An issue that has divided the political landscape for years: is our election system effective? In this country we use first past the post as our electoral system, but just how democratic is it?
A system in which having a quarter of the votes can amount to only 23 seats compared to a party having less than 3% more votes than it and having nearly 200 more seats. The 1983 general election saw an emerging third party challenge the traditional labour and conservative stronghold for power, the liberal/SDP alliance had won 25.4% of the vote which equated to only 23 seats, where labour had 27.6% of the vote and 209 seats.
First pass the post is a system in which the country is split into constituencies and in each constituency, parties will each put forward a candidate, that people who live in that constituency vote for. The candidate with the most votes will become the member of parliament for that area.
The party with the most MPs then gets to form a government (become the governing party). When constituents are voting for their MP in effect, they are not just voting for that person to run their constituency but are voting for the party they stand for and the party’s leader of who they want to be prime minister. MPs are then expected to represent their constituents in parliament (whether that is voting certain ways, proposing backbench bills/legislation, or similar getting attention bought to issues in their constituency).
The flaw in this system is that the number of seats does not always equate to the percentage of votes a party received. The most recent example of this would be in the 2019 election where the Liberal Democrats won 11.5% of the vote (however this was only 11 seats) whereas with only 7.4% of all votes, the Scottish National Party won 48 seats.
So, what is the alternative? Well proportional representation has been a system that has been picking up popularity in the last few years including being stated as used in over 80 countries worldwide. It is the idea that the percentage of votes received will equal the number of seats received in parliament. For example, 40% of votes would equal 40% of seats. However, each way works slightly differently.
In the multiple systems of proportional representation that exist around the world most involve a complex system of ranking candidates rather than specifically voting for one: in a country that voted Brexit and the day after the results the most googled question was “what is Brexit?” I don’t think changing our relatively easy voting system would go down particularly well. On top of this people would perhaps refrain from voting as a new system could deter them.
Another method would be everyone votes for a party and the percentage of votes a party receives will equal how many seats they get; however, the parties are then responsible for distributing representatives. Many questions would then remain for this system: such as would constituencies remain? Would MPs be given an area they are responsible for? Or would MPs then just be general country wide? If so, how would local issues be sought to? Many people feel that changing our electoral system would contain too many hypotheticals to commit to.
As the saying goes if it is not broken don’t fix it, but just how broken is our electoral system? Is it broken enough that we need to re-evaluate the way in which we elect our government? Through questioning how democratic our elected chamber is then why isn’t there more traction about the house of lords who are unelected and have significant political power?