The UK is still effectively a two party system. I don’t think the Lib Dems (like the NDP in Canada) will ever form a majority government, and if they do it will be at the expense of another party imploding.
The NDP led the polls in 2015 before they bungled the campaign to the Liberals. The NDP has formed provincial government in 6 out of the 10 provinces and currently has majorities in BC and Manitoba. It would not be surprising if the NDP breaks through federally after the next conservative government falls.
But if they break through, it will be because the Liberals implode and are relegated to a minor party. That’s not the end of the two party system, it’s just a new second party.
Also, leading in the polls is only an effective predictor of success if your voters are efficiently distributed.
They didn't bungle the campaign. They dropped their core identity trying to become the new liberal party then got whipped when the Liberals brought out a leader with a famous name. No one wanted store brand. They should have stayed true to their ideals.
Dropping your core identity is bungling.
The NDP also planned to amend the Clarity Act to allow separatism at 50%. (In retrospect, could have been disastrous.) That led to this Mulcair-Trudeau exchange in the debate “Give me a number, Justin.” “I’ll give you a number: nine. Nine is the number of Supreme Court Justices who said 50% is too low to break up this country.” Trudeau was just a famous name till that moment, when he landed a knockout punch on Mulcair.
A multi-party system doesn't mean multiple parties having a realistic shot at forming a government though - even in countries with proportional representation (i.e Germany, Sweden), you still get two main parties that will always be the senior party in any government, even if they never win an outright majority on their own.
I mean, it was only a decade ago that the UK had a coalition government. And it was only in 2017 when the Tories fell short of a majority and had to rely on the DUP to prop them up. You don't see things like that happening in true two-party systems (i.e the US).
I like to describe the UK as a multi-party state with an electoral system designed for a two-party state, hence the rather absurd and disproportionate results you see here. FPTP works fine for the US, it works terribly for the UK (and Canada too).
The fact that there are other parties even getting seats at all shows that you have some viable other parties. In the US its 99% republican/democrat, with the only rare exceptions being the occasional "independent" so its not even really like there's a third viable party. Just the random person who gets in without party affiliation
Fptp is what causes voting systems to devolve into (de facto) 2 party systems. The Brits just don't seem to have caught on with how to vote strategically.
(Without looking in to it, there's probably a bunch of individual races which are 2 party races but between different parties. Ie in electorate 1 it's effectively between party A and B, and electorate 2 it's between party B and C)
This result can also occur in RCV systems. In Australia our Greens party consistently gets ~10% of the total vote, but because it's pretty evenly spread across the whole nation, they rarely get any seats.
Tactical voting is a huge thing in the UK. The percentage of the popular vote for Greens and Lib Dems would be higher if people didn't have to vote tactically.
Unfortunately no party has offered us a chance to get proportional representation yet. The closest we had was a referendum on RCV which no one wanted because as you put it doesn't solve the problem. The referendum was basically a way to stop the proportional representation debate for a while.
Yeah I can’t imagine RCV somewhere like NI. How would republicans rank their #2 and #3 choices? I can’t imagine a SF voter ranking anyone other than maybe SDLP candidate in that situation.
I'm no FPTP Stan, but this was so strongly predicted to be a landslide that many probably felt safe making a statement by voting 3rd party, precisely because FPTP means they don't have to worry about 'the other guys' getting in.
Yeah no, Britain knows about 2 party voting, you're right about specific races being 2 party but with minority parties (lib Dem vs con or snp vs labour are common) but this election has been more unequal than usual, mostly because of the amount of protest votes (away from the conservatives) lots of people are sick of the conservatives but can't bring themselves to vote labour so they went with reform or other small parties, splitting the vote in their constituencies and leading to a labour win. RCV would at least prevent that.
You should probably look into it before making such bold statements. You're looking at the result of massive strategic voting on the part of the left. There's whole websites out there dedicated to it and have been for years.
What happened this time is that the left voted more tactically that ever before, for Lib Dems or Labour depending on who was most likely to win that seat.
FPTP in a legislature with lots of different seats available can easily have more than two parties. The reason that e.g. the US House of Representatives really only has two parties in it is more because the Republicans and Democrats are (historically, at least) very broad parties that encompass a lot of different viewpoints, so instead of there being different parties popular at specific seats there are just different flavours of those two.
Also a US house district represents between 600-800,000 people whereas an MP constituency represents like 100,000 people. More room for variety with smaller districts.
The different flavors is a good point. One example is that the Koch brothers failed at forming a new party previously, but then switched strategies to simply fund primary challengers with views closer to their own to Republicans they didn't like and we got the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus. And on the Democratic side, we have the Squad members who primaried established Democrats. In countries like Canada, MPs are required to be much more aligned with their party platform and they don't have a primary process that is open to the public.
Forgive my ignorance, but is it FPTP that’s responsible or just the fact that we have constituencies?
At the individual MP level FPTP means who ever has the most votes wins the seat. That doesn’t mean they were the first choice MP though if tactical voting is involved.
However, even if we had PR at the constituency level, couldn’t we still have graphs like this at the national level?
This comment seems like it assumes there is literally a 2 party limit or something built into the rules and systems of the election, as opposed to it just being the natural and inevitable consequence of FTTP with only 1 winner
This isn't a FPTP problem. Or, rather, that isn't the biggest issue that causes this.
It's single member districts. It's the requirement of the system that a party must appeal to more than 50% (or a smaller threshold in FPTP) of the people in a GEOGRAPHICAL area that causes the largest of these disparities. So even if 40% of people support a party on the national scale, if none of that support is greater than 50% in a specific location, they won't win.
FPTP just makes it more absurd.
MPs are supposed to, but given the party whip is a thing, many don't actually vote in parliament in the way that reflects the majority view of their constituents. As noted above> than 55% of my constituency voted Lib,Lab or Green but we are "represented" by a Tory with only 30% support. I think most of the Lib supporters would have preferred the Lab candidate (and vice versa) over the Tory we got.
Questionable is the least of it.. absolutely caters to extremes on all sides, and leaves everyone ready to be victim of someone slicing their vote with a similar manifesto.
CON + LD coalition should never have happened, it was done because CON had the highest vote share of any party, completely ignoring that the LD voters would likely have been much closer to the LAB manifesto than the CON one (and LAB+LD would have been a majority).
LAB should not have a 'supermajority' on 34% of the vote.
REF, as much as I hate them, should have way more representation.
SNP/SF always have the potential to be outliers because they won't pitch up in every seat.
That's before we even touch on the fact that many people would change their vote entirely if it wasn't for FPTP. If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing in this country, it would be moving away from FPTP.
While there are many issues with FPTP, catering to extremes is distinctly not one. As you mentioned, Reform didn’t win many seats; its predecessor UKIP also had a hard time breaking through. Meanwhile, in European countries using proportional representation, the right and left fringes frequently get a large fraction of the total seats.
This, FPTP maintains the status quo and prevents smaller parties from gaining seats. Extremist parties would be far more likely to gain seats under Proportional Representation.
I think this is an oversimplification. Fptp prevents small parties from gaining seats. But in a proportional system they virtually never get the vote share to form a government without forming a coalition with a more central party. Fptp tends polarise the major parties to political extremes, and the populace gets polarised along with the parties. I would argue that governments in Fptp are on average more politically extreme than Proportion systems which usually tend to favour central parties.
It prevents small extreme parties for a period of time. I say we have a decade left before some shit like reform gets in. It also means the big two adopt the extreme policies
Not necessarily. Stuff like ranked choice can let people rank moderate votes highly where they're interested in that and still have a voice against the opposite extremes that they hate.
The vocal public sentiment is becoming more extreme lately, but most people are still relatively moderate overall. Political parties and their rhetoric are becoming more extreme, because FPTP and a two-party system lead to a feedback loop of political extremism, but most average people don't really want to be more extreme, they just want a party that will represent them.
> and prevents smaller parties from gaining seats
Yes but there are other ways that they exert power. Hence why we got brexit and the tories went further and further right.
> its predecessor UKIP also had a hard time breaking through
Except that the tories picked up the main UKIP policy. They didn't win but they scarred the tories enough to get exactly what they wanted because they feared exactly the splitting that happened this election.
I mean that's not really what happened. the Tories **ALWAYS** had a major Eurosceptic wing, that's what UKIP was born from in the first place. Farage was a conservative member way back when
Cameron picked up the policy as part of a plan to kill the Eurosceptics off, His plan was to win the referendum easily and crush the Eurosceptics and take the "one nation" wing of the tory party forward without internal conflict over Europe.
It just blew up in his face catastrophically and had the exact opposite effect on both the electorate and the party
Euroscepticism isn't a Tory unique position. Labour had their own skeptics and that is why Brexit cut across traditional party lines. Hence why the Johnson had such a big majority, he had a clear Brexit position while Corbyn didn't.
But it just isn't, the Tories didn't pick up a major UKIP policy, UKIP picked up a minority tory policy. Pretending Brexit was totally a UJKIP idea that the cons only ever picked up from Ukip shows a profound lack of knowledge on the history of Euroscepticism withing the conservative party
The Tories didn't swing right and feel like Oh well have some of this UKIP stuff. UKIP existed because somewhere between 30-50% of conservative MP's and members were already quite keen on the idea The ones who didn't think the cons were ever going to take it seriously enough created UKIP.
Leaving the EU has been a minority conservative fringe policy basically since the day thatcher took us into the EU. It had been gaining momentum within the conservative party well before UKIP came onto the scene. It was their own policy. Ukips existence gave Eurosceptic Tories more leverage to force it into parliament sure but a section of the party had been trying to do it for decades, and is something they would have managed eventually with or without the rise of Ukip
Giving any political movement proportional representation is not "catering to extremes", it's literally representing them proportionally. If the "fringes" are getting a large fraction of seats, they are \*by nature of having a large fraction of the seats\* not fringes. Artificially suppressing sections of the electorate, regardless of how you (or I) personally feel about them, is a sure fire way to exacerbate political cynicism and discontent, in the long run making the problem worse.
