Home / Dave Brockington / The Most Disproportionate Result in British Election History

The Most Disproportionate Result in British Election History

/
/
/
1683 Views

screen-shot-2015-05-09-at-15-42-32

This verdict courtesy of the Electoral Reform Society, who have issued their report here (one of the authors of the report is a past student of ours):

Few parties saw their vote shares fairly reflected in terms of seats. The Greens and UKIP won nearly five million votes but re- ceived just two seats between them. Few can look at those figures and think that the voting system is working for our democracy.

This was the most disproportionate result in British election history1. Labour saw their vote share increase while their number of seats collapsed. The Conservatives won an overall majority on a minority of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats lost nearly all their seats – despite winning 8% of the vote. The SNP won 50% of the Scottish vote share, but 95% of Scottish seats.

This isn’t surprising, and the ERS do a convincing job of pitching both the problems inherent with the present electoral system, and the tradeoffs inherent in three alternatives (STV, list PR, and the Alternative Vote), at a level that a layperson can understand.  The report correctly points out that the current government commands a (slim) parliamentary majority on just 36.9% of the vote (and only 24.4% of the eligible electorate). What it doesn’t point out is that this artificial mandate will be used to push through a radical agenda.

An alternative scenario is illustrated in the figure below:

disprop

The ERS states a preference for STV. I disagree; it would be a much easier sell to move to MMP/AMS. The report suggests that some semblance of direct constituency representation can be retained under STV using a low district magnitude, but this defeats the purpose of PR in general (less proportional results are attained with lower district magnitudes) yet diffuses direct representation. Up until the past couple of years in working with and campaigning for the Labour Party I had always downplayed the need for direct representation (why is it important to represent dirt and trees?), but I’ve changed my mind on the issue (“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”, a quote possibly misattributed to John Maynard Keynes, though Churchill in The Grand Alliance attributes it to Keynes if my recollection is correct). At least the perception exists in the minds of many voters here that such direct representation matters to them, so selling any switch away from FPTP should retain this one direct representative model.  MMP does this in Germany, New Zealand, and the Scottish Parliament, to name a few applications.

I strongly encourage the next leader of the Labour Party to place electoral reform front and center, and to campaign on this issue relentlessly for the next five years. Of course, there are two negative consequences of using either list PR or STV with the 2015 votes: the only plausible outcome would have been a Conservative-UKIP coalition (the Alternative Vote actually predicts more Conservative seats than achieved under FPTP). The second is that Labour would lose seats under list PR (down to 208 from the present 232).*  Tactically, this would only add political weight to the argument.  Finally, when The Economist, typically not a friend of progressive ideas, has come out in favor of electoral reform (even before the fiasco of 2015), surely the Labour Party can. Of course, the current contenders for the leadership of the Labour Party arguably lack the originality or initiative for such an obvious move.

See also Frustrated Progressive on the issue of electoral reform in Britain, and Niall Hughes at the LSE blog for a somewhat contrary view.

[*] These estimates on how different electoral systems translate the 2015 vote into seats assumes that the vote remains the same. It’s likely that different electoral rules would create different incentives and decision rules, hence, at least at the margins, a different outcome.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :