Britain’s first-past-the-post system tends to elect strong governments on a minority of votes cast.
First-past-the-post enabled the Thatcherite revolution
First-past-the-post (FPTP) or winner-takes-all electoral systems – like all electoral systems – throw up anomalies but they do create strong governments. In the 1980s Britain’s first-past-the-post system appeared to favour the Tories. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide majority of 144 with just 43% of the popular vote. Her transformational reforms would probably never have happened if she had had to win a majority of votes and Britain would still be Europe's sickest economy.
Thirteen (unlucky for the Tories) years after Maggie’s landslide win, Tony Blair won a bigger majority for New Labour with a similar minority of total voters. In 2000’s legendary US election George W Bush became President by winning America’s FPTP electoral college, even though Al Gore had actually won half-a-million more votes.
These results lead some people to advocate proportional representation. There are many different kinds of PR but the governments that emerge from PR systems have usually been supported by a larger percentage of voters than would happen under FPTP systems. In the purest systems of PR the winning party has to win at least 50% of the vote or form a coalition with other parties that, between them, have won a majority of votes.
Proportional representation produces different unfairnesses
The trouble with PR is that a small coalition partner can become the tail that wags the dog. A party may only have won 5% of the popular vote but it can exact a heavy price for keeping a much bigger coalition partner in office.
This ‘tail-wags-the-dog’ problem is more acceptable if the junior coalition partner is close to mainstream public opinion but it can discredit the PR system if it sits on the fringe of the political spectrum:
- Ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties have sometimes been blamed for stopping more moderate Israeli coalition partners from negotiating with the Palestinians.
- Germany’s Greens kept Schroeder’s Social Democrats in office by insisting on economy-handicapping environmental policies.
- Britain’s LibDems would hold the balance of power if Britain embraced PR for Westminster elections. Policies in tune with the LibDems’ Europhilia – not shared by a clear majority of voters – could be the dealmaker for any coalitions.
PR appears superficially fair but it can, therefore, give disproportionate power to extremist movements.
PR also means that no elector gets the manifesto they voted for. Instead power transfers to the smoke-filled rooms of politicians. Power-hungry politicians drop promises made to voters in order to provide them with the wiggle-room they need to make new promises to potential coalition partners.
PR has given countries like Italy notoriously unstable governance. The need for broad coalitions has prevented Germany – once PR’s poster nation – from making the kind of economic reforms that might have avoided its current economic difficulties.
First-past-the-post’s new defects
If Britain’s FPTP system once advantaged the Tories it is now heavily stacked against them. Peter Kellner, the YouGov pollster, has shown that the electoral geography is so heavily tilted Labour's way that Tony Blair could win an outright majority in the Commons with about 35% of the vote while the Tories would need at least 42%. According to Kellner, the Conservatives could (Al Gore-style) win half a million more votes than Labour and still find that Mr Blair was returned to Number 10. Professor Ron Johnston of Bristol University has calculated that if both main political parties had won 37.5% of the vote in 2001, Labour would have won 142 more seats than the Conservatives. You can use this website to explore how the system currently favours Labour.
The fact that the electoral system requires Labour to garner fewer votes in order to win more seats partly reflects the power of super-sized voters in the relatively small sized urban, Scottish and Welsh constituencies, where Labour’s support is concentrated.
Professor Johnston also points to the greater number of ‘surplus votes’ that Conservatives won in seats they hold and ‘wasted votes’ in seats they are unlikely to win. Labour had the greatest number of what he called ‘efficient votes’ because of their superior targeting during election campaigning and their success at winning boundary commission reviews.
The Tories’ electoral mountain is also a product of the anti-Tory tactical voting that Labour and the Liberal Democrats used to such devastating effect in 1997 and, again, in 2001. This ‘tv’ effect may unwind at the next election if (1) Labour becomes the chief object of voters’ dislike and (2) if Tories can identify with some ‘good for my neighbour’ causes.
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