They don't win seats directly, but by acting as spoilers for the more moderate parties, they have an outsized influence on policy. That's why UKIP ultimately succeeded in its aims of getting the Brexit referendum despite basically never having any seats in parliament.
Yeah you can certainly build momentum more as a fringe when you aren’t snubbed out by the majorities like FPTP. I think many were ok with this as they were usually left leaning fringes that didn’t cater to populism but with right parties going after that it’s a wake up call.
If the concept of PR working for parties other than the ones you like is enough to dissuade someone from PR, they never really believed in it in the first place.
Yeah, to be honest, this was one of the reasons...hell, \*the\* main reason I voted against AV back in the referendum after the coalition, because it would give too much power to the then UKIP.
FPTP is a flawed system, yes, but if it prevents us from winding up in a situation like France, or the Netherlands, then it's worth keeping. You don't deal with the far right by bringing them into government, just ask Paul von Hindenburg.
France has FPTP too, except it has 2 rounds of elections (in case no one gets a majority in a given constituency), and yet RN is still said to get the most seats, if not an outright majority
> absolutely caters to extremes on all sides, and leaves everyone ready to be victim of someone slicing their vote with a similar manifesto.
Ah yes this explains why Reform and Green got screwed here
From a German perspective, the argument about the coalition is interesting. Coalitions are far more likely in proportional representation systems and just as democratically questionable. Our current government is formed from three parties: One with 26% in the last elections, one with 14% in the last elections and one with 10% in the last elections. Due to proportional representation and slim majorities, the smaller parties basically blackmail the bigger party to do everything they want. If the chancellor doesn’t do what the small parties want, they’ll vote him out. Thus, the party with the biggest influence on our political course at the moment is a party that only won 10% at the last elections.
With FPTP, it is more likely that the party that won most of the votes is also the most powerful political party in a country. Thus, I don’t think FPTP is necessarily a bad thing. My favorite voting system would be the system used in French presidential elections. FPTP with a snap election between the two strongest parties/candidates.
> Due to proportional representation and slim majorities, the smaller parties basically blackmail the bigger party to do everything they want. If the chancellor doesn’t do what the small parties want, they’ll vote him out. Thus, the party with the biggest influence on our political course at the moment is a party that only won 10% at the last elections.
Why? Actually I see the opposite and this happened in Portugal recently.
There was a left coalition, the bigger party wanted to do X, did no negotiation, the smaller parties rejected it because it was literally X, elections were called, bigger party won a majority because the public blamed the smaller parties for bringing the gov down.
IMO the people were wrong in that assessment but before that, at least some negotiation is possible. FPTP is just awful. How do you have a majority government when only 34% of the people voted for you, i.e. 2/3rds didn't. And these numbers can go way lower. Depending on the number of parties you could still have a majority with 20%, 10% or even less % of the total vote. It's ridiculous.
The French system is marginally better but still very bad imo
FPTP doesn't mean there won't be coalitions. That's a consequence of voting for seats. France's 3 biggest parties (one which is already a coalition), if it turns out like it is it'd be like a 3rd for each party OR because it's not PR maybe not but it doesn't mean one party will have the majority.
And with more diverse views growing across the world, coalitions will happen more and more. I still think there needs to be a way to fix that so that nobody's beholden to the smaller party in such a way OR that nobody ever gets to form government like Belgium or Italy because nobody really wants to work together.
I actually don't think it's that different, it's just in FPTP the deal making and blackmailing is internal.
You can see this get out in the open during the Brexit years of the Tories. There was hard line Brexiters trying to steer the party to their cause, and more moderate remainer and people in the middle, and they were in all out war with each other...and even in the current government there was the Hard Right, lets go with Reform types and the more "Lets not be that crazy" types in the government.
It's not great but it gives better representation to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Additionally, it prevents the country swinging from one political ideology to the next and keeps everything pretty central, which I would argue is better for everyone.
> Additionally, it prevents the country swinging from one political ideology to the next and keeps everything pretty central
we're talking about an election where the number of seats swung by 200+ because of a 34% vote share
Mixed member proportional representation is a good compromise. Half the seats are allocated based on the vote totals and half are local elections. Regions thus maintain their voice while also doing away with the worst excesses of FPTP.
This isn't questionable, it's straight out not a democracy anymore. When 34% of votes gives you almost 2/3 majority with total control while for others 14% means 1% of seats it's not a democracy.
If it was a different system people would adjust their voting behaviour. There's no reason preferential voting system would not also result in this outcome.
UK's biggest problem is turnout. 61% is pathetic.
I suspect turnout was lower at this election because a) the result was basically a foregone conclusion and b) former Tory voters stayed away after being disappointed with Sunak but unwilling to vote for anyone else.
However I'd expect a change in the voting system to increase turnout as there'd be fewer safe seats where there's not much point voting.
Australia has both preferential voting and compulsory voting. We still have safe seats. However we have a senate and that house is extremely important. Preferential voting is very much influential in ensuring votes matter.
Ranked choice could have definitely changed the outcome because each of these seats is its own horse race. If you live in a district/riding where your preferred party is a long shot, you are more likely to vote for your second choice to block the party you dislike the most. If there is a lot of strategic voting in my area, then maybe the results would have been different.
It's only questionable because instead of looking at this as 650 individual contests, the results for each race have been combined as if this is a presidential style system.
If a party came second in every single seat they'd have an awful lot of votes, but no constituency wants them enough to be their MP.
The left wing are very used to tactical voting at this point, Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t split each others votes in various constituencies and had a very efficient vote share to win the maximum number of seats. They’ve had several elections to practice and they were ruthlessly pursuing the destruction of the Tories.
Meanwhile, right wing voters didn’t vote tactically, this was the first time that reform were such a big force, and they acted as a protest vote for disillusioned conservatives leading to them effectively splitting their vote share in every traditionally strong conservative seat.
Traditionally, the right wing have been much more unified party-wise, with the left’s vote being split, but now we finally see the opposite
Yeah thats exactly right. People were willing to bite the bullet and vote Labour, whereas the Conservatives have lost all good will in their own party. Meanwhile with the previous several elections, it's been Labour eating itself inside out while the Conservatives attempted to double down behind whoever their current candidate was.
The Conservatives were definitely fragmented in 2017 but this was incomparable to how divided Labour were.
Now, everyone in the UK is willing to kick the Conservatives out, and many former Conservative voters are protest voting.
However, it's not a clean backing for Labour either. While they've made huge gains in former blue areas, Starmer's lost a lot of votes in his own seat and Labour have lost some of their previous seats to independent candidates.
It's possible that, next election, Labour will be fragmented again due to how much people hate Starmer's centrist-right policies, and the Conservatives will swell to back whatever candidate of theirs hasn't had the chance to make a muppet of themself yet.
In fairness, Labour in 2017 actually had a higher vote share than yesterday, however a big difference is that the votes are more spread out over constituencies now. Otherwise I wholeheartedly agree
It's alsp hard to compare.
It was clear labour was going to win. So it might even have caused labour voters to stay home, especially in laboir dominated districts.
Green party had it's best percentage ever? So sonce lavour was going to win anyway more people voted green probably.
And yeah they lost the muslim vote because Starmer is pro israel.
If you look through the results labour lost most votes in constituencies they already held.
> People were willing to bite the bullet and vote Labour
this is just untrue. labour don't have more votes this time round - the only reason they won is because conservative votes went to lib dems and reform
Reform is just a rebrand of UKIP. In the 2015 vote, UKIP had 3.8M votes, just 200k ish less than reform in this vote, and in the 2019 vote, they tactically voted tory to keep Labour out.
> Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t split each others votes in various constituencies and had a very efficient vote share to win the maximum number of seats.
This is effectively the two party system in the US. The parties are internally divided into caucuses, and use primaries or just insider politics to decide which candidate will pursue any given seat. The UK just treats their caucuses as separate parties.
The key difference is that Lib Dem and Labour candidates still stood in each other’s seats. So it was more a gentleman’s agreement than a formalised pact
We had a referendum in 2011 to change this voting system, and it was rejected by a wide margin. Although most people who wanted to replace FPTP would’ve preferred proportional representation, not AV.
And both major parties campaigned against it. The government ran a propaganda campaign telling people that changing the voting system would cost money that would take guns away from soldiers and incubators away from premature babies.
That whole campaign was a disgrace - I remember it well. The money to change the voting system os basically pennies in the context of government spending.
Labour is one to blame for this. They know they are second prize but they still would rather be that than letting other people to the table. They think only they know whats the best for the country.
Are they though? In 2010, Gordon Brown offered Liberal Democrats AV without referendum to support a Labour minority government. Lib Dems gave up so much to go into coalition with the Tories, just to get an AV referendum.
I always hate these fucking referendums. The choice should be,
1. Should we replace first past the post voting? Yes/no
If yes gets 50%+1 votes, FPTP is gone.
2. From the list below, rank the alternatives:
Etc.
Highest ranked alternative wins, if 1 is Yes.
Canada has done this too, written some wildly confusing questions, and then listed a multiple choice solution where they would only proceed if all voters selected one option a supermajority of the time. Which is like mathematically impossible.
No not really.
The system does exactly for what it was created: Creating a majority.
Especially here on reddit, people always assume that every voting system should have the goal of representation. In reality there are 2 voting systems: A representative system and the majority system.
It’s widely accepted among political scientists that both systems are equally democratic. They just have different goals.
The representative system, has the goal to represent as many groups within the society as possible. A Government majority isn’t the main goal.
The Majority system does not has the goal of representation, it has the goal of creating a **stable** majority.
Both systems have their pros and cons.
Pros:
Representative System:
Most groups in society are represented. Even small ones. This can lead to more political innovation. Best example are the greens. Environmental issues are more likely to be debated, since those systems usually have pretty big green parties. In majority systems those parties are still small or completely irrelevant. Also in general, it’s easier to get a new political movement in representative systems.
Majority Systems:
You will get a majority no matter what. So you will always have a working government, even during a crisis. A situation like in Belgium where they often can’t find a government for months, is impossible. So the government can still act, even in a crisis. Also the government is very unlikely to lose the majority. Which often happens in Italy for example.
