Electoral Reform?
The 2019 general election was considered one of the most divisive general elections in recent memory in the UK. For one, the stakes seemed to be at an all time high. The election was billed as being the “Brexit Election” as that was far and away the biggest issue on peoples’ minds. On top of that, the fate of the NHS was claimed to be on the line and its survival was perceived as being at stake. However, what really seemed to make the election divisive was the absolute hatred that has been fostered between the government and its opposition. The tactics employed during the election did not help either, with rampant lying, misinformation, and personal abuse being used copiously.
Because of the fear and vitriol that was whipped up against both sides there was a deep mistrust of both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition. As I campaigned, on the doorstep, the most common response I was given was “I don’t want to vote for X, but I could never vote for Y.” There was a deep sense in this election that people were always voting for the lesser of two evils and were rarely voting for a party and leader that they genuinely believed in. The second most common response on the doorstep was that their vote didn’t matter and so they either weren’t going to vote or were putting in minimal effort into who they were voting for.
While there were many things to take away in terms of why the Conservatives won the election and the other parties (across the UK) struggled, there was a far bigger take away. There is a deep mistrust and apathy towards our political system and it provides very little hope or trust in Democracy. As trust in democracy is arguably at its lowest in decades and the potential collapse of democracy becomes more and more likely, the general election portended a dark future for British democracy.
The Electoral Reform Society published their general election’s analysis which demonstrates just how flawed our national electoral system is. “Of the 32 million votes cast, only 9.4 million votes (29.2% of the total) were ‘decisive’ in securing a candidate’s election (i.e. were needed to elect the winning candidate… All in all, over 22.6 million votes (70.8%) did not contribute to electing an MP. The fact that in a democracy, a political system that is reliant on the collective investment of every citizen, that only 29.2% of 67% (percent of voter turnout) of the population’s vote actually contributed to MPs being elected is scary.
What does this mean to our politics though? Boris Johnson has one of the largest majorities in living memory and has near full reign to push through any legislation because of the success of the Conservatives at the election. The Conservatives only increased their vote share by 1.3%, but that 1.3% difference means a gain of 48 seats and the largest Conservative majority since 1987. This isn’t the Conservative government’s fault. The Labour also is currently overrepresented in the House of Commons based on the proportion of votes that it received. The ones who truly suffer in our first past the post system are those smaller parties which are not entrenched in power. Between the Green Party and the Brexit Party, they had 4.7% of the vote, but only account for .2% of the seats in the House of Commons.
What we are left with is a democratic political system which isn’t representative of the populous. It seems an extraordinary thing to say and rather paradoxical, but it is the sad reality of our current political climate. It is also evidently pushing people further and further away from voting and engaging politically, particularly those who would not be in favour of those in power. This has the very undemocratic effect of entrenching those in power further and distancing those who are most vulnerable and furthest away from engaging politically. For a country that has a difficult past in giving up power and empowering the most vulnerable it is not entirely surprising, but nonetheless has a truly destructive effect on policy making.
The First Past the Post system we use in the UK means that British politicians are appealing to their own voters rather than the nation as a whole. They have no need to appeal to any voters in their constituency because as long as they keep their voters they will remain in power. Not only that, but there is far less incentive for cross-party cooperation and working with each other rather than against. This winner takes all mentality is incredibly destructive and greatly reduces MPs in Westminster capacity to affect positive social change as they are only seeking to affect positive change for their voters rather than the nation as a whole and most importantly the most vulnerable in our nation.
The two-party system that has been formed through our voting structure has changed the ways in which parties and politicians approach elections. They no longer need to provide a positive and compelling message that is better than all the others. Instead, they simply need to appear better than the singular alternative and the best way of doing that is degrading and tainting the name of the other party. Politically it makes more electoral sense to attack the leader of the Labour Party or the Conservative Party rather than trying to present complex and effective policies. It leads our parties to reduce a message to an oversimplified slogan rather than a strong, and nuanced message. This growing gap between parties has had a destructive effect on politics driving politicians to populism and scapegoating individuals or groups rather than bringing them into a wider discourse.
