens now?
Candidates [can] stand in their ‘local’ area and voters [can] vote for a ‘local’ candidate of whatever colour rosette.
As soon as the person achieves X votes, they are in.
With modern electronics (and some safeguards), this voting could be done ‘live’, i.e. if the person you were going to vote for already had X votes, you could either vote for your second or even third choice, safe in the knowledge that your first choice was already in.
In the alternative, on paper, you have 1st, 2nd etc choices, but again, if enough other people agreed with you, your first choice would get a seat…
Voters would not be artificially restricted by constituency geography.
The MPs voted into power would represent [an equal / equivalent number of] the votes cast (Proportional voting rights)
The government would still be formed by the Party with the most MPs, as voted for. However, smaller parties, like the Greens, would have an equal chance to gain a seat, which would carry equal [or proportionate] weight with every other seat, whatever the colour of the rosette…
Are Constituencies the problem? Or have I missed something?
Personally, I feel more represented in Scotland knowing that I can go to an MSP who covers my region and also at least somewhat aligns with my politics.
If you don’t like party control then open list proportional systems allow voters to exert control over which people the party puts forward are elected.
I would suggest that the Irish system is the Rolls Royce of PR.
It also is a constitution with a ceremonial president but one whose basic duty is to enforce that constitution – which means that Gina Miller will be grateful that she has no prospect of expanding her purview to Ireland.
It is also of course, another constitution written in Whitehall – so British through and through :)
They also have logical geographical constituencies – just bigger. If it’s important they presumably could be addressed as the Hon member for X but they might have to be called the Hon first or second or third member for X according to their position in the poll…
Also often overlooked is that PR would actually give less power to party managers because in FPTP in most constituencies there are only two realistic possibilities. If you want to maintain your power or your closeness to power then you have to comply. With PR there are likely to be at least three or four possibilities. It is automatically more inclusive.
Nitpick: Neither the current (1937) Irish constitution or the preceding (1922) constitution were written in Whitehall. They were both drafted in Ireland by Irish drafters. They were of course seeking to codify a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, but that’s a different thing.
Apologies and thanks for the correction.
Maybe central government simply has too much power, and that’s why it matters what electoral system we have. If more decision-making took place more locally, then the Westminster electoral system wouldn’t matter so much.
Added benefit: national press would have less influence, as would lobbyists and ‘think-tanks’.
I’m fairly comfortable with the commons but would like to see a second house with equal powers, but without the prime minister based on proportional representation.
Obviously over simplified, but I that’s ok because it will be easy, will have all the benefits of the current system and all the benefits of any other system you might imagine.
The link between voters and candidates is all ready broken. Our last two representatives were not from the constituency. Both were ‘professional’ politicians who had no outside experience of ‘normal’ life and were parachuted in. I see no downside to lists and managers under a PR system and considerable upsides where the extremists will achieve representation and show themselves up. (See also Ms Truss’ economic “vision” that did not survive first contact with market reality).
Interestingly enough, the electoral system introduced into Ireland by the British Government, before independence, was superb, has universal support here, and meets all your criteria. I think you might find the Constitution of Ireland an interesting read.
David, I agree with your point about 1 rep per constituency. You can have PR and maintain that link. However that alone will not give proportionality. That is why you need a top up system from party lists to rebalance. However that can potentially lead to your point 2 – where the list members can dominate the parliament. I do believe that if we replace FPTP with PR then the result must be truelly proportional. That also means the top-up mechanism must balance over the whole electorate (like in NZ) not regionally like the Scottish system (which is open to anomalies like the 2011 result).
There are of course 2 types of MP (those representing constituencies and those in the party list). This is odd but we can work with it. Our existing MPs can end up with 2 jobs:Representatives, ministers. Now these 2 roles are totally different and require different skills. It makes sense that representatives are the constituency MPS and the ministers are from the party lists. This means at any one time no-one has to do both roles. A career path could be to start at a representative MP and as experience is gained move to party list and be in pool of ministerial candidates. With such a system you get PR that preserves the good points of FPTP that you mention. I can see that your point 2 is still a potential issue as it might not be overcome (although it will be mitigated. Hope this makes sense.
If I’m understanding you correctly, I rather like this idea. Sounds to me like we’d still have a consituency MP (elected via FPTP, or possibly AV), but would have PR for ministers.
It feels like this approach could work well, since Cabinet would often end up being formed cross-party, following negotiations. The PM would end up being whoever could command the confidence of Cabinet.
The result would hopefully be that policy local MPs are voting on is closer to the views of all the parties that make up parliament, and votes would be less party-line based.
The big downside I can see with this approach is the breakdown of collective responsability, with leaks of “we opposed this, but the others overruled us so it’s policy now” potentially making things unstable.
I will spare you my many Very Strong Opinions on this topic, and just note that last week an MP stood up in the House of Commons and said that he was voting the opposite to his true position because otherwise he would have the whip suspended, and that was a fate he wanted to avoid so that he would be able to vote to kick out the Prime Minister.
No system where Prime Ministers (and Leaders of opposition parties) can unilaterally suspend the whip of MPs. and cull their party from candidates who would otherwise easily win in their constituencies (see Rory Stewart) can criticise others for allocating disproportionate power to party lists and party managers.
The attractions of (some form of) PR for me are
1. It more accurately reflects the share of the vote gained by particular parties.
2. It enfranchises those in constituencies with a large majority for one party. In my constituency the current incumbent won with 57% of the vote. The other candidates combined amassed 43%. For some people that would discourage them from voting.
3. Forcing parliamentarians to work together would help focus on real issues rather than some of the puerile ideological approaches currently pursued. The current crisis in dealing with migrants is a case in point. The objective in Parliament should be to sort the crisis out not to hurl insults at one another.
4. We might (just might) see an end to the braying and taunting across the floor of the house.
I want thoughtful, intelligent and measured political discourse. The current arrangements, exacerbated by social media and much of the print media, seem incapable of producing that. Perhaps it is a lost cause?
I understand your point about the local constituency but think it has got lost in the febrile atmosphere which often pertains in the more heated debates. I also think the convention of referring to MPs by their constituency is outdated and should be abandoned.
Single member constituencies are totally artificial in many urban areas, particularly the larger cities. Even in rural counties like Cornwall the problems that are unique to the existing single member constituencies are more likely the responsibility of the local council.
By-elections are still possible in a PR system based on STV. This happens for local elections in Scotland. Theoretically they could also occur with a list system of PR.
Under a PR system local party members can have as much control of the party list, or the STV candidates, as currently exists in choosing a single candidate under FPTP.
@PeterMay
“the irish system … another constitution written in Whitehall”
That would be rather overstating it. The original (1922) constitution did include some major elements that were British demands. The current (1937) constitution was introduced unilaterally, and not popular in Westminster at the time.
I think the democratic benefits of PR are far outweigh the minor drawbacks described, though they can be overcome depending which PR system is chosen.
The constituency link:
STV (Single Transferable Vote) uses multimember constituencies to create proportionality. Constituencies are larger geographical areas contains two or more seats. Members are elected when they receive enough votes to exceed the quota necessary, over-votes are transferred to the next preferred candidate of each voter. It’s complicated to explain and operate but easy for voters: simply rank your preferred candidates. This process maintains the constituency link and voters have a choice of MPs to contact on personal matters.
In Scotland there is the additional member system where single member constituencies are elected and additional members are elected from party lists to top-up the various party numbers to create a proportional result. Thus most but not all MPs would have a constituency to represent.
By-elections:
The additional member system has these by default. STV can have by-elections but they usually favour the majority party in the constituency. There are ways to preserve proportionality in a by-election, but fiendishly complicated.
Party list systems suffer from both drawbacks. They are the least satisfactory PR systems from a voter point of view. But they do generate truly proportional results.
I personally favour STV over the additional member system. However I’d accept any PR system, including the party list, rather than stick with the iniqutiy of FPTP.
The comments on the previous blog mentioned a system under which an MP needs more than 50% of the vote to be elected. Where no candidate gets more than 50%, there is a run-off between the top 2 candidates.
That approach would not produce true proportionality. However, MPs would retain the constituency link and by-elections would be perfectly possible. It also has the merit of being a very simple system to explain.
And it might change the electoral landscape in seats where currently an MP wins with a minority of the votes cast because the majority of votes are divided between a number of opposition parties.
That sounds very like the AV system. While it produces a winning candidate with the widest support in each constituency it isn’t proportional.
The result may be like AV but the *process* is different. At the AV referendum, one complaint was that a lower-placed candidate could win over the first-placed. That was seen to smack of bureaucratic fiddling and somehow “unfair”. When there’s a run-off, the voters still get to choose who wins.
And I did say it wasn’t truly proportional. OTOH it would meet 2 of DAG’s criteria.
The anti-AV argument used at the 2011 referendum was spurious. Second place doesn’t always win. A separate run off can also produce the result that the winner in the first round loses in the second. In fact AV is also known as IRF (instant runoff) because that is how it works.
I agree it resolves DAG’s two drawbacks but the serious problems of FPTP remain. PR using STV also resolves those drawbacks so that’s a win-win in my opinion.
The “lower placed candidate” is only lower placed in the artificial sense of getting fewer first preference votes. They could be the best candidate in the opinion of the voters in the sense that in a one-to-one contest with any other candidate they would win. The error here is to see the current mechanism as defining the desired result – which obviously then means it appears the best as the contest is rigged.
It is widely recognised that the best candidate routinely loses in FPTP due to their vote being split with a similar candidate to the benefit of a candidate which is quite different and has overall much less support. FPTP can even elect the worst candidate – i.e. one who would lose in a one-to-one contest against every other candidate.
I’m with Steven. To give a sense of how it feels:
I currently have a very good constituency MP .. SNP, not my party, but I’m in broad agreement with his politics, and have found him sympathetic and helpful in trying to resolve practical issues. But with the previous MP .. not so much (it’s a Tory-SNP marginal and last time .. the less said the better).
For Holyrood, I have a constituency MSP (also not my party, also thankfully, congenial) and a selection of regional MSPs. All the regional MSPs have a broad understanding of main political issues in my constituency (region isn’t so big that they don’t all have decent overall knowledge of it) and, suppose my constituency MSP weren’t helpful, I’d have someone from a more congenial party to go to – with an equal locus in any deferred matter I might be concerned about.
The ideal of an MP representing all their constituents, regardless of party, sadly, is not always attained. I think that safely qualifies as an understatement. MPs, however much they might wish otherwise, are more beholden to the central party than to the constituency .. even than to the local membership of their own party.
First past the post might have worked when party machines were not so well developed, when central party organisations didn’t exert such close control over candidate selection, or when MPs felt more free to rebel in Commons debates / votes. Those days have gone. I regret that they’ve gone, but for where we actually are, the Scottish system works better than the Westminster system.
And, as DAG says in the post, PR simply provides a more just result at the national level. (So, as a Scottish Green, I’m much less sidelined at the national policy level, given the SNP-Green coalition, than I would be as an English Green in any forseeable coalition govt. at Westminster).