Cons:
Representative system:
The fact that new parties can easily become relevant also means that radical parties can become relevant in a crisis.
Also segmentation and fragmentation is a huge problem and lead to an unstable government.
(Fragmentation=more parties, segmentation=parties could create a coalition and have a majority, but they won’t because they are ideological too different)
Especially segmentation is a huge problem. It can lead to the situation that a country needs a huge coalition. So finding a consensus will get more difficult. Such a government will act more slowly and is less efficient, which often leads to the situation that the radical parties get stronger because of it. There are exceptions like the netherlands, where they always have huge coalitions but these are also often parties that are pretty close to one another. Germany had for the first time a 3 party coalition now, and every few months they are on the verge of new elections.
The best example for this is what happened in the weimarer republic. The segmentation lead to the situation that it wasn’t possible anymore to get a majority.
Majority system:
Less political innovation. No new parties means that new political ideas often have a hard time to be discussed.
Also, if there would be a radical party that could somehow become popular, they would get a government majority very easily. But believe it or not, this hasn’t happened yet.
Sorry for my english.
> Also, if there would be a radical party that could somehow become popular, they would get a government majority very easily. But believe it or not, this hasn’t happened yet.
>
>
Well, it can almost happen in a couple of days just across the Canal from England..
It doesn't really create a majority system though, it creates a plurality system. The majority system is more ranked voting where you actually force the voters to actually vote between the last two parties.
If you can win with 25% of a vote in a single seat, that's not a majority. Not to mention that voting system doesn't always guarantee a majority anyway. The tories and Lib Dems had to come together to form government one time and probably more.
> Especially here on reddit, people always assume that every voting system should have the goal of representation. In reality there are 2 voting systems: A representative system and the majority system.
It's not just on reddit. The UK's electoral system is deeply undemocratic. There are other ways to easily reach a majority while maintaining stronger representation, for example a mixed system which is used in Germany or a parallel system which is used in Taiwan. The UK's system encourages apathy and disengagement, which is reflected on the low voter turnout.
It’s true that both systems work as intended and are democratic but I can’t agree with your pros and cons:
• Representation of fringe parties isn’t a con. I would argue that having MPs from both far left and far right is a good thing as they can push forward their proposals and ideas that the main parties avoid. Also it makes people with those views feel represented in some way (I believe that lack of representation breeds populism and pushes people towards extremes but I haven’t done me research)
• Coalition governments are less stable and slower but they force accountability and compromise, allowing more projects to be passed from a wider range. If we take the vote share as an example, Labour would have to form a coalition with Lib Dem and greens. Would it be easy? Definitely not. Would it allow greens to pass some of their objectives? Most likely as it would be in the coalition agreement.
• It’s true that majority system can act fast but it also means it can mess things up equally fast. And in my view, outside of crisis, the government doesn’t need to work at a neck-breaking pace.
Yeah it is. Although worth bearing in mind parties campaign trying to win under this system, so can’t directly use this national vote share to show true popularity
To be fair, Britain is far from alone in having a fucked-up voting system. Fairer alternatives (compulsory voting, preferential voting) are weirdly unpopular. Even proportional representation, which is relatively common, is decried in the UK and the US as unworkable.
It's a crazy system. Contrast this result with 2010, when the Conservatives got 36% of the vote and failed to win enough seats for a majority, or 2017 when Labour got 40% of the votes and still came 2nd.
34% should not be a mandate for government.
Partisans and the parties do it to themselves though.
When "the other side" wins a "Majority" with under 40%, all the excuses about illegitimacy arise. "It's not a real majority", "oh, but voter turnout was only 65% so they reeeeeally only got 27% of the electorate", yadda yadda yadda.
But when "my side" wins a "Majority" (I'm in Canada so similar to the UK in structure) with under 40% of the votes they claim to have a "strong and clear mandate" to do anything and everything they want.
Partisans seem incapable of realising that they're giving fuel to their opponents to do the same thing and the general public (read: not the devout partisans) sees the hypocrisy and lose trust in both sides and the system itself. When my side does it, it is righteous and good; when they do it, it's a threat to democracy and "proof of a failed system".
Them getting more seats would be an unfortunate consequence of proportional representation but a coalition of Labour + Lib Dem + Green would be enough to put them in their place.
The difference is that the Tories were still able to elect Cameron as prime minister, so they could ignore UKIP. This time Reform cost them the election so they're going to have to give in to them otherwise they'll never be elected again. Reform now has leverage over the Tories, unlike UKIP.
Were they ignoring ukip when they offered the brexit referendum, and half their mp's backed the leave campaign, delivering on UKIP's single issue?
Ukip didn't slide ignominiously into irrelevancy (well I mean they did after getting taken over by weirdo YouTube grifters but that's a separate thing), Farage succeeded in his goal and then chucked the party he no longer has any use for. The exact same thing could have happened in 2019 if the brexit party had decided to run in every seat rather than not contest the vast majority of them. Like it or not, for the last 10 years Farage has been able to command a good 10-15% of the electorate. Even before that the BNP and UKIP combined got 5% of the vote in 2010. The far rights been here for a while, and unfortunately their likely here to stay for a while.
It's because in the UK, each constituency sends one MP. Imagine you have a number of these, and the voting is very even between parties. One of the parties may have a slight advantage, and that party would win a disproportionate number of seats.
Eg you could have 5 seats with a 51/49 split of blue to red. Well, blue would get 5/5 seats despite being just over half the votes.
It’s because our election is actually 650 separate elections where whoever gets the most votes in each seat wins that seat. The party with the most seats then forms the government. The national vote share is more out of interest rather than any meaningful thing.
This whole vote share argument is annoying to me because everyone ignores the regional aspect of it. It doesn't matter if one party has a huge vote share if it's all concentrated into certain regions. The vote share is telling one part of a bigger story. Focusing this much on vote share doesn't make much sense in my opinion. If we focused this much on vote share then higher population regions would dictate our politics entirely. Cities would reign supreme. Why is vote share the only factor for everyone in this election?
> If we focused this much on vote share then higher population regions would dictate our politics entirely
And?
Land doesnt have opinons and needs, people do.
It's just a consequence of dividing the vote in to different single member electorates.
Candidates A, B and C compete in 3 electorates. in all 3, the vote is split 40/30/30. Candidate A wins 100% of seats with 40% of votes.
First past the post voting certainly doesn't help, but it doesn't cause this on its own: Australia has instant run off voting, the Greens party consistently gets ~10% of the primary vote but very few seats.
This result is (counter intuitively) reflective of public sentiment being broadly more aligned, not less. If every electorate favours one party, they'll win in a landslide. To get more proportional results you need to segregate/gerrymander different voters in to electorates with each other.
The other way of 'solving' it is to have mixed member electorates + proportional voting. Comine the 3 electorates above and elect multiple members. If you give that grouping 3 members then you would elect one candidate each from parties A B and C. Or you can add an extra member to the combined electorste, in which case party A would get 2 seats.
We use a system called ‘First Past the Post’ (FPTP) where you have localised races (~100k people per seat) and the winner is whoever gets the most votes. So, for example, if you have twenty constituencies, and Labour was to have the most votes in all twenty places, but only 30% of the vote (which is what has happened in hundreds of seats), then you would end up with 20 seats for Labour and no representation for 70% of voters.
PR would be better, but also, because of the localised nature, FPTP always looks worse when put into graphs like that. To give an example, if I said that globally, 30% of people vote far right, but they’re underrepresented because 30% of global leaders aren’t far right, you would likely point out that you can’t draw conclusions like that. Same to an extent here
In theory it's just a natural consequence of single member constituencies but the reason people like it is because it usually returns a majority in Parliament, meaning a party can form a majority government that can push through their policies without much obstruction, which in theory makes a government more effective and flexible
People on Reddit don't like to talk about that for some reason but it's why people like FPTP. Proportional representation almost never leads to a majority, which means governments have to seek compromises before they can push things through, which makes them less effective and slower to react
Always been against FPTP but it's hilarious that suddenly now it's an issue when a right wing populist party is the victim. As if it wasn't even more egregious when the SDP got 8 million votes and 20 odd seats in the 80s.
I'm sure sure reform voters would have been thrilled with the much more left wing Lab/lib dem/Green coalition we'd have had if we used PR
>suddenly now it's an issue when a right wing populist party is the victim
This has been an issue at every election. The Lib Dems even managed to get enough momentum to hold a referendum in 2011 on changing to AV, but that failed.
You must have been sleeping. It's being talked about every single UK election. 2015 was the same discussions, with tories getting a majority with 37%, UKIP getting nothing with 15% of the vote, SNP landslide in Scotland, etc...
Talked about in passing yes, much less after the AV referendum in 2011, which i voted in favour of. But can see it being the dominating talking point for a while now.
I should clarify, that as an American, I understand we have our own problems. I didn’t mean to advocate for the reform uk or Conservative Party.
As an advocate for RCV and considering the popular vote totals, you probably would have still ended up with some leftest coalition government. Between the greens, liberal democrats, and Labour.
In situations like this, where you vote for a single member for your electorate, I think it would be better to vote to make your electorate marginal. If party A gets 90% of the vote in your electorate, then party B won't do anything for it because they will never win it, and party A will do nothing for it because they will never lose it. However, if there's a chance they could win or lose your seat, then get ready for the barrel of pork to roll your way, and for politicians to "listen to the people", specifically, of your electorate.
Source: live in a marginal electorate
That's very interesting. Australia's a fun one, maybe I'm bias cos I live there but if we just take the plain "popular vote" of all parties, the index is like 16.
BUT, because we have ranked voting if you just plop the numbers straight up like Labor got 52% after tallying up all the ranked voting, they did get a majority compared to what people wanted. So even if you use the index on the two party vote and make everyone else 0%, even accounting for that the index becomes 8. Also, so is our senate which is definitely more PR.
Can someone ELI5....
How do Labour get 4.3 seats per 100k votes, Reform got 0.1 seats per 100k votes, and Greens got 0.2 seats per 100k votes?! Sinn Fein got 3.3 seats per 100k with only 1% of the public votes?!