What we are left with are the people that I encountered on the doorstep saying, “I don’t want to vote for X, but I could never vote for Y”. The biggest loser in this scenario seems to be democracy as trust for politicians across the board is being eroded. As we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, a large part in a strong response to the pandemic is an inherent trust in a government. As we in the UK and in the US—a country with similar electoral problems—are countries with little trust in governments which has led the two countries to being the countries with the highest recorded death tolls in the world. Democracy relies on the collective engagement of its citizens who are critically making choices which they think will improve society. In the UK, it could be argued that we have an electoral system which takes away those choices and so remove peoples’ capacities to think critically. What this leaves us with is a broken democracy that is vulnerable to sliding towards authoritarian populism.
There is undoubtably a challenge in constructing the most effective electoral system that powers a democracy. There are also some positives to our system that need to be considered in alternatives, namely the constituency system. We are immensely privileged in the UK to have a political system where we all have access to an MP who represents us and we just need to email, call up or show up to a surgery to engage with them. However, the UK, who is the only European country still using First Past the Post, needs radical electoral change. There are alternatives to First Past the Post which are used all around the world and even in devolved governments in the UK. Party List Proportional Representation (PLPR), Additional Member System (AMS) and the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system are all used in the UK.
Party List Proportional Representation is a system was used in the UK from 1999 to 2019 in European Parliament Elections (except in Northern Ireland where they used STV), specifically regional closed list. Rather than being broken up into smaller constituencies, the PLPR divides the country into larger regions (we had 11 in Britain) and there are a certain amount of seats per region based on population sizes. Parties then would put forward a ranked list of candidates and they would receive a proportion of seats based on what proportion of the votes they received. This means that there is much higher proportionality. Every vote counts as the actual number of votes a party receives matters and not simply the fact that they received the most votes. This would mean that there would be no such thing as a ‘safe seat’ because any increase in votes for a certain party could change the number of seats that party has.
The drawback to this system is that there is less nuance in voting as you are simply voting for a party and not for an actual candidate. Alongside this, there is less of a connection at a constituency level between the public and government. This could perhaps lead to a greater gap between the politicians and the people they represent on a national level. There are numerous variations of PLPR used around the world that address some of these issues, but have challenges of their own that will not be explored here.
Additional Member System—also known as Mixed Member Proportional Representation—is used both in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd. AMS seeks to blend together FPTP and PLPR by doing both. Voters both vote for a constituency candidate and vote for their preferred party within a region. The votes for a party ‘top up’ the constituency votes. By this I mean that parties will get ‘top up’ seats to bring up their proportion of overall votes to an accurate number—i.e. if a party had 20% of the constituency votes but 40% of the regional votes, they will get the number of ‘top up’ seats to bring them up to 40%. Using this system there is both constituencies and that connection locally while also addressing some of the issues of proportionality that FPTP faces. The ratio of constituency seats to list seats varies widely around the world and greatly affects the proportionality of the votes—both Scotland and Wales use a ratio that favours constituents over proportionality.
The Single Transferable Vote system is used in Northern Ireland for all non-Westminster votes and in Scottish local elections. STV uses slightly larger voting regions that FPTP, but much smaller than PLPR—usually around three to six constituencies—. Each voter ranks as many candidates as they want from first to last. If the first choice of a voter is safely voted or has no way of winning a seat then their vote transfers to their second choice and so on. This means that every voter is impactful and can change the outcome of the election, even if their vote doesn’t impact their first choice. This leads to much more proportional representation, as well as encourages less animosity between parties as the voter has to think proactively about other parties than just their own. STV does not have quite the same locality in representation as FPTP, but retains much more than PLPR.
With all of these voting systems there is a trade off between proportionality and representation. First Past the Post goes completely in favour of representation whereas Party List Proportional Representation goes completely in favour of proportionality. The constituency system we have in the UK is incredibly powerful, and I suggest we cannot lose it. However, the two party system that FPTP has created has led to deeper polarisation and lack of cross-party cooperation which is tearing the UK apart, as seen in the Brexit vote and 2019 election.
Notes
For a more detailed analysis of the 2019 General Election and voting in the UK read the Electoral Reform Society’s booklet here https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research/publications/the-2019-general-election-voters-left-voiceless/#sub-section-34.
Voters Left voiceless: The 2019 General Election (Electoral Reform Society) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045
This article was written by Alasdair Howorth, CiPol Intern, as part of a Democracy series posted in July 2020.
Other articles in the democracy series:
‘Christians in Politics does not take specific political positions but attempts to foster good disagreement by encouraging thoughtful debate. Please get involved.’