There’s scope, of course, to tweak constituency and region sizes to adjust the balance between constituency and regional representation .. as it happens Scotland seems to have it about right. But a side benefit of the regional system is that there’s less incentive for gerrymandering at the constituency boundary level, and the coalition governments it more typically delivers are less able to get away with gerrymandering if they did happen to be inclined. You can’t really consider the fairness of FPTP as at Westminster without considering the power it gives one-party governments to gerrymander.
When I voted in the Irish system, I always felt my vote had an affect, I could see where it went, I knew the constituency even if it was large and there were by-elections.
I’m no expert in these matters but as a voter for the last 30+ years in a constituency with a (so far) massive and eternal Conservative majority I just feel my vote never really gets me any bang for my buck. I always vote, ‘cos you have to, don’t you? But I’d rather like it if there were a possibility that my vote counted for something rather than it just getting counted.
Any system that might enable more of us to have a more meaningful say, would, as they say – get my vote.
FPTP is a misnomer – there is no post.
So let’s start by putting in a post – i.e. 50% of the votes. Use simple STV to do that. Keep the existing single-member constituencies.
Don’t make it any more complicated because a significant proportion of the Great British Public will distrust it, and the Tories will have a field day confusing them even more. The proposer of the system can call it “Proper FPTP” so the Tories can’t even monopolise the familiar.
It should stop the worst excesses of the present system even if it’s a long way from being fully proportional. Once it’s embedded and trusted, the next generation can work out the next step. Perhaps a fully-elected House of Lords using proper PR could then be devised.
Don’t get too ambitious – this is Britain, after all. And what we do well is incremental change.
And that is why my piece above does not use “FPTP” – but I get corrected anyway…
Sorry, I wasn’t intending to correct you! My point is that the Tories trumpet FPTP as being the fairest method – as they did with the Lib Dem-inspired referendum. There’s no point in discussing which electoral system is the best if all that would happen is the Tories pulling the same trick as last time.
So let’s fix FPTP first, by improving it and making it even fairer. Which weakens the Tories case for defending the status quo.
What you describe is the Alternative Vote system. It is not PR, and won’t solve the problem FPTP presents.
I’d just like to feel my vote has the remotest point. Living my entire life in safe seats for a party whose policies I disagree with has been wearing, but hasn’t stopped me voting anyway.
I’ll have to look into tbe Irish system (thanks to those recommendations above), the German system, the Scottish system and the PR second house all seem considerably better than what we have, as were the European elections.
Britain’s problem is that the electorate’s choices are restricted by prior decisions by party members. The party selects a donkey and puts a blue rosette on it. The opposing party selects a donkey and puts a red rosette on it. The voter can only choose the colour of the rosette of the winning MP.
The list system of PR is no better. Voters choose a rosette, the party chooses the person.
STV PR – single transferable vote – is the only way to go. The party offers options, the voter picks from those options. Yes a single constituency has more than one MP, but they are all still tied to that geographic entity.
I live in Ireland, but I lived in England for a number of years and still retain connections. Frankly however, due to exposure to British media, even Irish people with no particular connection to the UK can hardly avoid knowing a lot more about the UK than UK residents do about Ireland.
It is hard to convey to those who don’t live with it just how much STV PR changes how voters think, how much more STV voters are engaged with politics and ultimately as a result of that ongoing engagement how knowledgeable and sophisticated they are.
The key is that voters feel ownership. Why wouldn’t they? Every time there is a GE, in the aftermath parties dissect the results looking at how they lost out, what transfers they missed, perhaps even how one town in the constituency felt neglected and didn’t give them votes. The voter is the customer and the customer is king. That’s how democracy should work.
“It is hard to convey to those who don’t live with it just how much STV PR changes how voters think, how much more STV voters are engaged with politics and ultimately as a result of that ongoing engagement how knowledgeable and sophisticated they are.”
This is a fascinating observation. I wonder to what extent it can be substantiated. If it can be, then this would shift my view.
I lived in Ireland until my late 30s. I felt very connected to the political process, people followed their votes as transfers occurred.
Much more engagement than here.
“I wonder to what extent it can be substantiated.”
It’s mere opinion on my part, albeit strongly held. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any studies comparing voter engagement levels in the UK and Ireland. Then again, it’s not my field.
My amateur thoughts: Perhaps some academic with no axe to grind could compare a sample of Irish voters in Ireland with a sample of well settled Irish voters in the UK, with a further comparison between the UK Irish and a sample of UK Britons to check whether Irish lack of engagement in the UK is down to “not belonging”.
I suspect there would be a difference in engagement levels between the Irish in Ireland and the Irish in the UK, but very little difference between the UK Irish and UK Britons.
Would such a result suffice as substantiation?
I have also voted in Ireland and the U.K. and found voting in Ireland a far more satisfying and nuanced affair, plus I always felt my vote counted, even if my first preference didn’t get elected. I find voting in England largely pointless – my current MP has a majority of over 30,000 so it really doesn’t matter whether I vote or not. It is also helpful to have at least one local TD from the party(ies) of government to complain to, even if you didn’t vote for them (each Irish constituency has 3-5 TDs). My current Labour MP is lovely, but there is no point in complaining to her about policies she also disagrees with, but can do nothing about. I occasionally write to the Tory in the next constituency, but, as I cannot vote for him, he can safely ignore me.
Dear David,
The average percentage of the electorate casting a vote in the UK general elections since 1974: 70.16%.
In PR-country The Netherlands (where until 1970 voting was mandatory – hence the starting point): 80.4%.
(Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/ (For obvious reasons, I didn’t count the Brexit vote); https://www.parlement.com/id/vh8lnhrp8wsz/opkomst_bij_tweede_kamerverkiezingen
Kind regards,
Frank in Leiden
Research the Electoral Reform Societies information, they have done research in Ireland etc. https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-systems/types-of-voting-system/single-transferable-vote/
Single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies…. E.g. 3-5 members per area. Obviously they’d be larger than current constituencies but they maintain the geographical link, are more representative than the alternative vote, and avoid party lists.
Great piece. No system is perfect. PR list not only give power to party organizations but they also encourage a sort of coalition system that give outsized power to smaller parties. The French 2 round system also tends to make winners unrepresentative: those second round votes are negative, better than the other bad choice votes.
Part of the problem is that political parties have lost their ties with voters, perhaps because of too many years of easy money and few hard decisions.
PR does not require a party list system. This argument ignores STV, which is proportional, maintains the constituency link and has no lists.
The late Michael Dummett’s ‘Principles of Electoral Reform’ is a superb analysis of what turn out to be two distinct questions: (a) how should a parliament reflect voters’ preferences? and (b) how should voter’s preferences in a constituency decide on a candidate to represent them?
On the latter, I think some sort of transferable vote system would be an improvement on the absurdly miscalled first past the post.
But what chance of reform when a recent PM (a PPE) graduate claimed not to understand PR? (The level of public discussion before the referendum on the issue was of a piece with that surrounding the referendum on EU membership).
Surely a very simple approach would be to make the second chamber of parliament into a body elected under PR. We would retain the primacy of the Commons, so the direct representative system would provide the prime minister and be where legislation starts, but then require proposed legislation to be tested against a body more reflective of the spread of opinion in the country. People might then vote differently for the two chambers – to take your example, one might vote for one of the big parties, or even a specific person, in the constituency but then vote for the Greens, say, in the revising chamber to make sure that environmental concerns were always considered.
And of course we would junk the absurd House of Lords.
I have strong reservations about a wholly-elected second chamber, as it would be filled with party-affiliated people and be subject to many of the same problems of whipping, ambition, etc. And many good people don’t want to be campaigners either. I favour a mix: elections by thirds every few years, single-term membership only, and a proportion appointed by an independent commission on the grounds of public service, expertise and experience of ‘life’ – i.e. giving a voice to those not usually heard.
The first problem is to get the government of the day to introduce this reform.
Last time around there was a serious study led by Roy Jenkins that turned slowly into a referendum on the subject. If you recall the well funded and focussed lobby against both had a lot in common with the Brexit team and won. End of project.
The discussion about exactly which scheme to use is secondary to creating a consensus that it is imperative to change the system. Right now the current cabinet represents a behind-closed-doors result of a negotiation to form a government from the Tory factions. It would be better to make political factions more explicit.
Changing the electoral system is extremely hard because the only people with the power to make it happen are people elected under a different system who are therefore very likely to lose out after the change.
But that doesn’t mean we should just give up!
All electoral systems have their pros and cons. But surely in a bicameral legislature there is no necessity that each chamber is elected by the same system or even that all members within a particular chamber are elected by the same method? So you might retain the ‘benefits’ of FPTP for, say, the Commons but have a reformed (and more powerful) Upper Chamber elected by way of some form of PR.
It is neither necessary nor sufficient to have PR – there are too many ways in which it can be implemented in a highly deficient manner.
However, any change that will improve representation and accountability will inevitably move us farther along to a *more* proportionally representative legislature, even if it isn’t mathematically PR.
Your reference to the Greens not receiving fair representation for the size of their vote is a good example. Who knows how much greater their vote might be if people’s votes counted, which in nearly every constituency they don’t unless they vote for a major party. I vote tactically under FPTP. I would vote differently under PR.
Exactly! There would be no need for tactical voting and the first preference votes would give an accurate picture across the country. (Albeit limited by which parties stand in each constituency.)
The fundamental “problem” is universal suffrage. Electors are not obliged to vote in the national interest, or even in their own interest, and the secret ballot means they cannot be held accountable for their choices.
No electoral system can, by itself, prevent electors voting against the national or their own interest.
I agree that FPTP has many serious flaws, as do all PR systems.
Having said all that, I think there remains one compelling argument in favour of PR: that FPTP has an inherently anti-progressive bias.
Most politics over the past two centuries represents a struggle between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives, in the Oakeshottian sense, wish things to stay more or less the same, while Progressives want to make things better (and thus, different).
There is only one way for things to be the same, while there is an infinity of ways for things to be different. The survival of the Conservative party is no surprise, as is the fissiparous nature of progressive parties. So when one conservative (Conservative) party faces a handful of different progressive parties under FPTP, the conservatives will usually win, while under PR, progressives are more likely to prevail.
First past the post is a failed system and should be replaced.
It produces governments which have not won a majority of the votes cast nationally.
Many people feel that their vote does not matter since. This disengagement from politics is unhealthy in a democracy.
Probably a Very Unpopular Opinion
The system in Aotearoa New Zealand offers the electorate two votes: one for a party and one for a person (a constituent MP). In the 2020 GE, a good friend voted for the Labour Party and for her local MP who was a member of the Maori Party. The Labour Party won a majority, but her local MP was also re-elected. So, an NZ voter doesn’t have to fit themselves into just one political pigeonhole.
I suppose this system somewhat exists in the UK. For example, I can vote for a Green local councillor, but Labour for Westminster. But local councils are beholden to and can be overruled by Westminster (budgets and political power), so a Green councillor feels token. So, maybe there is a case for strengthening the political/legislative power of local councils?
New Zealand has a mixed system of representation. People vote twice – once for an individual as their Constituency MP (first past the post) and another for a party (proportional representation). These two sets of votes determines the final mix of MPs in Parliament. By the way, there is no ‘Upper House’ in NZ either… Compare that to the House of Lords being the second biggest Upper House in the World (only China’s is bigger) and the controversies around the appointments which seem to get bigger every time !
The late renowned thinker Edward de Bono proposed several new ideas in relation to the operation of democracy.
The first one I remember involved representatives (MPs) having a ‘stock’ of vote units to be used in multiple parliamentary votes rather than a ‘blank slate’ for each new vote.
Parties would get an annual stock of vote units based on the number of seats held. So if Party A had 300 seats and Party B had 200 seats, A would get 300 vote units per year and B 200.
Each parliamentary vote would then ‘consume’ units. So Party A could allocate its full 300 units to a particular individual vote, but it would then have a reduced ‘stock’ of units for other votes in that year.
The intention was to achieve a system in which collaboration and compromise across the parliamentary spectrum was encouraged and rewarded, rather than a party with a big majority always being able to get its way.
That sounds appalling. Give me PR and let the elected MPs vote without limitation.
Single member constituencies with STV would be an initial improvement.
Not all constituencies, perhaps, must be geographic. An elected member for, by, and of, a profession might be useful. The Church and the Law have something similar in the upper house.
By-elections have utility. Let’s not have general elections!
600 members with a term of 5 years could be elected about 3 per week, or 5 per week to give more weeks off.
3-5 election teams could move steadily through the country/ies as a travelling circus.
A failing government could fail gracefully and gradually, coalitions could change, feedback on current issues could be unavoidable.
And the sudden huge spasms could be minimised.
I think the weekly drip is better than, say, 125 seats on a day each year or even 10-11 on the last Thursday of each month.
And there’d still be unscheduled by-election as members died or disgraced themselves.
I think that would be an incredibly bad idea. Governments that govern as if they are in perpetual elections focus only on the short-term, and don’t bother with long-term problems because they don’t have the time to deal with them, or much chance of facing the consequences of not doing them.
Think of major reforms like autoenrolment into pensions – that grew from the Pensions Commission announced in 2002, through the Pensions Acts 2007 and 2008, and didn’t complete roll out until some years later. Yes, there were skillful managers maintaining consensus, but you need time for big reforms.
Once again your blog demonstrates the high quality of comments from your readers.
Steve Richards of rock and roll politics has been promising a podcast on PR for some time. You’ve contributed to the research should he follow you.
Meanwhile Elon Musk completes the purchase of Twitter- will that lead to a more representative debating forum or quite the opposite. PR on social media?
Given the criteria you’ve set, I think a slight modification of the system used in Northern Ireland is the best fit. Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies gets fairly close to genuine proportionality (it does under-represent parties which can’t hit 10% or so anywhere, which hurt TUV last time round). It minimises the power of party managers to manipulate lists, as the only way they can guarantee their favoured candidate will get a seat is to deliberately run too few candidates. Any party trying to gain seats will inevitably leave voters with a choice of which of the party’s candidates gets fewest votes and therefore misses out.
For this system, constituencies need to have 5 or 6, or more, members in order to get close to proportionality. For GB elections that could be made to fit quite well with the traditional counties – larger ones would be split, but less populous ones like here in Wiltshire would be a single constituency with 6 or 7 MPs depending on how many the Boundary Commission decided were appropriate. So we could keep traditional boundaries that voters recognise, and keep a local link for MPs.
Where I’d depart from the NI system, and you definitely would, is how they handle byelections. In NI, these would get quite fraught, and a departure from proportionality would be bad news, so parties are allowed to nominate replacements for retiring members. This brings party managers back in and allows the DUP to parachute their leader in, should they choose, without the indignity of having to stand for election. That breaks two of your criteria at once. So byelections should be voted on, either by single-member STV voting or by FPTP.
Have you any thoughts about the Scottish system.
The Athenians classically are said to have patrolled the agora with a swinging dye-soaked rope, so that any (male, householding) citizen who was shopping when he should be voting, governing etc would be marked.
Laziness and various forms of suppression weaken any voting system.
The State should have a duty to obtain a vote from each citizen. The Australian system of requiring by law each citizen to attend each election is a good start. Adding constraints and hurdles such as photo-ID is the opposite.
I think this could be an interesting approach. But in my view you need a “none of the above” option, and a mechanism for dealing with cases where “none of the above” wins the vote.
I agree. Adding a ‘none of the above’ box to all ballot papers would be simple and (I hope) uncontentious, and mean that Abstention becomes a valid act rather than absence or spoiling the ballot paper. (Note: in 2017, as the LD candidate at the election count, I saw a spoiled paper marked ‘bollocks’ and suggested it should count as a LD vote on grounds of our then slogan. This was not accepted!)
I don’t know the proportion of spoiled ballots, which remains an option on paper, but the option for “none of the above” was to stand oneself.
Abstaining is to accept the decision of everyone else.
Under the current system, not all votes are equal.
Why ever vote in your lifetime if you live in a safe seat of a party you oppose?
Why vote for any party other than LAB/CON in a LAB/CON marginal, other than as a futile gesture towards the party you truly support, whose millions of supporters are too evenly distributed to achieve a majority in almost any constituency?
How can a nation express its will through what is effectively a binary choice? If the nation votes for typhoid over cholera, typhoid will be hymning the faith & trust placed in typhoid by the voters, but their true wish was neither, a wish the FPTP system suppresses effective expression of.
“Why ever vote in your lifetime if you live in a safe seat of a party you oppose?”
I feel obliged to remind you of the 2019 “Red Wall” results, where many previously very safe seats suddenly volte-faced to a party that previously had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of winning them.
My own constituency was the first to flip – a fact which baffles me to this day – but it proves at least that nothing in politics is “safe”.
As a retired Electoral Services Administrator working in a ‘safe’ constituency area I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that there was no point in voting because ‘My vote doesn’t count’. This was the response when it came to the Annual Canvass and we were having to chase up non-responders. It was and still is a sad fact that the only persuasive argument we could make was that not being on the Electoral Roll would affect their credit rating and might adversely affect their ability to get a loan, get a mortgage, rent a house or in one instance be able to book a holiday.
Never mind voting being seen as a right and duty of a citizen of this country. Never mind that if you don’t vote then why should the party in power be bothered with your issues – young people take note. We need to address this ‘what’s the point of voting’ attitude and I believe that proportional representation is the only way to get citizens engaged in the democratic process.
And as for being represented by my elected MP, what a joke. Her/His/Its attitude to pretty well everything is diametrically opposed to my own views. In fact the only time I felt I had any representative who’s views aligned with mine was when I had an MEP!
Having lived in several countries with variations on PR (Wales, Germany, Austria, Switzerland), I no longer see any real merits in FPTP. The supposed local link is still available in PR systems, often with the advantage that you have multiple members from different parties representing your area, so you don’t have to rely on the whims of your rightwing Tory small-state Brexiteer MP to deal sympathetically with your concerns over social care, housing, health etc. This is also why the supposed personal connection to your MP is nonsense. Most constituencies are fairly safe seats where the MP knows they have the job as long as they and their party want them to, so their loyalty may be to the party rather than their constituents. Of course, many MPs are hard-working and dedicated, but there is very little their constituents can do in a “safe” seat, under what is effectively a two-party FPTP system, if they are not. The supposed relationship between the people who live in a constituency and “their” MP is essentially feudal in nature, like FPTP itself, and should have no place in a modern democracy.
The key problem, as identified above, is that no parliament will vote to undermine the privilege which the current system has granted the current members.
My suggestion yesterday for second past the post for a second chamber has the possibility of acceptance in the next parliament after the collapse of the Tory party. It may be favoured by both those in desperate need for personal relevance and by genuine reformers.
There might even be a referendum which might win the day by a slim majority.
It could also be a step towards the STV nirvana which is popular in these comments, if only by proving that change can happen.
It could also be a disaster, but at least a lesser one than at present.
Another one in favour of the Scottish system here.
When you’re thinking about this the first thing you have to accept is that there is no perfect system. So it’s about what compromises you’re prepared to accept.
If you want PR you will always have to accept some sort of list, somewhere in the system. If you want local MPs you will always have to accept its not 200% proportional.
The system in Scotland has the following benefits in my mind
1. Still have a local MP
2. List MPs are regional, so still have a degree of locality, and indeed regions are not currently represented in any way at Westminster
3. It allows smaller parties fair representation
4. It prevents landslide majorities
5. It still keeps the lunatic fringes out – needs at least 6-7% of the vote in a region to get an MP (hence why ukip never got an MSP)
6. It develops a multi party democracy, which in turn develops more cooperative politics (over the last 15 years the SNP has had budgets supported by Labour, Libs, Tories and Greens at various points)
Yes, its not perfect, but I think its just about the best available.
While I’d personally prefer something akin to the Scottish AMS system, David R Maciver makes a good case for a random ballot here: https://www.drmaciver.com/2013/09/towards-a-more-perfect-democracy/ .
At a more local level, I have three councillors representing the ward in which I vote. As they are each vote by FPTP, we always have three Conservative Councillors representing us (each winning 40-60% of the vote.
Even assuming that the conservatives have 60% of the vote, surely we should have one non- conservative councillor?
Maybe the solution at every level is to have multi-representative constituencies, and elect those representatives using STV (i.e. vote for indiviuals to represent in priority order).
This then means that I may have an MP in my constituency that I feel might represent me better than the others.
It may also mean that on local matters, those MPs despite being from political opposites, learn to work together for the good of their common constituents.
One would think that a series of baby steps would allow a system to evolve that didn’t hand things over to party manager but still improved the representative nature of the parliamentary system. A decent start would be a move to using the single transferable vote. After that, we could evaluate the options that had opened up. Going the whole hog to PR NOW IMMEDIATELY would be an recipe for ending up with a very flawed system.
The House of Lords is equally, no, even more in need of modernisation. It has a vital role in scrutinising the work of the Commons but it has been hugely abused. It needs some democratic accountability, perhaps some regional input, but without the ability to fully override the HoC, US Senate style. A conundrum for people cleverer than I am to solve.
PR doesn’t have to be a party list system. STV is PR. It isn’t a step towards PR.
In Ireland, we have proportional representation by single transferrable vote (PR by STV). This means that we have between three and five TDs (MPs) per constituency, and we vote 1, 2, 3 in order of preference.
I think the huge advantage of this system is that it is virtually impossible for a government to be formed without a TD from every constituency. So the whole of the country is represented geographically.
By contrast, in the UK, it is possible to be elected with around half of the vote in just over half of the constituencies. When the Tories are in government, they only need to keep the shires happy. When Labour are in government, they can concentrate on the large cities and the north. The situation in the US is similar, but worse. A map of red and blue in the US shows how divided the country is.
