What does the UK electoral reform mean?

How will electoral reform affect the UK? Photo credit: Alan Cleaver

Protesters have described the current electoral system in the UK as “unfair” and have called for proportional representation. The new government has said that it will hold a referendum on electoral reform. However, the alternative that the coalition government proposed is not necessarily a real step away from First-Past-The-Post system.

They had been protesting with purple arm- and headbands, with signs and chants: Take Back Parliament, a coalition of several groups including POWER2010 and Electoral Reform Society, have lobbied for a referendum on electoral reform, following the parliamentary election in the UK last week.

At a protest in front of the Work Foundation on Monday 10 May, one of Take Back Parliament’s members, Guy Aitchison said:

“We are here to say to the Lib Dems as they are walking into the building to hold their crucial meeting on what the future of this country will be: Don’t make a deal without a referendum on proportional representation.”

At first glance they seem to have reached their goal: the UK parliamentary voting system could soon be changed under the new government. As part of their coalition agreement, the Conservatives promised their smaller partner, the Liberal Democrats, to hold a referendum on the so-called First-Past-The-Post system.

It’s a majoritarian electoral system, in which only the candidate with the majority of votes in his or her constituency will become an MP. This makes Britain unique in Western Europe, according to Jonathan Hopkin, senior lecturer in Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE).

“In Western Europe we are the only country which uses First-Past-The-Post. The nearest thing to that is the system in France, which is also a majoritarian system – but with two rounds of voting,” he said.

If it were up to ‘Take Back Parliament’, Britain should probably join in. Guy Aitchison criticised the First-Past-The-Post system sharply, saying it wasted millions of votes:

“If you don’t vote for the winning candidate in your constituency, then your vote has no influence on the make-up of Parliament,” he said. “Under a fair voting system, all the parties get seats in Parliament according to the votes they receive.”

Pros and Cons

Mr Hopkin agrees that Britain’s current voting system has its weaknesses: “It produces results which are very skewed in favour of some parties and penalise others. The Liberal Democrats, for instance, won around 23% of the vote, but only 57 seats out of 650. They are clearly underrepresented quite sharply. Whereas the Labour party with 29% of the vote – so with just 7% more – won 258 seats. That’s almost five times as many.”

The British electoral system has also received quite a bit of criticism in the foreign media. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, called it ‘blatantly unjust’.

How does the current electoral system keep parties out? Photo credit: Donald MacLeod

But although big parties tend to get a disproportionately big share of seats under the First-Past-The-Post system, it also has its strengths.

“It’s a very simple system. Voters have no trouble understanding how the system works,” Hopkins said. “You have a ballot paper with a list of candidates in front of you. You choose one and then the candidate with the most crosses against their name wins the election.”

“The other main advantage of this system – if it is an advantage – is that it makes it easier for governments to be formed by one single party. Its tendency to overrepresent some parties makes it more likely that one single party will have a majority in parliament. The purported advantage of that is that it produces strong governments. There is a certain amount of clarity. Voters know what the government said it was going to do and can then call it to account at the end of a parliamentary term”, he adds.

Additional advantages

Others argue that it is very effective in keeping small, potentially radical parties out. Only last year David Cameron – the new Prime Minister – argued against introducing proportional representation in the London Evening Standard, describing it as a “… system that will let in the BNP” – Britain’s far-right, nationalistic party.

However, Jonathan Hopkin points out that it is not completely impossible for a minority party to get into Parliament under the current voting system in the UK. If the BNP managed to concentrate their votes in one district, they could win a seat in the British Parliament, he says.

A small party that managed to do exactly that in this year’s elections were the Greens: With Caroline Lucas, party leader and MP for Brighton Pavilion, Britain’s very first Green Party member got into Parliament.

And Hopkin adds that proportional representation doesn’t automatically allow small parties into Parliament:

“There are various ways in which they can be kept out. In the German system, for example, there is a threshold: You have to win five percent nationally in order to receive any seats at all. And as things stand, the BNP would stand no chance of getting elected”, he says.

Alternative voting systems

Take Back Parliament protested against any concessions on electoral reform from the Lib Dems. Photo credit: Hanna Hauck

But even though the coalition agreement between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives states that they will hold a referendum, it doesn’t necessarily mean that PM Cameron has changed his mind about proportional representation. The choice will be between First-Past-The-Post and the Alternative Vote (AV) – yet another electoral system.

Here voters can rank the candidates in order of preference, Jonathan Hopkin explains.

“Candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated, and second preference votes are distributed to the other candidates until one receives a majority. The advantage of this system is that the winning candidate will at least have a majority of support of some kind. Not necessarily of first preference votes, but of a combination of first, second and third preference votes”, he says.

Still, the Electoral Reform Society, which campaigns for the introduction of the Single Transferable Vote, has argued that this year’s election results wouldn’t have looked much different under AV. It even maintains that “the Alternative Vote is very much like First-Past-The-Post”. The protesters on Monday also made clear what they wanted, when they chanted: “No deal without PR (proportional representation)”. So, it remains questionable, if holding a referendum on introducing AV will satisfy the critics.