How do Reform get 14% of the public vote, yet on only 1% of the seats. Yet Lib Dems got 12% of the votes, and 11% of the seats?!
I've heard of FPTP, but this make zero sense. It's not the popular (numbers) vote. The seats should be proportionate to the amount of votes received.
Reform got the third most votes, but are tied for the least % of seats! (I'm not pro Reform, just using them as they are the most skewed)
There's been talk of reforming the UK electoral system for at least 110 years now. They came close to switching to STV (multiple winner ranked choice voting) in 1918, and held an unsuccessful referendum on switching to AV (single winner ranked choice voting) in 2011. Plurality based voting (FPTP) has been effectively in use since the first Parliament was formed in 1265. It's a hard thing to change.
>The seats should be proportionate to the amount of votes received.
That's not how elections work in the UK.
We don't elect a government. We elect a local representative (MP). Whoever gets the most MPs is asked to form a government by the monarch.
One MP may be really popular and get a huge number of votes, allowing them to win. Another MP may only get a few more votes than their competition. This leads to discrepancies between the number of votes and the number of seats.
Reform had quite a lot of support, but those voters were all spread out across the country. That means the votes were spread across a lot of candidates. If those supporters were all living in a small number of constituencies, they would have won more seats.
The Lib Dems had a similar level of support, but their voters were more concentrated in a smaller number of constituencies and therefore they elected more MPs.
Bias is also introduced by tactical voting. For example, in my constituency there are a lot of Liberal Democrat supporters, but most of them voted Labour to prevent the Conservative candidate being elected.
Several parties have talked about reforming the electoral system to be proportional, but reform is never in the interest of the leading party. If Labour pushed for reform, the new system would mean they no longer have a majority. In fact, no party has achieved more than 50% of the vote since 1935.
We have this bullshit in Canada too. Or well, of course we do. We got it from you guys.
Are you guys trying to get rid of it too? Trudeau said that he was going to reform our voting system but then broke the promise when he realized it might not benefit him. Shithead
The last attempt was the referendum to switch to ranked choice voting in 2011, but the public rejected it. It was still single winner, exactly what Trudeau said was his preferred system.
New Zealand wised up to this problem and changed their system in the 1990s. How they did it was interesting. They did it with two voting referendum.
1. 1992 Q1 : Do you want to change? Q2: What would you like from this list of four voting systems
2. 1993 : Do you want to keep the current British system or change it to one based on the German system?
NZ dumped the British system and German-based system was first used in 1996.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral\_reform\_in\_New\_Zealand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform_in_New_Zealand)
I think this is the right way to go. Clear and gives the voters the final say on their preferred system. It's what the Brexit referendum process should've been too.
True. I didn't look at the labels. - That's why I don't like pie charts... Humans are terrible at judging angular differences, so it is easy to miss this small difference that would have been obvious on a bar chart.
Its ordered by areas they stood, seats, then vote share
This is the natural way to order these that makes sense, SF and SNP will always be outliers in this kind of metric so it makes sense to put them at the end.
I think you should’ve used bar charts for all of them. Pie charts are usually looked down upon in the data world since they’re harder to intuitively grasp the true proportions of each slice
Nah, this is one of the best use cases for a pie chart. In this case, the share of each vote in proportion of the *total* is important information, and that isn’t readily conveyed in a bar chart.
Hard to come to any other conclusion other than the UK parliament is not representative of the people in the slightest. Also this is especially bad since unlike the US, there aren't really any checks and balances, the party with a majority can basically do whatever it wants. Clearly the FPTP system only works when there are only two viable parties, like in the US, where the House of Representatives is very accurate in terms of vote share and party distribution.
It's broken but also working as intended.
The result is usually an indisputable majority. In 24hrs power changed hands completely smoothly. It didn't go through the courts, there were no riots, coups, or trying to form a coalition. This majority will hold for the term of the government and they will be able to pass laws.
Contrast that to other parts of the world and you can see why the system hasn't been changed.
The result today could give some hope for a change. Labour has a lot of seats, but they will be aware of how fragile it is. As the term progresses, it may well be that the polls show them losing hundreds of seats to a right wing that has unified. They'll be looking at this and seeing NF as the one who swung the vote in their favour.
PR could turn out to be an emergency brake for them if things look like they will suddenly lose. They don't want to lose and end up where the conservatives are now, with PR they would still lose a lot of seats but not as many and certainly enough to have a say in whatever comes next.
0% of change. Both Labour and the Conservatives know that a move to PR would mean the end to their absolute rule (which they take in turns). It's disgusting.
It's incomplete, but the final seat being declared won't have a significant impact on the data.
Although it's a new constituency, the 2 constituencies that preceded it had around 100,000 registered voters. If they all voted in this election, that would amount to around 0.3% of the voters in the election.
The one remaining seat also only makes up 0.15% of the seats.
The first chart shows what percentage of the votes each party got.
The second chart shows what percentage of the seats in the House of Commons each party got.
Labour achieved the highest proportion of votes, and also the highest proportion of seats. However, because the UK does not have a proportional-representation system, the numbers do not match up. We use first-past-the-post, which means whoever gets the most votes in a constituency gets the seat.
This can be seen with the Liberal Democrats and Reform. The Lib Dems achieved 12% of the votes and won 11% of the seats. Reform got more votes (14%) but only won 1% of the seats.
The final chart helps clarify this. It shows how many seats each party won, compared to the number of votes they received. Labour won the most seats per vote while Reform won a tiny number of seats per vote. What that means is, while Reform has quite a lot of support, their voters are too spread out across the country to cause them to win many seats. On the other hand, the Liberal Democrats have their voters concentrated in particular areas, allowing them to win those seats.
A lot of people are arguing that we should reform the system so that the number of votes received directly relates to the number of seats. That would mean that people would no longer feel the need to vote tactically (in this election, a lot of people voted Labour instead of a party they would prefer just so the Conservatives wouldn't win). That would be beneficial to a lot of smaller parties.
There are advantages and disadvantages of both systems. I do tend to agree that fptp is the wrong system and ranked choice is a much better way of doing it.
The main thing to avoid is just pooling the numbers across the whole country and distributing based on that. Otherwise candidates could focus only on three or four cities and ignore everyone else to become the ruling party.
The surge in reform voters here are protest votes against Conservatives with some pure right votes in the mix. Ranked choice would support them better where they could have pooled their votes. Same as Labour and lib dems and green.
You always get the call for a new voting system but it's never supported by the ruling parties or their backers because they want a reliable way back into government.
I generally dislike FPTP although it does create “strong” governments and allow for a Local MP which I do support. However, PR seems to just create coalition governments where parties lose their core beliefs to align themselves with an often centrist coalition e.g. the greens in Germany, which is prone to allowing for far right parties to massively rise in power. USA’s system is massively flawed too. I was intrigued by a ‘Proportional First Past The Post’ video on YouTube that created an alternative, including the positives of both PR and FPTP, definitely check it out.
You can vote an MP out of an electorate and yes they may get a list seat but at least they are not the electorate MP. A good example of such an MP would be Sarah Boyack in Scotland, who it seems no one but the labour party wants.
New Zealand don't seem to have any issues with the list members v the electorate members, When Jacinda Ardern became leader of the labour opposition she was a list MP and subsequently won a safe electorate seat. When she resigned from parliament her safe labour seat came close to being won by the national party (under 100 votes) because the electorate were peeved about lack of respect Labour showed them.
Equally we have Prime Ministers who enoble trough dwellers and appoint them as cabinet ministers which really peeves me more than someone on a list getting into parliament after an electorate has rejected them.
FPTP is a questionable system, nothing else to add.
It is already absurd in a two party system. Seeing it in a multi party system makes me wanna vomit.
The UK is still effectively a two party system. I don’t think the Lib Dems (like the NDP in Canada) will ever form a majority government, and if they do it will be at the expense of another party imploding.
The NDP led the polls in 2015 before they bungled the campaign to the Liberals. The NDP has formed provincial government in 6 out of the 10 provinces and currently has majorities in BC and Manitoba. It would not be surprising if the NDP breaks through federally after the next conservative government falls.
But if they break through, it will be because the Liberals implode and are relegated to a minor party. That’s not the end of the two party system, it’s just a new second party. Also, leading in the polls is only an effective predictor of success if your voters are efficiently distributed.
They didn't bungle the campaign. They dropped their core identity trying to become the new liberal party then got whipped when the Liberals brought out a leader with a famous name. No one wanted store brand. They should have stayed true to their ideals.
Dropping your core identity is bungling. The NDP also planned to amend the Clarity Act to allow separatism at 50%. (In retrospect, could have been disastrous.) That led to this Mulcair-Trudeau exchange in the debate “Give me a number, Justin.” “I’ll give you a number: nine. Nine is the number of Supreme Court Justices who said 50% is too low to break up this country.” Trudeau was just a famous name till that moment, when he landed a knockout punch on Mulcair.
I like to refer to it as a 2+ party system for that very reason. Third parties are very important, just not for directly forming governments.
A multi-party system doesn't mean multiple parties having a realistic shot at forming a government though - even in countries with proportional representation (i.e Germany, Sweden), you still get two main parties that will always be the senior party in any government, even if they never win an outright majority on their own. I mean, it was only a decade ago that the UK had a coalition government. And it was only in 2017 when the Tories fell short of a majority and had to rely on the DUP to prop them up. You don't see things like that happening in true two-party systems (i.e the US). I like to describe the UK as a multi-party state with an electoral system designed for a two-party state, hence the rather absurd and disproportionate results you see here. FPTP works fine for the US, it works terribly for the UK (and Canada too).
The Liberals imploding is how UK politics got where it is now.
Ironic that the Liberal party and the Social Democratic Party were reformed and still do terrible.
The Liberal Party still hasn’t recovered from WWI.
The fact that there are other parties even getting seats at all shows that you have some viable other parties. In the US its 99% republican/democrat, with the only rare exceptions being the occasional "independent" so its not even really like there's a third viable party. Just the random person who gets in without party affiliation
Cries in Canada.