The Irish system since the 1980s has always resulted in coalition government. In the early 1980s, some of these were quite short-lived (only a few months in a few cases). But most governments since then have run to a term of about five years. Of course there are tensions between coalition partners. But compared with the tensions among Conservative MPs in recent years, these are trivial.
I don’t think any electoral system is without flaws, but I think ours is far, far better than FPTP.
I don’t entirely understand the Irish system. What I do understand and detest is the British — English — unwillingness to look around and learn from others’ experience. There is much that could be improved in how things are done on this island beyond “an Australian points-based immigration system,” which the Australians have largely abandoned anyway. Other countries face similar problems and solve them in ways that are more or less similar to our own. But their experience is rarely cited.
I think this discussion needs to include the Lords as well. It could be perfectly feasible to facilitate the local link via an elected second chamber of parliament. The pomp and circumstances associated with the Lords don’t need to change.
I leave it to others to comment on how to reorganise the Commons for best proportional representation.
The biggest issue with winner-takes-all single-member constituencies is that they create a perverse incentive. There are two ways of winning:
1. By trying to persuade the largest number of people to vote for you
2. By trying to dissuade more people from voting from your opponent(s) than will vote for you.
2 is much easier than 1, which is why politics in FPTP systems becomes so incredibly toxic. Newt Gingrich realised this in the 1990s and ended up destroying American politics by focusing on partisanship.
In proportional systems, dissuading voters from one rival may merely send them into the arms of another. The second strategy is far more difficult, and so politicians have to rely on a greater extent on giving people a reason to vote FOR them, rather than AGAINST others. (Though of course, as with all generalisations, it still goes on.)
The other unique thing about the British electoral system is that, although it is bicameral, the upper chamber is very silly. It contains people appointed, either by various PMs or the Church of England (summarising), or by monarchs dating back many centuries. It may be a useful repository of expertise, but it is not a form of representation.
Most other bicameral systems have a lower house which provides popular representation in some form, and an upper house which provides regional representation. The Netherlands and Germany, for example, have upper house seats indirectly elected through regional elections in provinces and Bundesländer.
There is a good deal to be said for regional representation in parliament. But there are multiple ways of achieving that. As others have said, the German system is a very interesting hybrid, with half of the lower house elected by proportional representation, the rest in constituencies.
Problems with the list system can be (partially) addressed by appointing individual representatives based on the number of votes they get. Several electoral list systems require candidates on the list to get above a threshold number of votes to be elected directly, and allow parties to appoint the remaining seats which don’t.
In my view, no electoral system can function well without a fair degree of consensus on major priorities and on modus operandi, whilst a variety of systems can function well given both of these. As well as conventions of honesty and respect (Nolan etc.) this means that a majority party (especially if slight) must take account of the interests (and preferably the opinions too) of the minority, and this will apply with PR systems too. I think a change should retain the local link, so either AV in single-member constituencies, or STV in multi-member constituencies, is probably better than party lists.
AV doesn’t produce consensus as it isn’t proportional. It has to be STV.
My broad opinion on this subject changed from a firm believer in FPTP to a passionate advocate of some kind of PR after the 2015 election; when UKIP got almost 13% of the national vote, but only one seat. I abhor what UKIP represented but this is a perfect example of just how unfair, unjust and unrepresentative the current system is… So many votes are completely irrelevant.
Whilst I do not have sufficient knowledge to answer your specific questions I do note that you wrote:
“The current system has not even avoided hung parliaments…”
Of course, in countries where some form of PR is used, this statement is actually meaningless. Whatever the make-up of the elected representatives is, IS the Parliament. It just “is”.
I believe that a significant attribute of a PR type system, that I espouse to anyone who wants to listen, is how (in general) the make-up of each Parliament changes gradually, over time, as opposed to the “see-saw” effect we have here when every 10-15 years or so there is a complete volte-face.
I am pretty radical about the need for PR, expect for exactly the concern about losing local representation. I’m also not a fan of systems that top-up from a list as it creates two different classes of MPs.
I think a reasonable compromise is to use STV or some other ranked choice approach for the commons, so at least each constituency MP can claim to have a stronger level of support from their area than is demonstrated by FPTP. It also removes the pressure to vote tactically on supporters of smaller parties. My guess is the true support for parties such as the Greens is even higher than what we currently see at elections.
Then, replace the Lords with a fully proportional body.
This combination can be expected to often produce different party distributions in the commons and the second chamber. I consider this a good thing if it forces a more collaborative approach to government,
The Jenkins Commission recommended a form of AMS which he called AV+: single-member constituencies, with some additional members at a county or sub-county level, partially compensating for disproportionality.
How large we make the additional seats is up for discussion, allowing for a compromise between FPTP and full proportionality. Larger, multi-member county seats would go further towards PR, and allow representation of less popular parties; smaller, single-member sub-county seats would retain a measure of majoritarianism and AV could be used at both levels to ensure that all members are acceptable to at least 50%.
In terms of linking two layers of AV representation, one method is as follows. Ballot papers have a column for Constituency MPs and a column for County MPs. Constituency MPs are elected first. Then, first preferences for County MPs are counted, with the successful party in each constituency election treated as eliminated (so if your first-preference party won the constituency, your second preference is taken for the county). Thus the county layer compensates (partially or fully) for the disproportionality of the constituency layer.
@John and @David J Cutts – Jenkins recommended something no-one has used anywhere else, and it wasn’t the option put to referendum, which was AV.
AV can do some very strange things, and I’m not convinced the list seats under Jenkins would have been enough to correct for that.
Rather than inventing something new just because we’re British and can’t possibly use something other people use, I reckon we should choose between things that are used in real life in countries with which we have a lot in common.
A key challenge to those who favour FPTP and champion the view that the will of the people should prevail ( i.e. Brexit 52% v 48% ) is how is the view of the people reflected in the HoC with 43% of the popular vote represented by 56% of all seats in Parliament. In terms of casting what I describe as ‘effective’ vote ( i.e. a vote that has direct bearing on the composition of the HoC,) roughly 65% of all votes cast have no direct bearing on determining the make up of the HoC. Taking the abstention rate of c 35% together with ineffective votes, our winner takes all system leaves the ultimate decision as to who rules us with c 20% of the electorate. When one also factors in tactical voting, a substantial number of votes are cast for what are effectively second preferences rather than first as a first preference would likely carry less weight electorally than a second preference depending on the constituency. In short, our electoral system is a highly effective mechanism that perverts the will of the people. Other posters have addressed the locality and by election questions well enough .
The geographical link is broken in the many cases where a candidate is parachuted in, often in the face of extreme protest from the local party.
MPs only represent their voters in their constituency. People who voted against them go unrepresented. In safe seats, these voters’ votes are worthless.
Parties are already coalitions. We have a left coalition and a right coalition. Each of these coalitions has minority support in the country. With splitting of the parties that PR would allow, other coalitions may emerge that have more support from the country.
FPTP is a NIMBY’s charter. It has to go.
How about a system whereby all 650 constituencies are paired up (in a geographically sensible way by the Electoral Commission), with two MPs (the candidates with the most and second most number of votes) elected to each of the 325 new constituencies?
That would seem to me to reduce the factor of “I want to vote for X but I feel I must vote for Y to stop candidate Z from getting in”, something that really irks a lot of opponents of FPTP. It should also allow a few more MPs from underrepresented parties such as the Greens to break through. And reduce the prospect of one party winning a large majority, thus encouraging coalition-building and cooperation whilst tempering the ‘elected dictatorship’ feel of the current system.
But it would keep the constituency link that you are so keen on. (Constituents would have a choice of two MPs to go and see or write to; that increased choice for the public would be a good thing in itself.)
Another deplorable aspect of the current FPTP system is the enduring existence of almost “hereditary” local magnate seats particularly among the Tories. This is not so prevalent as it was in “Chips” Channon’s time whose third volume of diaries I am reading. He himself “inherited” his seat from his Guinness mother in law and passed it on to his son. The Cecil and Drax families other examples. This has no place in a modern democracy.
I’m in favour of PR. I live in Tory Essex and at the moment my vote doesn’t make a difference (but I vote anyway). I don’t think the direct link between MP and constituency is of much importance: it is the policies of national government that have the major impact on our lives. And I would like to feel that my vote – everyone’s vote – counts. Added to that, I think most MPs will vote in line with their party, regardless of how many constituents urge them not to on a particular issue – and I think that’s especially true if they hold government posts.
I think MPs have enough work just dealing with national issues – or they should have if they play a full part in research, debate, studying draft bills etc. So, in that case, constituency casework could be undertaken by someone else.
Which brings me to a question about casework – do MPs of the governing party have more success than other MPs in sorting out constituents’ problems? ie does their intervention carry more weight? It shouldn’t do, but I wonder if this has ever been studied?
I’m not very convinced by your twofold values of the current system.
What value is really gained when the distinct, meaningful area’s representative actually votes according to the whipped mandate of their party’s leader, not his/her conscience and/or as constituents’ preference? Or indeed votes as instructed only because he doesn’t want his letter of no confidence in the PM to be removed when he loses the whip?!
Party managers/leaders today seem to have far more control of who is even allowed to stand for MP, & are far less forgiving of those elected MPs defying the party line.
Ultimately our current system fails us, the constituents, especially in that I have never lived in a ‘marginal’ constituency, and so my vote has never counted, and I am far from alone in this! Everyone moans about low turnouts at elections: I’m surprised turnouts are as high as they are given how little most of our votes count.
I also wonder how much has the current system failed politicians themselves. David Cameron’s cardinal error was not just calling the Brexit referendum on the assumption that it would be easily won. He seems to have completely failed to understand that, in a referendum, ALL VOTES count. How much was he blindsided by the assumption of power of political parties which are given parliamentary seats out of all proportion to the number of votes cast for that party?
“It means that parliamentary debate is itself a congress of places and local identities.”
It may give the illusion of that, but has this ever really been true. It might have felt more like that when there were fewer MPs, but originally only a relatively small number of people would decide on the representative. Even when nearly all adults are allowed to vote the FPTP system very often gives a representative chosen by a minority of the voters.
Also, in safe seats, parties often parachute in a favourite, who has no roots and little knowledge of the area.
PR will not solve all these problems, but I don’t think it is something that FPTP does better. PR actually could improve local representation, albeit with larger local areas.
“One member constituencies also mean we have by-elections, which provide a form of accountability between general elections that can be surprisingly effective – for example, Johnson’s fall from office followed two huge by-election defeats.”
Other people have discussed ways in which by-elections could remain meaningful, but perhaps the reason you see them as a necessary potential corrective is that our current system nearly always hands so much power to a minority party.
Also, such an ad-hoc corrective relying on unfortunate deaths or behaviour of individual MPs seems like a fairly poor system. If correctives are needed they should be much stronger and more reliable than this.
Finally you mention avoiding hung parliaments as if that is definitely a bad thing.
Parties coming together to hammer out policies might actually lead to better and more long standing legislation and outcomes. Instead of the see-saw effect we tend to get at the moment, which is damaging from a cost and investment point of view, even if you ignore the effects of the policies themselves.
Dear Sir, I am an electoral systems & legal frameworks expert. Although my work is largely supporting & advising on electoral reforms in transitional contexts ( Sudan, Lebanon), I have long been baffled by Britain’s preservation of the FPTP system. I feel very strongly that Britain’s democracy would benefit from a PR electoral system – BUT with careful consideration regarding the vast technical choices regarding PR. This includes the type of PR (STV vs List), the type of list PR (open or closed list) the type of electoral formula used to translate votes into seats, the number of seats per district, and of course – whether a not an electoral threshold (a minimum percentage of votes a list needs to win to be eligible to win seats) is applied. Regarding the type of PR: although me & other electoral system geeks are fans of STV (applied in Northern Ireland), because it ensures voters preferences are most accurately represented, politicians don’t like it, particularly for large populations, because the tallying process is complicated. So realistically, list PR is more feasible for Britain. Regarding your (rightful) concern that list PR gives too much power to party leaders: this is only true in closed list PR where parties decide on the order of candidates’ names on the ballot. Those at the top of the list have a greater chance of being elected because in closed list PR, if a list wins seats, they are distributed to the names at the top of the ballot. So if a list wins 3 seats, the first three names on the list are elected. Open List PR does not give parties this control because voters are allowed to give a preferential vote(s) to their favourite candidate(s)- and the candidates with the most preferential votes are awarded seats, if the list has won seats. In terms of connection to the constituency: MPs are still representing geographical constituencies. It’s just that there are multiple representatives- so actually, there are far less votes wasted- as long as an appropriate electoral formula is used, bringing me to my next point. All PR systems use a mathematical formula to distribute seats to lists. Some formulas favour larger parties while others give greater opportunities to smaller parties. Rather than applying the Hare Quota ( which overly rewards large parties at the expense of smaller parties) or d’Hondt (same comment), Britain could use the Sainte Lague formula – in its pure rather than modified form- because this ensures smaller parties can win seats. I could go on and on – we haven’t touched on electoral district boundaries. But I hope this has given you some food for thought.
“politiicans don’t like it”. The voting system is for the benefit of
the electorate, not the politicians, so that should not be a
consideration.
And open list systems may not be as bad as closed list ones, but they are still bad because they allow parties the special privilege of aggregating together votes to concentrate their influence. Suppose, for example, that two candidates on an open list get 55% and 45% of the party’s votes. That allows one to be elected even though if they had stood as an independent they would (very likely) not have been elected.
No electoral system is perfect, but I would aver that a more proportional electoral system for the House of Commons would be less imperfect that the current first-past-the-post system in 650 single-member constituencies.
In a liberal democracy, the very least we can ask is that a government with a majority in parliament should be supported by a majority of the voters, not just the largest minority.
Apart from the 2010 coalition, no UK government – however large or small its parliamentary majority – has achieved a majority of the popular vote for nearly a century, since 1935. Cameron achieved a parliamentary majority in 2015, and Blair a bigger one in 2005, with little more than a third of the votes cast.
And we need a second chamber that is not dominated by patronage, with residual decorations from inheritance and the Church of England.
(Nick Clegg should have pushed Cameron much harder to implement more of the LibDem’s constitutional reform programme as part of the 2010 coalition. Such a missed opportunity.)
As many others have pointed out, the electoral and representative arrangements in other countries – not least Ireland and Germany – provide examples of alternatives that might work better.
(1) I would use existing constituencies as a starting point, and group them together in bundles of say, 9. (With some flexibility in that number to respect major regional boundaries).
(2) Operate single transferable vote to elect 9 MPs for the ‘super-constituency’.
(3) Implement a process (maybe an algorithm, or maybe give winners first choice) that allocates a specific constituency each to the 8 MPs for which they have parliamentary responsibility.
Step (3) would lead to some unusual, but unavoidable, consequences where the local MP wasn’t the one a member of the party won the most votes locally – but that’s the biggest compromise. It doesn’t matter who exactly your local MP is – just that you have one.
The other compromise is expecting votes to number a large number of candidates on a lengthy ballot (and it taking much longer to count and process votes) but I feel it’s justified.
Nine is a very large number for an STV election. Why are you suggesting such a complicated system?
Scotland is the extreme case, but on current boundaries, you’d need to put something like the following seats together for a 9-member constituency:
* Orkney and Shetland;
* Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross;
* Na h-Eileanan an Iar;
* Ross, Skye and Lochaber;
* Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey;
* Moray;
* Banff and Buchan;
* Argyll and Bute;
* Perth and north Perthshire.
(Or Gordon and Aberdeen North, instead of the last two).
That would be an absolutely impossible area for any one MP to cover – remember that in a nine-member seat, you essentially only need to get 11% of the vote after transfers to get representation, so you could easily get a plethora of small parties with one member in these huge areas.
The problem with the UK electoral system is, as with all FPTP systems, is that the votes for candidates who did not win the seat don’t matter. The voters could just as well stayed home. A massive minority or even a majority of voters may have no effect on the outcome at all. As well, the winning party overall most often wins a majority of seats with a minority of votes.
The objection that MPs are referred to by the name of their constituency rather than by their names thus keeping things more civil is an empirical question. My hypothesis is that this is not the case. Even if so, it is a minor minor matter.
A preferential system does increase the level of voter relevance and does assure a majority victory in constituencies. However, Arrow’s impossibility theorem raises the possibility of anomalous results as happened in Burlington VT’s 2009 mayoral election. As well, given exhausted ballots the ‘majority’ may well be less than a majority of voters who cast valid ballots.
I am a supporter of STV. The counting is complicated, not complex, and works in Ireland, NI, Australia, etc.
MMP can result in overhang seats – a party or parties win more constituency seats entitled to by proportion of votes. In Germany, the 299 constituency seats combined with the 299 list seats did not result in proportionality. Thus 138 additional seats were needed to achieve that goal. It even raised the question of where to put all those people.
List systems (ideally open lists) can be local so long as there are adjustment lists at the national level to make up for discrepancies. In the UK, there could be adjustment lists for each of the 4 nations of the UK reflecting the composition of the UK.
A top up system would top up constituency seats with the necessary number of seats required for proportionality. This would mean that the number of total seats would vary from election to election. By reducing the number of constituency seats, this could be made manageable. As well, the mess of toping up on top of MMP (as Germany) would be diminished of eliminated.
A great benefit STV is that voters can ‘split their ticket.’ This can also be achieved with panachage (as in Switzerland).
However, a new electoral system for the UK should begin with a simple system with the requirement of review after every general election.
Hung parliaments are a good thing. Following NZ rules for coalitions and/or confidence and supply agreements does result in stable governments.
You ask: ‘can a case be made for [keeping all the good stuff and getting rid of the bad stuff]?
Well, yes, of course it can, in any situation.
I think you mean ‘which system goes far enough towards [keeping the bad and retaining the good] as to be compelling?’
My answer to that question would be that we used to have nationwide PR elections that were also tied to regions – for MEPs. It meets most of the critera you set (regional seats, by-elections). Party lists exist, but as you point out, FPTP is also manipulated by party managers so this feels like an unfair additional demand.
And would it be compelling? Well under FPTP, millions of people have never in their lives (let alone an individual Parliament) been represented by an MP who is _close_ to their political views. Fixing that is a compelling case in my opinion.
Thank you David for opening up this discussion. And thank you too to all the people who have posted thoughts and comments.
I moved from the UK (FPTP) to New Zealand in 1994, and they started using the MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) system a couple of years later.
I was initially suspicious, but in the end came to believe it was far superior to what had gone before. As I understand it, there was a referendum held in 2011 as to whether or not to keep the MMP system going, and the result was 58% in favour.
I moved to NZ from the UK in 2017 and it’s an interesting case study in a country that moved from Westminster FPTP to PR. As well as the advantages of fairness and proportionality, MMP has other advantages:
1. Voters get two votes – one for a party, one for a local MP. So if you don’t like your local MP but do like their party, you don’t have to vote for them. Similarly you might have a very good local MP who happens to be from a party you don’t want to vote for – again you don’t have to vote for their but you can still vote for the person.
2. It leads to a different kind of politics, which is more consensual and centrist. NZ had very radical governments under FPTP; Muldoon and Rogernomics (under both Labour and National) were able to make dramatic, Brexit style changes to the country with a minority of the vote. Now that can’t happen. Even with Labour getting an absolute majority in 2020, they still took the Greens on as coalition partners and even worked with National on issues that needed solutions that would stick long term like climate change and housing.
3. You tend to get better politicians. The rules of any game determine how it is played *and who wins*. Clark, Key, English, Ardern have all been good at communication, working with others and listening to different viewpoints, and former leaders are well respected (although there is a lot of vitriol directed at Ardern right now, I suspect that will fade once she leaves). It’s a long way from the elected monarchy a FPTP majority effectively is, and as to the “quality” of Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, May, Cameron …
4. Knowing the result will be fair whatever happens leads to more “losers consent”. (Three year terms probably help with this as well).
And if I might make a point that reflects my Very Strong Opinions about what the country of my birth has done to itself – the need to endlessly agonize about whether to change system does smack of British exceptionalism and a sense that British democracy is the Greenwich meridian from which all others must be judged. When the reality from outside the country, which I am sure many people there now recognize, is that it is a by word for political chaos and a warning about what happens when the institutions and systems of a formerly sensible country fail to protect it from populism and nationalism.
In that circumstance it really should be a no brainer to change the system that had led to this. Just think how different the last 25 years would have been if Labour had followed through on their commitment to bring in PR in 97. Yes UKIP would probably have had a taste of power – but like all extreme parties, they would have had to compromise to get in power, and voters would probably have kicked them out after seeing them for what they are as often happens. Instead under FPTP they have taken over the Tories and brought about the disasters of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
One issue you do not raise is whether the system can be gamed, both by the voter and by the parties.
FPTP can certainly be gamed by both; its failings are well understood. Nearly any voter understands the value and strategy of tactical voting. We all understand “safe seats” – and the implications of making them unsafe.
Most systems do have weird tactical voting opportunities, but these are often much harder to understand.
Perhaps the best solution would not be PR at all, but to combine (say) four constituencies into one, and return four of the candidates. Voters would cast four votes, then, for four candidates. Some will vote for four Conservatives, but some will vote for four Labour, and candidates will have to work to differentiate themselves even within their own parties.
While parties will still try to place people in safe seats, the seats will only be safe for a well known candidate, and there will be fewer as a result.
And byelections degenerate into single FPTP elections, with corresponding risk for the parties.
I think one representative per geographical area is greatly overrated. Multi member constituencies can achieve connection between voters and representatives very effectively. This is particularly important at a time of increasingly partisan politics. As some MPs adopt positions on which their constituents don’t just disagree but can feel morally repelled by it leaves some voters feeling they are without an MP they could approach with a problem. Multi member constituencies will almost inevitably give some choice of party and certainly of personality.