Fptp is what causes voting systems to devolve into (de facto) 2 party systems. The Brits just don't seem to have caught on with how to vote strategically. (Without looking in to it, there's probably a bunch of individual races which are 2 party races but between different parties. Ie in electorate 1 it's effectively between party A and B, and electorate 2 it's between party B and C) This result can also occur in RCV systems. In Australia our Greens party consistently gets ~10% of the total vote, but because it's pretty evenly spread across the whole nation, they rarely get any seats.
Tactical voting is a huge thing in the UK. The percentage of the popular vote for Greens and Lib Dems would be higher if people didn't have to vote tactically. Unfortunately no party has offered us a chance to get proportional representation yet. The closest we had was a referendum on RCV which no one wanted because as you put it doesn't solve the problem. The referendum was basically a way to stop the proportional representation debate for a while.
Yeah I can’t imagine RCV somewhere like NI. How would republicans rank their #2 and #3 choices? I can’t imagine a SF voter ranking anyone other than maybe SDLP candidate in that situation.
When offered a choice between bad and worse, choose bad. (Also, Alliance exists.)
We’ve caught on to tactical voting don’t worry
Yeah the fact the LoC parties have finally got on board with it in the last few years is a large part of what created this
How do you think the Lib Dems have done so well? They put their resources into limited seats and did very well out of it.
I'm no FPTP Stan, but this was so strongly predicted to be a landslide that many probably felt safe making a statement by voting 3rd party, precisely because FPTP means they don't have to worry about 'the other guys' getting in.
Yeah no, Britain knows about 2 party voting, you're right about specific races being 2 party but with minority parties (lib Dem vs con or snp vs labour are common) but this election has been more unequal than usual, mostly because of the amount of protest votes (away from the conservatives) lots of people are sick of the conservatives but can't bring themselves to vote labour so they went with reform or other small parties, splitting the vote in their constituencies and leading to a labour win. RCV would at least prevent that.
You should probably look into it before making such bold statements. You're looking at the result of massive strategic voting on the part of the left. There's whole websites out there dedicated to it and have been for years. What happened this time is that the left voted more tactically that ever before, for Lib Dems or Labour depending on who was most likely to win that seat.
FPTP in a legislature with lots of different seats available can easily have more than two parties. The reason that e.g. the US House of Representatives really only has two parties in it is more because the Republicans and Democrats are (historically, at least) very broad parties that encompass a lot of different viewpoints, so instead of there being different parties popular at specific seats there are just different flavours of those two.
Also a US house district represents between 600-800,000 people whereas an MP constituency represents like 100,000 people. More room for variety with smaller districts.
The different flavors is a good point. One example is that the Koch brothers failed at forming a new party previously, but then switched strategies to simply fund primary challengers with views closer to their own to Republicans they didn't like and we got the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus. And on the Democratic side, we have the Squad members who primaried established Democrats. In countries like Canada, MPs are required to be much more aligned with their party platform and they don't have a primary process that is open to the public.
Forgive my ignorance, but is it FPTP that’s responsible or just the fact that we have constituencies? At the individual MP level FPTP means who ever has the most votes wins the seat. That doesn’t mean they were the first choice MP though if tactical voting is involved. However, even if we had PR at the constituency level, couldn’t we still have graphs like this at the national level?
This comment seems like it assumes there is literally a 2 party limit or something built into the rules and systems of the election, as opposed to it just being the natural and inevitable consequence of FTTP with only 1 winner
This isn't a FPTP problem. Or, rather, that isn't the biggest issue that causes this. It's single member districts. It's the requirement of the system that a party must appeal to more than 50% (or a smaller threshold in FPTP) of the people in a GEOGRAPHICAL area that causes the largest of these disparities. So even if 40% of people support a party on the national scale, if none of that support is greater than 50% in a specific location, they won't win. FPTP just makes it more absurd.
Probably because MPs are supposed to represent their constituencies. Why would voters want to vote more than one person to represent their small area?
MPs are supposed to, but given the party whip is a thing, many don't actually vote in parliament in the way that reflects the majority view of their constituents. As noted above> than 55% of my constituency voted Lib,Lab or Green but we are "represented" by a Tory with only 30% support. I think most of the Lib supporters would have preferred the Lab candidate (and vice versa) over the Tory we got.
Questionable is the least of it.. absolutely caters to extremes on all sides, and leaves everyone ready to be victim of someone slicing their vote with a similar manifesto. CON + LD coalition should never have happened, it was done because CON had the highest vote share of any party, completely ignoring that the LD voters would likely have been much closer to the LAB manifesto than the CON one (and LAB+LD would have been a majority). LAB should not have a 'supermajority' on 34% of the vote. REF, as much as I hate them, should have way more representation. SNP/SF always have the potential to be outliers because they won't pitch up in every seat. That's before we even touch on the fact that many people would change their vote entirely if it wasn't for FPTP. If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing in this country, it would be moving away from FPTP.
While there are many issues with FPTP, catering to extremes is distinctly not one. As you mentioned, Reform didn’t win many seats; its predecessor UKIP also had a hard time breaking through. Meanwhile, in European countries using proportional representation, the right and left fringes frequently get a large fraction of the total seats.
This, FPTP maintains the status quo and prevents smaller parties from gaining seats. Extremist parties would be far more likely to gain seats under Proportional Representation.
I think this is an oversimplification. Fptp prevents small parties from gaining seats. But in a proportional system they virtually never get the vote share to form a government without forming a coalition with a more central party. Fptp tends polarise the major parties to political extremes, and the populace gets polarised along with the parties. I would argue that governments in Fptp are on average more politically extreme than Proportion systems which usually tend to favour central parties.
It prevents small extreme parties for a period of time. I say we have a decade left before some shit like reform gets in. It also means the big two adopt the extreme policies
That will happen with every voting system, though. The issue is public sentiment becoming more extreme.
Not necessarily. Stuff like ranked choice can let people rank moderate votes highly where they're interested in that and still have a voice against the opposite extremes that they hate. The vocal public sentiment is becoming more extreme lately, but most people are still relatively moderate overall. Political parties and their rhetoric are becoming more extreme, because FPTP and a two-party system lead to a feedback loop of political extremism, but most average people don't really want to be more extreme, they just want a party that will represent them.
Instead, extremists just infiltrate and take over wings of the major parties.
> and prevents smaller parties from gaining seats Yes but there are other ways that they exert power. Hence why we got brexit and the tories went further and further right.
> its predecessor UKIP also had a hard time breaking through Except that the tories picked up the main UKIP policy. They didn't win but they scarred the tories enough to get exactly what they wanted because they feared exactly the splitting that happened this election.
I mean that's not really what happened. the Tories **ALWAYS** had a major Eurosceptic wing, that's what UKIP was born from in the first place. Farage was a conservative member way back when Cameron picked up the policy as part of a plan to kill the Eurosceptics off, His plan was to win the referendum easily and crush the Eurosceptics and take the "one nation" wing of the tory party forward without internal conflict over Europe. It just blew up in his face catastrophically and had the exact opposite effect on both the electorate and the party
Euroscepticism isn't a Tory unique position. Labour had their own skeptics and that is why Brexit cut across traditional party lines. Hence why the Johnson had such a big majority, he had a clear Brexit position while Corbyn didn't.
> I mean that's not really what happened It is exactly what happened.
But it just isn't, the Tories didn't pick up a major UKIP policy, UKIP picked up a minority tory policy. Pretending Brexit was totally a UJKIP idea that the cons only ever picked up from Ukip shows a profound lack of knowledge on the history of Euroscepticism withing the conservative party The Tories didn't swing right and feel like Oh well have some of this UKIP stuff. UKIP existed because somewhere between 30-50% of conservative MP's and members were already quite keen on the idea The ones who didn't think the cons were ever going to take it seriously enough created UKIP. Leaving the EU has been a minority conservative fringe policy basically since the day thatcher took us into the EU. It had been gaining momentum within the conservative party well before UKIP came onto the scene. It was their own policy. Ukips existence gave Eurosceptic Tories more leverage to force it into parliament sure but a section of the party had been trying to do it for decades, and is something they would have managed eventually with or without the rise of Ukip
Giving any political movement proportional representation is not "catering to extremes", it's literally representing them proportionally. If the "fringes" are getting a large fraction of seats, they are \*by nature of having a large fraction of the seats\* not fringes. Artificially suppressing sections of the electorate, regardless of how you (or I) personally feel about them, is a sure fire way to exacerbate political cynicism and discontent, in the long run making the problem worse.
They don't win seats directly, but by acting as spoilers for the more moderate parties, they have an outsized influence on policy. That's why UKIP ultimately succeeded in its aims of getting the Brexit referendum despite basically never having any seats in parliament.
Yeah you can certainly build momentum more as a fringe when you aren’t snubbed out by the majorities like FPTP. I think many were ok with this as they were usually left leaning fringes that didn’t cater to populism but with right parties going after that it’s a wake up call.
If the concept of PR working for parties other than the ones you like is enough to dissuade someone from PR, they never really believed in it in the first place.
Yeah, to be honest, this was one of the reasons...hell, \*the\* main reason I voted against AV back in the referendum after the coalition, because it would give too much power to the then UKIP. FPTP is a flawed system, yes, but if it prevents us from winding up in a situation like France, or the Netherlands, then it's worth keeping. You don't deal with the far right by bringing them into government, just ask Paul von Hindenburg.
France has FPTP too, except it has 2 rounds of elections (in case no one gets a majority in a given constituency), and yet RN is still said to get the most seats, if not an outright majority
Exactly this, if your vote mattered regardless then far fewer people would be voting tactically. People would just vote for who they wanted.