I strongly disagree with using the second chamber as a device to overcome the shortcomings of FPTP used to elect the lower chamber. This raises a serious issue about the role of the second chamber. In particular would its powers remain as they are and the government be determined by the composition of the lower chamber? If so there will be serious arguments about the fairness of a system ( and the legitimacy of the government) if the limited power second chamber is felt to be more genuinely ‘representative’ of the popular vote than the more powerful lower chamber. Unless you are looking at a fundamental overhaul of the entire legislature and its powers it is better not to use the second chamber as a mechanism to correct perceived problems with the electoral system.
My personal preference is multi member constituencies using the STV system that has worked effectively in Ireland for 100 years.
Our current system is inadequate, but there is no one perfect replacement, and we should use creative thinking and best practice to design something that fits the UK, not just a copy and paste exercise.
Germany combines constituencies with a top up list system to give proportionality. Plus a 5% national hurdle that parties have to achieve to try to stop disproportionate influence from minorities.
The list system is the most problematic aspect as it is controlled by parties. Maybe there could be a way of having elected lists on a regional basis (we did for MEPs)? It’s complex and needs careful statistical and demographic analysis. Plus combine with reform of the Lords to get a better balance across Parliament as a whole?
Germany also has a Federal system, with strong states (Länder) that provide some counterbalance through the Upper House (Bundesrat) and the electoral college for the President. So a whole system reform needs to be considered.
I think we should also look at issues like how do you allow new parties to enter the system, without creating the danger of a lot of frivolous or extreme small parties wielding disproportionate power. As well as a % hurdle, party funding, media rights etc need to be considered. Lack of representation isn’t just down to the voting system.
Whatever the new system, direct constituency links are vital. Speaking in the House and appearing on the media are important parts of an MP’s work. But working with community groups, and individual casework is often more important, and most valued by constituents, and allows the MP to see policies put into practice in the real world. A useful reality check and keeps power in the hands of voters, not party machines.
I grew up with it of course but I believe that the Irish system of multi seat constituencies with a single transferable vote is good. It prevents the party hierarchy having too much influence, it keeps pressure on representatives to be responsive to constituents between elections, it makes for a Parliament more representative of diverse views and post election it forces the parties towards pragmatic compromise rather than autocratic rule by a minority. It minimises the feeling by significant groups of electors that they get no parlimentary representation.
First comment on your blog, so go easy on me. I’m just a regular person, with above average intelligence who cares about the world, especially the one I live in! (love your blog btw). I see the current problem with our politics as explained in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
First Past the Post system. However you work it, it will logically always end up with just TWO parties fighting each other. With any 3rd party or smaller (the Greens for example) left on the sidelines. I just cannot see how that is a/ fair b/ good for any of us c/ logical. It’s just a bad system right from the start.
The whole of parliament is a farce. Two benches, throwing custard at each other, like a bunch of public school boys/girls. With anyone else just getting a minor look in. I really think any government needs to grow up. A parliament (ruling body) of a country should be a round table, with everyone involved given an equal say. Look at many other organisations around the world. I don’t want one party to rule over everything, I want a consensus of intelligent people who discuss issues and find compromise that best fits our country. The people of the country. Not just the people in charge (or the people funding them).
How do we achieve that? I do not have the perfect answer. But surely we can do better than First Past the Post, as it’s clearly flawed from the start.
Apologies but I haven’t been able to read many of the replies so this may have already been covered.
It is worth looking at the % of votes cast for centre/progressive parties versus right wing parties since the 2nd World War. While there are self-evident flaws with this (e.g. tactical voting muddies the waters) there have only been two occasions – yes, only two – where the right have won more than 50% of the vote. Yet the vast majority of Governments formed since 1945 have been very to extremely right wing. This isn’t democracy. It has never been democracy. It’s an abhorrence that it has ever been described as democracy.
First past the post has only ever suited one party and one party alone in this country. The Conservatives. They have been able to govern on a right wing and far right platform without ever having the mandate to do it apart from those two occasions.
To answer the question, I think there is a simple answer that STV is a straight-up improvement putting more power in voters’ hands. That’s whether you keep single-seat constituencies or have larger ones. Further change beyond that can be argued, but changing single vote to STV seems a no-brainer.
But I also want to address the second of David’s two points: that it gives disproportionate power to political parties (who, it is presupposed, exist). I would go further than that, I see it as more of a threshold issue than a change in relative power. PR requires political parties. That “proportionality” that it measures is the votes for parties. It’s not that parties are merely useful politically in a PR system: they are a mechanical requirement, or else PR means nothing at all.
“But we already have political parties (and to some extent always will, in any system)!” I hear you cry. Well, yes, but they’re not mechanically necessary. In fact they don’t play a part electorally, only in Parliament after the election. They’re accommodated by our conventions, rather than required. They are rightly political parties, operating on the political sphere, not democratic parties operating on the democratic sphere. Our system could as easily accommodate 650 independent members as a parliament where everyone was party-affiliated. Party affiliation is a mere token, of no hard democratic meaning, that we attach to the real democratic object: the representative.
So there is some real ideological line that is crossed in not only formally legitimising political parties within the constitution, but actively requiring them, as PR does. You might not care about this line, or think that it’s practically irrelevant anyway, since we de facto have a party system anyway even if not de jure. But it should perhaps be acknowledged that the line is there. Even if those of us who don’t like the idea of crossing the line decide it’s a price worth swallowing.
(And changing from single vote to STV also does not cross this line of mine, in addition to respecting the lines of David!)
What is interesting about this debate is the dog that hasn’t barked – the many catastrophic elections to the House of Commons under FPTP and the implication of the electoral system in thousands of deaths.
Election 1 – 1918 General Election where Sinn Féin will all the seats but 1 on what becomes the Republic on 48% of the vote. (the vagaries of uncontested seats means this undercounts SF support which was probably high 50s). A First Dail with a substantial number of both Unionists (15% of the population of the south in 1920) and Irish Nationalists MPs alongside SF would have changed the dynamic of Irish Independence quite dramatically.
Election 2 – February 1974. NI politics limped back into life on the 1st January. The old Stormont had been prorogued in 1972, and a new Northern Ireland Constitution Act had been passed in 1973 leading to a constitutional convention election in the summer. Pro-power sharing parties won 75% of the vote. Intensive talks and negotiation lead to the Sunningdale Agreement and a power-sharing executive which took power on the 1st of the January. The talks had eroded support for power sharing among the protestants and when a UK general election was sprung (against the urgings of the NI parties) the anti-power sharing parties won it 51% to 49%. Under the Westminster system they got 11 out of 12 seats. The anti-power sharing parties then immediately sent delegates to the Ulster Workers Council alongside the (legal) UDA and with observers from the (illegal) UVF. This organisation called an armed general strike on the 1st May which within 14 days led to the collapse of power sharing. The Good Friday Agreement – bitingly called Sunningdale for slow learners by Seamus Mallon – took another 20 to 25 years to restore government.
Elections 3 – Scotland post IndyRef. Scotland has had a series of disastrous Westminster election results (I write as a member, former Westminster candidate and what the French would call a militant of the SNP). In the immediate post-IndyRef election we won 56 out of 59 seats on < 50% of the vote. Luckily we had a parliament with a real electoral system to fall back on. Westminster voting at Holyrood would have created a chamber with 120 SNP MSPs out of 129 – a catastrophe averted.
FPTP hands comedy bonuses to the leading party – 127 extra seats to Thatcher in 1997, 133 to Blair in 1997 and 80 to Johnson last time.
Johnson's disastrous bonus yet may yield another catastrophic harvest in Northern Ireland with tensions ratcheting by the day. (The call by Michelle O'Neill for a Joint Authority and not Direct Rule if the DUP won't rejoin Stormont is an ominous sign.)
Current polls show this catastrophic electoral failure possibly coming to England with Labour in 550 seat territory. Never happen! they cry, well it has on a number of occasions, just not in England.
The current electoral system is unconscionable.
Having visited Ireland during election season, a big fan of STV. Constituencies are small enough to maintain the local link and introduces an element of proportionality. The elections themselves: posters everywhere urging you to vote 1 for some candidate, possibly 2 for their fellow party member; the count is riveting as people get eliminated and votes transferred.
(Id probably go STV for the House of Commons, and then party lists for the Lords equivalent, though there’s something to be said for allowing people to rank candidates within those lists.)
One thing which might help to alleviate concerns about local representation is to have local government representatives appointed to the upper chamber whilst they’re elected councillors.
I don’t think that the upper house should purely consist of those elected on the local level, as the Bundesrat effectively is – the expertise of judges, doctors, trade unionists etc. is valuable – but it couldn’t sustainably include representatives of all councils either. There are currently 127 English unitary, metropolitan and London boroughs, around two hundred councils in two-tier areas and 65 in the devolved nations, so even without adjusting for population the upper house would likely be too large.
One solution could be for local authorities to be grouped into the European Parliament regions, with each region sending one representative per million inhabitants and each local authority voting at the same time as the rest of their region (which may also prevent councils from running in perpetual campaign mode, instead of having lower-tier elections three out of four years and county council votes in the fourth). I think that selection for the upper house amongst councillors should be done by an independent body; if done by the councils themselves, the Greens for example would struggle to be represented regardless of how many votes they get as even under a proportional system I doubt they’d be the largest party in a substantial number of councils but receiving enough votes to justify multiple representatives.
However, as I’d keep lifetime nominations for part of the upper chamber and the majority of members wouldn’t have a geographical affiliation to the same extent as the Commons, choosing sixty to seventy representatives from all councils without dividing the councils into subnational regions and employing a less proportional system may be possible. The issue of councils voting simultaneously is not necessarily a barrier either; even if individual councils don’t move to all-up elections, the nominating body could use the popular vote of the most recent local election in each area to decide how many councillors should represent each party in the upper house.
Another vote (!) here, for the NI system. You’re voting for candidates, rather than lists, even if it’s a numbering/ranking system. The mechanism of cutting off and re-distributing the remaining votes, once a candidate hits the target for election, seems to work.
No one has mentioned ‘deliberative democracy’.
Is there an argument for it to be used to address the voting system?
Perhaps, in the process, it might expand the theme of this post and identify what it is about the existing system that works and where it falls down.
It would require careful design and administration but it might in the process address the more fundamental issue of how democracy can deliver policies that work and have majority support?
Dear David (I am late so am sure that nobody else will read this),
Hung parliaments are a good thing, for two reasons.
Firstly, as has been pointed out by several commenters, it likely leads to more stable policy-making. Secondly, and in *your* view more importantly, I think that it reduces the “accountability gap” that you discussed last year, in particular “the failure of parliament to be an effective check on the executive”.
Indeed, in most cases it is not ‘the government’ but rather ‘a (prime) minister’ who steps out of bounds. They however belong to a specific party and therefore – as a person – can only count on the support of a minority in parliament.
It then merely takes one coalition party to threaten leaving the coalition to force the person to step down.
More generally, as someone who believes the UK’s electoral system is the bane its political troubles, it has been odd to read your blog for years and never see it discussed.
I would urge you to talk to a few political scientists, or maybe just foreigners, to see how different the dynamic is under a different electoral system.
But I will keep reading and admiring your amazing blog regardless.
(re-submitted with double line spacing)
Well I read it, good points
To answer the proportionality, you need either full PR or a top-up system like Scotland.
I dislike both because of the party list system, so I would remove the party list as follows:
1) All candidates eligible must stand in a constituency.
2) Ideally STV, but FPTP works, to chose the constituency MP.
3) Top up Candidates are chosen from the best losers, as voted by us. So if you need 20 more Tories, you take the 20 tories who got the highest % of vote in their constituencies (yet lost).
Result is they can put candidates forward in whatever seat, but if the public doesn’t vote for them, no party list puts them in a seat.
John Burn-Murdoch has just posted a timely Twitter thread for this debate.
Talks about problems with the US and UK electoral systems.
As you’d expect from Burn-Murdoch, he uses hard data to make persuasive arguments.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1586023734183620608
I see that several respondents have mentioned the German system. Having voted in Germany since 2017 I find that this is a good system which whilst delivering a party proportionate outcome still maintains a link to the constituencies. One consequence though is that it is much harder for a single party to obtain a simple majority. Hence the many coalitions that have featured in the German Government over the years. Sadly the UK’s record of coalition governments is poor. With a significant change in thinking brought about by the introduction of a propositional voting system that would change and hopefully lead to a better quality of governance through stronger representation.
I think it’s a mistake for reformers to try and push specific alternative electoral systems. A better approach, to my mind, would be to focus on the glaring conflict of interest inherent in MPs choosing how they themselves are re-elected.
Back in 2019, I started a parliamentary petition to Let an independent body choose the voting system for electing MPs, one of a set of 15 constitutional reform petitions I tried to start at that time (another of which was to Put an option on ballot papers for a ‘jury’s choice’ MP).
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much interest in constitutional reform at the time and none of my petitions attracted much attention – and when the election was called all parliamentary petitions were cancelled anyway. The last few years do seem to have woken more and more people up to the need for deeper reform of the political system, but I suspect we haven’t reached a tipping point yet.
Interesting comment on the strategy for gaining electoral reform. It addresses a fundamental dilemma for reformers. However, it is difficult to get round the twin imperatives of firstly electing a reform-minded Parliament and secondly navigating a road map towards implementing a better system once a mandate for electoral reform has been achieved under first past the post. To my mind, success will only be achieved when there is a more widespread understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different systems by party activists and the electorate more widely. This is why this blogpost, looking at the different competing qualities of different systems, is very necessary if not sufficient.
“it is difficult to get round the twin imperatives of firstly electing a reform-minded Parliament and secondly navigating a road map towards implementing a better system”
Well, I can see two possible ways round the first (though it may be that neither of them are any more achievable in practice): one would be through a legal challenge on the basis that the current system violates the trust of sovereignty held by Parliament; the other would be through the king making the monarchy democratically accountable and then introducing electoral reform by decree.
The pessimist in me does not expect either to happen!
Likewise the Irish system of PR with STV works well and the link with constituencies is maintained.
My “local” (safe-seat) MP for Poole, Dorset, lives in Gloucester and, if his social media activity feed is anything to go by, appears to spend more time rubbing shoulders with his own local interests than those in Dorset; I could be wrong.
Nonetheless, upwards of 50% of the Poole electorate have no representation in Parliament and in our case our MP will happily advocate fracking and the pursuit of fossil fuel assets which given local objections to anything that potentially spoils the view from beach at Bournemouth, in all likelihood does not represent the majority view of the Poole electorate.
PR and STV would go a long way to address this political imbalance and provide truly local representation.
Maybe, one ought to compare the UK system to other European systems; side by side.
I am fast becoming of the belief that it isn’t so much the voting system is wrong , more, it’s a strategic question of what are we actually ‘voting’ for.
Changing the ‘voting system’ to some sort of proportional representation (whilst likely to be beneficial to the many single topic/minority parties ) it is unlikely in my view to change the quality and calibre of governanve we so (in my view) deseperately need.
Democracy from ‘demos’ (the people) to kratos (power) isn’t giving us good governance – simply changing the voting system per re-arranging the deckchairs (on the Titanic) doesn’t cut it.
I’d like to see a fundamental shift and true separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Whilst the judiciary works relatively well in the UK , legal lawfare and judicial intervention is becoming more commonplace – for the very reason that the legislature is not and cannot hold the executive (the government to account) in any meaningful manner. This has been the case under numerous governments but best exemplifeid by the Blair government with its huge majority and expecially so with the Johnson government (inc Truss (who she?) and now Sunak goevrnment).
What’s the solution? – more direct democratic power to the people possibly via referenda (like Switzeraland) on the big issues of state and , importantly a directly elected Prime Minister and cabinet . We can still have a directly elected HoC via an agreed voting system ……BUT….
We need a HoC/HoL (if not abolished or made more of a scrutiny body with teeth & possible elected) to hold the elected government ( a government that is truely representative of the people) to full account. MP’s if you like would be like company stakeholders who keep the directors (government) honest ( or feet to the fire in the vernacular ).
The Harrogate Agenda (THA, look it up!) is a good source of information and ideas on how this could work.
Simply tweaking or replacing an already broken voting system with another would be a waste of time. Now, really is a time for change.
PR solves the problem of how governments with large majorities become unaccountable (e.g. Thatcher, Blair/Brown, Cameron and Johnson/Sunak). Achieving electoral reform for PR will be difficult enough but a totally redesigned government system such as yoy propose would be impossible to get passed, and it might even make things worse.
Evolution is better than revolution. You have to be very careful starting afresh. Truss tried something like that and look what happened to her.
PR is tactical – it doesn’t, as I said in my original post, fundamentally change, for the better, our governance.
I’m not trying to make a party political point, rather accepting our new reality that social media/the herd operates in ‘ internet time ‘ – new governance has to do the same in my view.
It’s why, especially democratic evolution is moving at a much faster pace than it ever has. It’s revolution in all but name – the newer generation(s) only operates pretty much by instant gratification & expectation.
Our current demos cannot keep up nor is it in any form democratic, even with PR or its derivatives.
Moving to a new ‘demos’ or a more equitable ‘demos’ isn’t going to be easy.
As Bob Dylan wrote & Jimi Hendrix sang….
“So let us stop talkin’ falsely now
The hour’s getting late, hey…..”
We’ve had Brexit, we’re still living with Covid & after effects & we’ve got effective economic war in/on the European continent – it wouldn’t take much by way of an economic/political shock for our UK (possibly EU) to tank – Far better to have a political system (polity) & underpinning demos that is better suited to the times ahead.
I don’t know many who thinks that current system is working?
Would it be reasonable to limit the number of times that a Prime Minister can be selected without a general election? I can see that the ability to change leader once might be necessary but more than that could be indicative of a need to regroup and secure a mandate from the electorate rather than the party members.
Hello David, still working, I am only half way through these comments. Most are interesting, many valuable. as I did not take notes along the way, I have dropped many nuggets, which I would like to be able to see as a reference. Even in your editor’s guise you may not have enough time to compile a reference list (and personally, I have a wee firm to run) would any other readers like to edit a summary as a reference doc?
[I often thought too, that a light book made out of the FT readers’ comments before, during and after the referendum would make a fine future reference of how some of us felt at the time and might one day help the UK to digest Brexit which still gives us the vapours.]
Before I address the requirements, I’d like to raise the question of what elections are for.
When faced with a collective choice, for example between two alternatives, if we believe in equality, then everyone’s influence should be equal. That means that a minority should not be able to impose their views on a majority. This is the rationale for democracy – if over 50% of the electorate want something, then that’s what everyone gets. That does not mean it always turns out well, but the alternative is worse – that under 50% get to choose instead, meaning the views of people in that group are worth more than those of the people in the opposing group. So the UK FPTP system which commonly grants a ruling majority to a group of representatives who received significantly less than 50% of the vote is totally defective.
So when it comes to electing representatives, what are elections for? Are they intended to produce a body who fairly reflect the views of the electorate, or are they intended to produce a body that measures up to some other criterion (such as resembling the electorate in specific ways). the democratic principle means it should be the former, though a side-effect of this will often be the latter simply because people frequently best represent the views of people like themselves. The distinction is important because political parties provide a package of views and no specific package (or combination of packages) may fairly reflect the views of the electorate, so while an imbalance between votes for parties and party MPs may be a strong indicator of a failure in the electoral system, that does not mean that fixing the representation of parties in the Commons necessarily fixes the underlying problem of unbalanced representation of voters views.
So now to address the requirements.
There is considerable merit in one person being the representative for an area, but there is even greater merit in having several (a small number) as that gives constituents a choice over who can best represent their interests and gives the MPs a strong incentive to pay attention to their constituents rather than taking them for granted.
Political parties are a necessary evil. If you consider what they do, they get MPs to vote for things which are party policies rather than because they are best for the MP’s constituency or best for the country as a whole. That is a corrupting influence a bit like bribing MPs to vote in a particular way. A strong party can enforce its will on MPs by threatening to withdraw its support for an MP at the next election. Where the election grants special privileges to parties, this can be a major threat. However, it’s impossible to prevent vote bargaining – it’s perfectly reasonable for an MP to vote for something which is bad for their constituency if it is of greater benefit to the country, or where there is a reciprocal arrangement with another area which is overall better for both. So we can’t ban parties. But we should have an electoral system which gives them no special privileges. That rules out any proportional system which using things like party list to fix a defect in some other aspect of it.
A system which has been tried and proven succesful has been mentioned by other commenters here – STV as used in Ireland. With about 5 MPs per constituency, we get direct representation of constituents, but with competition between MPs to actually represent them well – competition which even includes competition between MPs of the same party.
Straightforward by-elections are not quite as good as the original election, as STV will typically elect a candidate for the biggest party (in that area) which may distort the final balance very slightly. Only if the government has a very small majority will this matter. The by-election can still provide valuable feedback to the government by showing how people voted – incluing which way the transfers went.
If you really want by elections to be every bit as good as general elections, that can be achived by requiring all MPs representing a constituency to resign (and stand again if they want) if a by-election is necessary.
Even if there is a better system in theory, STV with five seats per constituency is so much better than FPTP there is no excuse for not switching to it. Nothing prevents further improvements being introduced later.
Your point Charles wrt STV risking the promotion candidates only from the biggest / most popular party in a given area may be true, however, FPTP hasn’t done much better in my constituency; Conservative since ‘Pontius was a pilot’.
Having been deep blue forever, at the last local election our District Council apparently came under the control of a ‘new’ people’s party: “R4U” a self-proclaimed party of the people by the people for the people.
What we got, in fact, was a few councillors new to the game being joined by a cynical cabal of “Born-again” Labour and Liberal re-treads who, after 25-years of failing to get power under their true colours, simply bought a new rosette. The last Chairman was a 25-year Card-carrying Socialist, while his predecessor was Yellow, through and through, that is, until he ‘saw the light’… Rather than a new dawn for democracy we simply got ‘Wolves in sheep’s clothing’.