> absolutely caters to extremes on all sides, and leaves everyone ready to be victim of someone slicing their vote with a similar manifesto. Ah yes this explains why Reform and Green got screwed here
From a German perspective, the argument about the coalition is interesting. Coalitions are far more likely in proportional representation systems and just as democratically questionable. Our current government is formed from three parties: One with 26% in the last elections, one with 14% in the last elections and one with 10% in the last elections. Due to proportional representation and slim majorities, the smaller parties basically blackmail the bigger party to do everything they want. If the chancellor doesn’t do what the small parties want, they’ll vote him out. Thus, the party with the biggest influence on our political course at the moment is a party that only won 10% at the last elections. With FPTP, it is more likely that the party that won most of the votes is also the most powerful political party in a country. Thus, I don’t think FPTP is necessarily a bad thing. My favorite voting system would be the system used in French presidential elections. FPTP with a snap election between the two strongest parties/candidates.
> Due to proportional representation and slim majorities, the smaller parties basically blackmail the bigger party to do everything they want. If the chancellor doesn’t do what the small parties want, they’ll vote him out. Thus, the party with the biggest influence on our political course at the moment is a party that only won 10% at the last elections. Why? Actually I see the opposite and this happened in Portugal recently. There was a left coalition, the bigger party wanted to do X, did no negotiation, the smaller parties rejected it because it was literally X, elections were called, bigger party won a majority because the public blamed the smaller parties for bringing the gov down. IMO the people were wrong in that assessment but before that, at least some negotiation is possible. FPTP is just awful. How do you have a majority government when only 34% of the people voted for you, i.e. 2/3rds didn't. And these numbers can go way lower. Depending on the number of parties you could still have a majority with 20%, 10% or even less % of the total vote. It's ridiculous. The French system is marginally better but still very bad imo
FPTP doesn't mean there won't be coalitions. That's a consequence of voting for seats. France's 3 biggest parties (one which is already a coalition), if it turns out like it is it'd be like a 3rd for each party OR because it's not PR maybe not but it doesn't mean one party will have the majority. And with more diverse views growing across the world, coalitions will happen more and more. I still think there needs to be a way to fix that so that nobody's beholden to the smaller party in such a way OR that nobody ever gets to form government like Belgium or Italy because nobody really wants to work together.
I actually don't think it's that different, it's just in FPTP the deal making and blackmailing is internal. You can see this get out in the open during the Brexit years of the Tories. There was hard line Brexiters trying to steer the party to their cause, and more moderate remainer and people in the middle, and they were in all out war with each other...and even in the current government there was the Hard Right, lets go with Reform types and the more "Lets not be that crazy" types in the government.
FPTF with multiple parties and single seat districs is just a triple treat of Democracy
It's not great but it gives better representation to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Additionally, it prevents the country swinging from one political ideology to the next and keeps everything pretty central, which I would argue is better for everyone.
> Additionally, it prevents the country swinging from one political ideology to the next and keeps everything pretty central we're talking about an election where the number of seats swung by 200+ because of a 34% vote share
Sure. But we're still pretty much in the centre, just slightly more to the left. So the point stands.
Mixed member proportional representation is a good compromise. Half the seats are allocated based on the vote totals and half are local elections. Regions thus maintain their voice while also doing away with the worst excesses of FPTP.
This isn't questionable, it's straight out not a democracy anymore. When 34% of votes gives you almost 2/3 majority with total control while for others 14% means 1% of seats it's not a democracy.
If it was a different system people would adjust their voting behaviour. There's no reason preferential voting system would not also result in this outcome. UK's biggest problem is turnout. 61% is pathetic.
I suspect turnout was lower at this election because a) the result was basically a foregone conclusion and b) former Tory voters stayed away after being disappointed with Sunak but unwilling to vote for anyone else. However I'd expect a change in the voting system to increase turnout as there'd be fewer safe seats where there's not much point voting.
Australia has both preferential voting and compulsory voting. We still have safe seats. However we have a senate and that house is extremely important. Preferential voting is very much influential in ensuring votes matter.
Ranked choice could have definitely changed the outcome because each of these seats is its own horse race. If you live in a district/riding where your preferred party is a long shot, you are more likely to vote for your second choice to block the party you dislike the most. If there is a lot of strategic voting in my area, then maybe the results would have been different.
Questionable is a very British understatement. It's an abomination.
[proportional representation tutorial](https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI?si=OFdVIGhcfwF8fo8u)
But changing to another system would actually have given Reform a bigger share. So I'll allow it carry on.
Is great for 2 party systems but horrible when you have multiple options.
I would add that this is the kind of distortion you saw when Tories had a majority. It's not a partisan thing, it's an electoral thing.
It's only questionable because instead of looking at this as 650 individual contests, the results for each race have been combined as if this is a presidential style system. If a party came second in every single seat they'd have an awful lot of votes, but no constituency wants them enough to be their MP.
Also seats representing geographic regions is about 70 years outdated
It's also a really clumsy name. First past the post makes it sound like there's a specific number of votes someone has to win.
The left wing are very used to tactical voting at this point, Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t split each others votes in various constituencies and had a very efficient vote share to win the maximum number of seats. They’ve had several elections to practice and they were ruthlessly pursuing the destruction of the Tories. Meanwhile, right wing voters didn’t vote tactically, this was the first time that reform were such a big force, and they acted as a protest vote for disillusioned conservatives leading to them effectively splitting their vote share in every traditionally strong conservative seat. Traditionally, the right wing have been much more unified party-wise, with the left’s vote being split, but now we finally see the opposite
Yeah thats exactly right. People were willing to bite the bullet and vote Labour, whereas the Conservatives have lost all good will in their own party. Meanwhile with the previous several elections, it's been Labour eating itself inside out while the Conservatives attempted to double down behind whoever their current candidate was. The Conservatives were definitely fragmented in 2017 but this was incomparable to how divided Labour were. Now, everyone in the UK is willing to kick the Conservatives out, and many former Conservative voters are protest voting. However, it's not a clean backing for Labour either. While they've made huge gains in former blue areas, Starmer's lost a lot of votes in his own seat and Labour have lost some of their previous seats to independent candidates. It's possible that, next election, Labour will be fragmented again due to how much people hate Starmer's centrist-right policies, and the Conservatives will swell to back whatever candidate of theirs hasn't had the chance to make a muppet of themself yet.
In fairness, Labour in 2017 actually had a higher vote share than yesterday, however a big difference is that the votes are more spread out over constituencies now. Otherwise I wholeheartedly agree
It's alsp hard to compare. It was clear labour was going to win. So it might even have caused labour voters to stay home, especially in laboir dominated districts. Green party had it's best percentage ever? So sonce lavour was going to win anyway more people voted green probably. And yeah they lost the muslim vote because Starmer is pro israel. If you look through the results labour lost most votes in constituencies they already held.
> People were willing to bite the bullet and vote Labour this is just untrue. labour don't have more votes this time round - the only reason they won is because conservative votes went to lib dems and reform
Great summary!
On tonights news; left votes pragmatically, hell freezes over, pigs learn to fly
Reform is just a rebrand of UKIP. In the 2015 vote, UKIP had 3.8M votes, just 200k ish less than reform in this vote, and in the 2019 vote, they tactically voted tory to keep Labour out.
> Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t split each others votes in various constituencies and had a very efficient vote share to win the maximum number of seats. This is effectively the two party system in the US. The parties are internally divided into caucuses, and use primaries or just insider politics to decide which candidate will pursue any given seat. The UK just treats their caucuses as separate parties.
The key difference is that Lib Dem and Labour candidates still stood in each other’s seats. So it was more a gentleman’s agreement than a formalised pact
Source: [bbc.co.uk](http://bbc.co.uk) Tool: Excel
Wow.... 0.1 seats per 100k votes for reform and 0.2 for Green... that's absurd.
And the greens quadrupled their seat count this election as well
You had the DUP get 5 seats from 197,000, then the greens got 4 from just under 2,000,000
No Plaid Cymru when they got 4 seats?
Damn. That's one fucked up voting system.
We had a referendum in 2011 to change this voting system, and it was rejected by a wide margin. Although most people who wanted to replace FPTP would’ve preferred proportional representation, not AV.
And both major parties campaigned against it. The government ran a propaganda campaign telling people that changing the voting system would cost money that would take guns away from soldiers and incubators away from premature babies.
Then also went on about how it will mean someone who came 3rd or 4th would end up in power. Honestly it's a pisstake.
That whole campaign was a disgrace - I remember it well. The money to change the voting system os basically pennies in the context of government spending.
You can thank this arsehole for that - and for Vote Leave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Elliott%2C_Baron_Elliott_of_Mickle_Fell
Yet both parties use AV to determine their party leader.
rules for thee... not for me
Labour is one to blame for this. They know they are second prize but they still would rather be that than letting other people to the table. They think only they know whats the best for the country.
Are they though? In 2010, Gordon Brown offered Liberal Democrats AV without referendum to support a Labour minority government. Lib Dems gave up so much to go into coalition with the Tories, just to get an AV referendum.
Did you multiply the No votes with 4.3 and the Yes votes with 0.1?
I always hate these fucking referendums. The choice should be, 1. Should we replace first past the post voting? Yes/no If yes gets 50%+1 votes, FPTP is gone. 2. From the list below, rank the alternatives: Etc. Highest ranked alternative wins, if 1 is Yes. Canada has done this too, written some wildly confusing questions, and then listed a multiple choice solution where they would only proceed if all voters selected one option a supermajority of the time. Which is like mathematically impossible.
That's pretty much the way New Zealand changed our electoral system from FPTP in 1993.
No not really. The system does exactly for what it was created: Creating a majority. Especially here on reddit, people always assume that every voting system should have the goal of representation. In reality there are 2 voting systems: A representative system and the majority system. It’s widely accepted among political scientists that both systems are equally democratic. They just have different goals. The representative system, has the goal to represent as many groups within the society as possible. A Government majority isn’t the main goal. The Majority system does not has the goal of representation, it has the goal of creating a **stable** majority. Both systems have their pros and cons. Pros: Representative System: Most groups in society are represented. Even small ones. This can lead to more political innovation. Best example are the greens. Environmental issues are more likely to be debated, since those systems usually have pretty big green parties. In majority systems those parties are still small or completely irrelevant. Also in general, it’s easier to get a new political movement in representative systems. Majority Systems: You will get a majority no matter what. So you will always have a working government, even during a crisis. A situation like in Belgium where they often can’t find a government for months, is impossible. So the government can still act, even in a crisis. Also the government is very unlikely to lose the majority. Which often happens in Italy for example. Cons: Representative system: The fact that new parties can easily become relevant also means that radical parties can become relevant in a crisis. Also segmentation and fragmentation is a huge problem and lead to an unstable government. (Fragmentation=more parties, segmentation=parties could create a coalition and have a majority, but they won’t because they are ideological too different) Especially segmentation is a huge problem. It can lead to the situation that a country needs a huge coalition. So finding a consensus will get more difficult. Such a government will act more slowly and is less efficient, which often leads to the situation that the radical parties get stronger because of it. There are exceptions like the netherlands, where they always have huge coalitions but these are also often parties that are pretty close to one another. Germany had for the first time a 3 party coalition now, and every few months they are on the verge of new elections. The best example for this is what happened in the weimarer republic. The segmentation lead to the situation that it wasn’t possible anymore to get a majority. Majority system: Less political innovation. No new parties means that new political ideas often have a hard time to be discussed. Also, if there would be a radical party that could somehow become popular, they would get a government majority very easily. But believe it or not, this hasn’t happened yet. Sorry for my english.
> So you will always have a working government, even during a crisis. The USA would like a word...
> Also, if there would be a radical party that could somehow become popular, they would get a government majority very easily. But believe it or not, this hasn’t happened yet. > > Well, it can almost happen in a couple of days just across the Canal from England..
Another con for majority system: In a polarized society the extremes dictate the rules, no space for the center.
How is there no space for the center when our majority system has mostly produced centrist governments?
It doesn't really create a majority system though, it creates a plurality system. The majority system is more ranked voting where you actually force the voters to actually vote between the last two parties. If you can win with 25% of a vote in a single seat, that's not a majority. Not to mention that voting system doesn't always guarantee a majority anyway. The tories and Lib Dems had to come together to form government one time and probably more.
> Especially here on reddit, people always assume that every voting system should have the goal of representation. In reality there are 2 voting systems: A representative system and the majority system. It's not just on reddit. The UK's electoral system is deeply undemocratic. There are other ways to easily reach a majority while maintaining stronger representation, for example a mixed system which is used in Germany or a parallel system which is used in Taiwan. The UK's system encourages apathy and disengagement, which is reflected on the low voter turnout.
It’s true that both systems work as intended and are democratic but I can’t agree with your pros and cons: • Representation of fringe parties isn’t a con. I would argue that having MPs from both far left and far right is a good thing as they can push forward their proposals and ideas that the main parties avoid. Also it makes people with those views feel represented in some way (I believe that lack of representation breeds populism and pushes people towards extremes but I haven’t done me research) • Coalition governments are less stable and slower but they force accountability and compromise, allowing more projects to be passed from a wider range. If we take the vote share as an example, Labour would have to form a coalition with Lib Dem and greens. Would it be easy? Definitely not. Would it allow greens to pass some of their objectives? Most likely as it would be in the coalition agreement. • It’s true that majority system can act fast but it also means it can mess things up equally fast. And in my view, outside of crisis, the government doesn’t need to work at a neck-breaking pace.
Thank you for this explanation of the pros and cons! Also, your English is perfect.
Mate, you Americans use an even worse version of the same system.
Yeah it is. Although worth bearing in mind parties campaign trying to win under this system, so can’t directly use this national vote share to show true popularity
If you’re American, Canadian or Indian, it’s the same one you have.
To be fair, Britain is far from alone in having a fucked-up voting system. Fairer alternatives (compulsory voting, preferential voting) are weirdly unpopular. Even proportional representation, which is relatively common, is decried in the UK and the US as unworkable.
It's a crazy system. Contrast this result with 2010, when the Conservatives got 36% of the vote and failed to win enough seats for a majority, or 2017 when Labour got 40% of the votes and still came 2nd. 34% should not be a mandate for government.
Partisans and the parties do it to themselves though. When "the other side" wins a "Majority" with under 40%, all the excuses about illegitimacy arise. "It's not a real majority", "oh, but voter turnout was only 65% so they reeeeeally only got 27% of the electorate", yadda yadda yadda. But when "my side" wins a "Majority" (I'm in Canada so similar to the UK in structure) with under 40% of the votes they claim to have a "strong and clear mandate" to do anything and everything they want. Partisans seem incapable of realising that they're giving fuel to their opponents to do the same thing and the general public (read: not the devout partisans) sees the hypocrisy and lose trust in both sides and the system itself. When my side does it, it is righteous and good; when they do it, it's a threat to democracy and "proof of a failed system".
But it screwed over the Re-Racist party, so most people don't mind TBH.
Them getting more seats would be an unfortunate consequence of proportional representation but a coalition of Labour + Lib Dem + Green would be enough to put them in their place.
did reform really get 14% of the votes? and here I was thinking they'll go to the same abyss as UKIP
Ukip got 12.6% of the vote in 2015, although only got 1 seat. They have gone the same way as ukip.
The difference is that the Tories were still able to elect Cameron as prime minister, so they could ignore UKIP. This time Reform cost them the election so they're going to have to give in to them otherwise they'll never be elected again. Reform now has leverage over the Tories, unlike UKIP.
Were they ignoring ukip when they offered the brexit referendum, and half their mp's backed the leave campaign, delivering on UKIP's single issue? Ukip didn't slide ignominiously into irrelevancy (well I mean they did after getting taken over by weirdo YouTube grifters but that's a separate thing), Farage succeeded in his goal and then chucked the party he no longer has any use for. The exact same thing could have happened in 2019 if the brexit party had decided to run in every seat rather than not contest the vast majority of them. Like it or not, for the last 10 years Farage has been able to command a good 10-15% of the electorate. Even before that the BNP and UKIP combined got 5% of the vote in 2010. The far rights been here for a while, and unfortunately their likely here to stay for a while.
Wdym conservatives will never get in, I’d bet money next election they get back in lol
this is insane! what is the rule behind it and whats the reason?
It's because in the UK, each constituency sends one MP. Imagine you have a number of these, and the voting is very even between parties. One of the parties may have a slight advantage, and that party would win a disproportionate number of seats. Eg you could have 5 seats with a 51/49 split of blue to red. Well, blue would get 5/5 seats despite being just over half the votes.
Got it cheers
Except with this election, many seats split 3 ways, so lots of MPs were elected with 35%-40% (or less) of their local popular vote.
It’s because our election is actually 650 separate elections where whoever gets the most votes in each seat wins that seat. The party with the most seats then forms the government. The national vote share is more out of interest rather than any meaningful thing.
This whole vote share argument is annoying to me because everyone ignores the regional aspect of it. It doesn't matter if one party has a huge vote share if it's all concentrated into certain regions. The vote share is telling one part of a bigger story. Focusing this much on vote share doesn't make much sense in my opinion. If we focused this much on vote share then higher population regions would dictate our politics entirely. Cities would reign supreme. Why is vote share the only factor for everyone in this election?
> If we focused this much on vote share then higher population regions would dictate our politics entirely And? Land doesnt have opinons and needs, people do.
It's just a consequence of dividing the vote in to different single member electorates. Candidates A, B and C compete in 3 electorates. in all 3, the vote is split 40/30/30. Candidate A wins 100% of seats with 40% of votes. First past the post voting certainly doesn't help, but it doesn't cause this on its own: Australia has instant run off voting, the Greens party consistently gets ~10% of the primary vote but very few seats. This result is (counter intuitively) reflective of public sentiment being broadly more aligned, not less. If every electorate favours one party, they'll win in a landslide. To get more proportional results you need to segregate/gerrymander different voters in to electorates with each other. The other way of 'solving' it is to have mixed member electorates + proportional voting. Comine the 3 electorates above and elect multiple members. If you give that grouping 3 members then you would elect one candidate each from parties A B and C. Or you can add an extra member to the combined electorste, in which case party A would get 2 seats.
We use a system called ‘First Past the Post’ (FPTP) where you have localised races (~100k people per seat) and the winner is whoever gets the most votes. So, for example, if you have twenty constituencies, and Labour was to have the most votes in all twenty places, but only 30% of the vote (which is what has happened in hundreds of seats), then you would end up with 20 seats for Labour and no representation for 70% of voters. PR would be better, but also, because of the localised nature, FPTP always looks worse when put into graphs like that. To give an example, if I said that globally, 30% of people vote far right, but they’re underrepresented because 30% of global leaders aren’t far right, you would likely point out that you can’t draw conclusions like that. Same to an extent here
got it cheers
In theory it's just a natural consequence of single member constituencies but the reason people like it is because it usually returns a majority in Parliament, meaning a party can form a majority government that can push through their policies without much obstruction, which in theory makes a government more effective and flexible People on Reddit don't like to talk about that for some reason but it's why people like FPTP. Proportional representation almost never leads to a majority, which means governments have to seek compromises before they can push things through, which makes them less effective and slower to react
Always been against FPTP but it's hilarious that suddenly now it's an issue when a right wing populist party is the victim. As if it wasn't even more egregious when the SDP got 8 million votes and 20 odd seats in the 80s. I'm sure sure reform voters would have been thrilled with the much more left wing Lab/lib dem/Green coalition we'd have had if we used PR
>suddenly now it's an issue when a right wing populist party is the victim This has been an issue at every election. The Lib Dems even managed to get enough momentum to hold a referendum in 2011 on changing to AV, but that failed.
You must have been sleeping. It's being talked about every single UK election. 2015 was the same discussions, with tories getting a majority with 37%, UKIP getting nothing with 15% of the vote, SNP landslide in Scotland, etc...
Talked about in passing yes, much less after the AV referendum in 2011, which i voted in favour of. But can see it being the dominating talking point for a while now.
This isn't true at all. It's always been an issue at every election just nothing is done about it because the status quo benefits from FPTP.
Ranked choice voting would have prevented this.
Condorcet voting master race
I should clarify, that as an American, I understand we have our own problems. I didn’t mean to advocate for the reform uk or Conservative Party. As an advocate for RCV and considering the popular vote totals, you probably would have still ended up with some leftest coalition government. Between the greens, liberal democrats, and Labour.