A quick trawl through the local press shows that the Council leadership is still as venally incompetent and institutionally corrupt as they were 20-years ago. I don’t think STV is likely to create a new issue…
Firstly I think that understanding a geographic link to be a strength of FPTP versus proportional systems may be a mistake in that it betrays our failure to devolve power to create high-quality local politics. This local politics can potentially provide what by elections achieve now – feedback to the
governing coalition. Ireland uses instant run off voting to fill seats, so this could be considered as well. Both Sweden and Ireland demonstrate systems that provide a local link at a more nationally-recognisable geographical scale. The systems used in these countries put voters ahead of party managers.
Firstly, present constituency geographical distinctions – e.g. “Mid Dorset and North Poole” – do not fit with the national or international level work that MPs do. Instead it is more likely that externally, they would be identified regionally e.g. South West, West Midlands, “Northern Wall”. The celebration of the parochial nature of MPs could be seen as a failure of local politics, particularly in England to produce high-quality local politics as abroad. Instead, it is widely acknowledged that power is too centralised, and ex-MPs such as Michael Heseltine openly admit MPs priority was not their locality but their national careers. The much vaunted constituency link therefore produces not a local representative, but an emissary of Westminster, co-opted by the interests of the centre. This a pattern that can be seen in the career of many MPs (Lloyd George’s declining interest in Welsh issues for example).
Rather, instead it would make more sense for MPs to be elected for a region, which is the scale at which real change needs to happen on issues of economic development or general welfare. These divisions would be also be more understandable for external audiences (businesses, government – domestic and foreign). STV as in Ireland, for counties could achieve this. Alternatively, Sweden’s model of using regions could be used.
Both of the aforementioned systems put voter choice ahead of party managers. STV allows individual candidates. Sweden’s PR system is “open” allowing voters to rank individual party candidates by their own choice.
To preserve the mid term feedback function of by-elections two options could be considered. An empty seat could be put to an instant runoff vote as in Ireland (also known as alternative vote, with the candidate achieving 50% being elected). Alternatively, proper, effective local devolution as in, say, Germany could provide a sense of the governing coalition’s performance through regional elections.
I feel we should be wary of the “one trick” that somehow corrects the ongoing problems of the politics of this country, and on the face of it PR could be viewed as such, my personal “trick” would be to simply abolish the Conservative party:-)
But I’ve always felt one of the key problems with the way governments are elected in this country is the power it gives a relatively small minority, voters in key marginal seats, over the majority of voters who live in safe seats whose votes are always of less influence. At election time, political parties can concentrate their resources on these marginals and forget everywhere else because they know in advance the likely outcome. If every vote counts equally, it would force them to pay attention to constituencies they might otherwise ignore.
But the biggest sea change would be the end of the duopoly of Conservative and Labour, while they would remain the dominant forces in British Politics, they would almost certainly be forced to share power with others which would broaden the debate and widen the ever narrowing Overton window as the media, especially the dominant right wing press, would have to fight a war on multiple fronts if they wanted a particular party to win out.
We’ve been through all this in 1998 with the Jenkins commission, who tried to design a proportional system that kept the merits of the constituency system. No need to reinvent the wheel.
The final suggestion of the Jenkins Commission was keeping a 650 seat HoC with 500 MPs elected on a constituency basis (you still have “your MP”) elected using AV (so every local MP has at least 50% of eligible votes) plus 150 MPs on a proportional top up elected by a second vote for a party (so that you can vote for the best MP regardless of party if you want, and vote for the best party regardless of local MP). That was the best hybrid system after extensive research and debate, and remains so. It is to the shame of the Blair government that they didn’t act, instead saying they would wait and see how a similar system worked in Scotland (albeit that they kept FPTP for the constituencies for some unknown reason).
With respect, I think it’s naive to think Jenkins is the last word. Since he reported, we’ve had six lots of elections to the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales / now Senedd under AMS, and seven to the Northern Ireland Assembly under STV. Whatever criticism people have of the devolved administrations, I haven’t seen anyone argue that they would function better if they had been elected under a different system – Jenkins’ concerns about the transparency of STV seem to me to fall away with NI demonstrating it can be used at local, province and European elections, while inventing Jenkins-style AV+ for Westminster while continuing to have AMS in Wales and Scotland just strikes me as utterly confusing and pointless.
I think the Jenkins Commission outcome needs to be reviewed. Especially as AV was roundly rejected in the 2011 referendum and discredited as a result. AV can produce more distorted results then FPTP in certain circumstances.
STV is proportional, retains constituency links for all MPs and needs no topup MPs. Above all it’s easy to understand and requires no preferred party vote, just a list of preferred candidates. Less complex for voters than the so called AV+. That name would certainly have to go if nothing else.
A great many commenters here appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of STV, which to my mind is the “gold standard” among tried and tested proportional systems. STV necessarily implies multi-member constituencies (otherwise it’s simply AV, a system that isn’t even proportional). It produces a single class of representative, unlike top -up systems, and it places the power in the hands of ordinary voters rather than unelected party officials.
There are some interesting “alternative” concepts in the comments, but there’s realty no need to look beyond STV.
Also no fan of referendums here; far too divisive and susceptible to misinformation campaigns. Instead, let’s have an independent, impartial, randomly selected citizens assembly to deliberate the alternatives and make a binding recommendation.
I think at some point we get tangled up in definition of words which have a range of uses, but I (using my definition of PR) would say that neither STV or AV are proportional systems.
We can argue about use of words, but if you involve parties in the mechanics of the electoral process, that’s one state of affairs.
If you have a system where the mechanics of the electoral process pay no heed to parties, that’s a different state of affairs. And that’s the case for STV/AV. Candidates are just individual candidates and votes are re-allocated on that basis.
Of course for multi-member STV, voters may choose to distribute their votes according to the party labels. But this is no different to the current system, where voters can choose to attach however much weight they want to the party label (for instance, ignoring the candidate entirely and voting entirely on the party label). It’s an entirely informal process and down to the choice of voters.
So I would say that multi-member STV does not in itself promote proportionality (i.e. among parties). What it does is allows the voters, in their communal wisdom, to choose to get a party-proportional result (if they collectively attach a lot of weight to party labels in their voting choices), or to choose to get a result without any concessions to party-proportionality (if they collectively disregard party labels in their voting choices). Which I personally find pretty neat: more choice in the hands of the electorate, no predefining one way or the other whether they should care about parties or not!
AV certainly isn’t proportional, it’s majoritarian. STV is approximately proportional. That is no bad thing. Some list systems deliberately exclude very small parties. STV does that naturally.
STV and AV use the same voting method but they aren’t the same system so shouldn’t be grouped together as STV/AV.
The point you make. I believe, is that when talking about proportional representation one has to ask “proportional to what?” I understand, but I don’t think it’s necessary to dive down that rabbit hole. We should leave that kind of debate to the citizens assembly which I sincerely hope will be convened to make a recommendation on what UK’s electoral system should be in future. For now, debating which PR system is best just makes reformers look divided, and thus an easy target for those who oppose change. Reformers must be united in condemning the current system.
We should be continually pointing out the gross unfairness of the current “FPTP” system, which effectively ignores the votes of those who either voted for a losing candidate, or voted for a winner, but their vote was surplus to what was needed to get them elected. This is so bad that in most elections, a clear majority of votes are ignored. We need a different system, one which lets most votes count, and “proportional representation” is a just a useful umbrella term for voting systems which produce results that better reflect the wishes expressed by the electorate through their votes.
“We should be continually pointing out the gross unfairness of the current “FPTP” system”
People have been pointing out how unfair it is for many years, without much success (which perhaps shouldn’t surprise us when we live in a society that has unfairness built into its foundations).
In my own attempt at untangling electoral reform, I suggest reformers would do better to point out the glaring conflict of interest inherent in MPs choosing how they themselves are re-elected – which would be considered wholly unacceptable in most contexts – and instead push for Parliament to confine itself to defining the purpose of elections, with the technical decision on the best way of achieving that purpose being delegated to an independent body.
David
While taking on board your points about FPTP, a couple of which I hadn’t previously considered, I have to say I still see little or no redeeming argument for that electoral system.
The UK is supposedly a ‘representative democracy’ yet its current electoral system routinely results in many millions having almost no representation of their choice in Parliament. 14.5 million votes went to losing candidates in 2019.
Indeed, the ‘safe seats’ created by FPTP means many people can spend most or all of their voting lives never having been represented by a Candidate or Party of their choice, as well as allowing sitting MP’s to get away with doing the bare minimum.
The system supposes that once elected a candidate will represent and act on behalf of all their constituents, not just those that voted for them, but I suggest the intensity of partisan divisions in the last few years, means this is increasingly no longer the case. I can think of many instances where a sitting MP has directly and overtly insulted swathes of those that would have opposed them. It’s hard to imagine such voters would seek their help or the MP be particularly minded to listen and offer it.
A system where the ruling Party can increase its vote by approx. 1% and be transformed from a minority government to one with an 80 seat majority, and thus claim an “overwhelming mandate” is clearly not fit for purpose.
That same system gave one relatively recent government a 168 seat majority with barely 40% of votes cast.
That the Tories & Labour require averages of approx 40,000 and 50,000 votes per seat won respectively, yet the Green Party win one seat with almost 900,000 votes and the Brexit Party no seats with almost 650 votes is, in my opinion indefensible.
Surely, the very least a ‘Representative Democracy’ can do is, elect a legislature as closely representative of those votes cast as reasonably possible. Something more akin to ‘the will of the people’?
It’s common for opponents of PR systems to point at Italy and claim such systems makes countries ungovernable compared to the decisive governmental model provided by FPTP. A point which may have seemed moderately justifiable 6 years ago, but is laughable today, given our experiences since 2016.
That 40+ other European countries, including some usually considered among the ‘best’ governed in the world, operate on some form of PR system is surely indicative, there’s no reason why we couldn’t also make it work?
Perhaps the biggest obstacle (other than our engrained mentality) might be the Palace of Westminster itself, designed as it with bench-to-bench confrontational ‘debating’ chambers?
Perhaps the ‘imminent’ collapse/refurbishment/replacement of the Palace will be the only practical opportunity we will have to rid ourselves of this 19th century dead weight?
Aside from the French Presidential vote, the only other ‘European’ country using FPTP is Belarus,
225 comments and still they come.
Yesterday I was listening to the Gideon Rachman podcast discussing the US mid term elections. Apart from the likely outcome which seems pretty certain, the key fact for me was that Trump will inevitably stand again, quite probably win and he will have fewer votes than his opponent, as was the case when he won first time or lost but claimed a win the second time.
For all its flaws, the UK system whether FPTP or some form of PR, AV seems to rely on a relatively sane electorate. But can this be guaranteed? Is the bigger question – who gets the vote? Is a wider, more inclusive electorate, unlike the general direction of the US system, the way to go?