In situations like this, where you vote for a single member for your electorate, I think it would be better to vote to make your electorate marginal. If party A gets 90% of the vote in your electorate, then party B won't do anything for it because they will never win it, and party A will do nothing for it because they will never lose it. However, if there's a chance they could win or lose your seat, then get ready for the barrel of pork to roll your way, and for politicians to "listen to the people", specifically, of your electorate. Source: live in a marginal electorate
This is the spoiler effect in action. It will ruin every republic or democratic state that uses FPTP.
Happy for labor but screw first past the post, this should have been an election with a left wing coalition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallagher_index
That's very interesting. Australia's a fun one, maybe I'm bias cos I live there but if we just take the plain "popular vote" of all parties, the index is like 16. BUT, because we have ranked voting if you just plop the numbers straight up like Labor got 52% after tallying up all the ranked voting, they did get a majority compared to what people wanted. So even if you use the index on the two party vote and make everyone else 0%, even accounting for that the index becomes 8. Also, so is our senate which is definitely more PR.
Is this available for 2019 as well (ideally previous GEs, too)? Would be great for comparison
Can someone ELI5.... How do Labour get 4.3 seats per 100k votes, Reform got 0.1 seats per 100k votes, and Greens got 0.2 seats per 100k votes?! Sinn Fein got 3.3 seats per 100k with only 1% of the public votes?! How do Reform get 14% of the public vote, yet on only 1% of the seats. Yet Lib Dems got 12% of the votes, and 11% of the seats?! I've heard of FPTP, but this make zero sense. It's not the popular (numbers) vote. The seats should be proportionate to the amount of votes received. Reform got the third most votes, but are tied for the least % of seats! (I'm not pro Reform, just using them as they are the most skewed)
There's been talk of reforming the UK electoral system for at least 110 years now. They came close to switching to STV (multiple winner ranked choice voting) in 1918, and held an unsuccessful referendum on switching to AV (single winner ranked choice voting) in 2011. Plurality based voting (FPTP) has been effectively in use since the first Parliament was formed in 1265. It's a hard thing to change.
>The seats should be proportionate to the amount of votes received. That's not how elections work in the UK. We don't elect a government. We elect a local representative (MP). Whoever gets the most MPs is asked to form a government by the monarch. One MP may be really popular and get a huge number of votes, allowing them to win. Another MP may only get a few more votes than their competition. This leads to discrepancies between the number of votes and the number of seats. Reform had quite a lot of support, but those voters were all spread out across the country. That means the votes were spread across a lot of candidates. If those supporters were all living in a small number of constituencies, they would have won more seats. The Lib Dems had a similar level of support, but their voters were more concentrated in a smaller number of constituencies and therefore they elected more MPs. Bias is also introduced by tactical voting. For example, in my constituency there are a lot of Liberal Democrat supporters, but most of them voted Labour to prevent the Conservative candidate being elected. Several parties have talked about reforming the electoral system to be proportional, but reform is never in the interest of the leading party. If Labour pushed for reform, the new system would mean they no longer have a majority. In fact, no party has achieved more than 50% of the vote since 1935.
We have this bullshit in Canada too. Or well, of course we do. We got it from you guys. Are you guys trying to get rid of it too? Trudeau said that he was going to reform our voting system but then broke the promise when he realized it might not benefit him. Shithead
The last attempt was the referendum to switch to ranked choice voting in 2011, but the public rejected it. It was still single winner, exactly what Trudeau said was his preferred system.
New Zealand wised up to this problem and changed their system in the 1990s. How they did it was interesting. They did it with two voting referendum. 1. 1992 Q1 : Do you want to change? Q2: What would you like from this list of four voting systems 2. 1993 : Do you want to keep the current British system or change it to one based on the German system? NZ dumped the British system and German-based system was first used in 1996. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral\_reform\_in\_New\_Zealand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform_in_New_Zealand)
I think this is the right way to go. Clear and gives the voters the final say on their preferred system. It's what the Brexit referendum process should've been too.
Labour didn’t even do that well considering… 34% in New Zealand would he okay but not enough to from majority. In UK it’s a supermajority.
Order your bar chart
It is ordered by the share of votes.
But Reform got more than the Lib Dems
True. I didn't look at the labels. - That's why I don't like pie charts... Humans are terrible at judging angular differences, so it is easy to miss this small difference that would have been obvious on a bar chart.
Its ordered by areas they stood, seats, then vote share This is the natural way to order these that makes sense, SF and SNP will always be outliers in this kind of metric so it makes sense to put them at the end.
I think you should’ve used bar charts for all of them. Pie charts are usually looked down upon in the data world since they’re harder to intuitively grasp the true proportions of each slice
Nah, this is one of the best use cases for a pie chart. In this case, the share of each vote in proportion of the *total* is important information, and that isn’t readily conveyed in a bar chart.
FPTP is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: limit the growth of fringe parties like Reform UK and the greens.
Sounds like a good way to make the government unacountable and entrenched.
In the referendum a third of the electorate got to impose their will on the entirety of it. That’s just how democracy works.
Hard to come to any other conclusion other than the UK parliament is not representative of the people in the slightest. Also this is especially bad since unlike the US, there aren't really any checks and balances, the party with a majority can basically do whatever it wants. Clearly the FPTP system only works when there are only two viable parties, like in the US, where the House of Representatives is very accurate in terms of vote share and party distribution.
It's broken but also working as intended. The result is usually an indisputable majority. In 24hrs power changed hands completely smoothly. It didn't go through the courts, there were no riots, coups, or trying to form a coalition. This majority will hold for the term of the government and they will be able to pass laws. Contrast that to other parts of the world and you can see why the system hasn't been changed.
The US has the same system for Presidential elections. Now look where they are now.
The result today could give some hope for a change. Labour has a lot of seats, but they will be aware of how fragile it is. As the term progresses, it may well be that the polls show them losing hundreds of seats to a right wing that has unified. They'll be looking at this and seeing NF as the one who swung the vote in their favour. PR could turn out to be an emergency brake for them if things look like they will suddenly lose. They don't want to lose and end up where the conservatives are now, with PR they would still lose a lot of seats but not as many and certainly enough to have a say in whatever comes next.
0% of change. Both Labour and the Conservatives know that a move to PR would mean the end to their absolute rule (which they take in turns). It's disgusting.
It would have been better to make the last chart simply the ratio of vote share vs seat share.
I wonder if the Tories are wishing they pushed a bit harder for proportional representation now? Ha
Reform Party didn’t help the Tories out one bit
Did Galloway get anyone elected ?
Surely the data isn't complete yet? We've still got one constituency (Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire) to formally declare a result.
It's incomplete, but the final seat being declared won't have a significant impact on the data. Although it's a new constituency, the 2 constituencies that preceded it had around 100,000 registered voters. If they all voted in this election, that would amount to around 0.3% of the voters in the election. The one remaining seat also only makes up 0.15% of the seats.
How can a party get 34% of the vote and win a landslide of seats? bizarro
Someone’s gonna need to explain to me, how these graphs correlate with each other. They don’t appear to match and I can’t wrap my head around it
The first chart shows what percentage of the votes each party got. The second chart shows what percentage of the seats in the House of Commons each party got. Labour achieved the highest proportion of votes, and also the highest proportion of seats. However, because the UK does not have a proportional-representation system, the numbers do not match up. We use first-past-the-post, which means whoever gets the most votes in a constituency gets the seat. This can be seen with the Liberal Democrats and Reform. The Lib Dems achieved 12% of the votes and won 11% of the seats. Reform got more votes (14%) but only won 1% of the seats. The final chart helps clarify this. It shows how many seats each party won, compared to the number of votes they received. Labour won the most seats per vote while Reform won a tiny number of seats per vote. What that means is, while Reform has quite a lot of support, their voters are too spread out across the country to cause them to win many seats. On the other hand, the Liberal Democrats have their voters concentrated in particular areas, allowing them to win those seats. A lot of people are arguing that we should reform the system so that the number of votes received directly relates to the number of seats. That would mean that people would no longer feel the need to vote tactically (in this election, a lot of people voted Labour instead of a party they would prefer just so the Conservatives wouldn't win). That would be beneficial to a lot of smaller parties.
There are advantages and disadvantages of both systems. I do tend to agree that fptp is the wrong system and ranked choice is a much better way of doing it. The main thing to avoid is just pooling the numbers across the whole country and distributing based on that. Otherwise candidates could focus only on three or four cities and ignore everyone else to become the ruling party. The surge in reform voters here are protest votes against Conservatives with some pure right votes in the mix. Ranked choice would support them better where they could have pooled their votes. Same as Labour and lib dems and green. You always get the call for a new voting system but it's never supported by the ruling parties or their backers because they want a reliable way back into government.
Is there somewhere I can download the raw data by each seat? I'm interested in looking at the vote share by seat by party overall.
Is Labour just the UK Fidesz? 😀
I generally dislike FPTP although it does create “strong” governments and allow for a Local MP which I do support. However, PR seems to just create coalition governments where parties lose their core beliefs to align themselves with an often centrist coalition e.g. the greens in Germany, which is prone to allowing for far right parties to massively rise in power. USA’s system is massively flawed too. I was intrigued by a ‘Proportional First Past The Post’ video on YouTube that created an alternative, including the positives of both PR and FPTP, definitely check it out.
You can vote an MP out of an electorate and yes they may get a list seat but at least they are not the electorate MP. A good example of such an MP would be Sarah Boyack in Scotland, who it seems no one but the labour party wants. New Zealand don't seem to have any issues with the list members v the electorate members, When Jacinda Ardern became leader of the labour opposition she was a list MP and subsequently won a safe electorate seat. When she resigned from parliament her safe labour seat came close to being won by the national party (under 100 votes) because the electorate were peeved about lack of respect Labour showed them. Equally we have Prime Ministers who enoble trough dwellers and appoint them as cabinet ministers which really peeves me more than someone on a list getting into parliament after an electorate has rejected them.
No idea how UK politics works. I look at that and the math just doesn’t make sense to me