UK Election: What difference would proportional representation have made?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32601281

by davidbarker • 11 years ago

52 97 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

nextweek2• 11 years ago

The point is moot, we had a vote on PR just after the last election. The vast majority did not vote for it.

IanCal3• 11 years ago

We did not have a vote on PR. We had a vote on an alternative voting system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote...

branchless• 11 years ago

Thank you good sir for knowing what you are talking about.

The UK establishment doesn't want PR. That alone is a great reason to get it, besides many other good reasons.

newaccountfool• 11 years ago

It created some interesting propaganda[1].

[1]http://i.imgur.com/Row95qp.jpg

danieltillett8• 11 years ago

I can't believe you poms voted this down. Why wasn't it called preferential voting (like here in Australia) on the referendum?

I love preferential voting. You get to vote for a minor party or candidate while also ensuring the candidate you hate most does not benefit from you doing this. There is basically no need to vote strategically and back candidates you don't like purely because you hate them less than someone else. You just list all the candidates in your personal preference from 1 to x.

vidarh13• 11 years ago

And even if the majority had been against PR in general, that would not make it moot: The current voting system is not democratic. It is actively disenfranchising a large proportion of voters. I will never have representation under the current voting system, because my views are not mainstream enough to get a majority in a single seat constituency.

The fiction that someone who gets the majority of a seat will represent all their constituents is just that. And blatantly offensive to many of us who consistently sees our representatives acting against our interests and not care the slightest about the portion of their constituents who are not likely to be possible to sway to vote for them.

shrikant• 11 years ago

I'd argue that it's moot because people voting behaviour will change under a different voting system. You can't just extend these results to a world where PR is the prevailing system.

splike• 11 years ago

This is a common problem in policy making known as the Lucas Critique[1]. But I don't think that it justifies avoiding any change to the voting system

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique

vidarh13• 11 years ago

True, but there's every reason to believe that it would trigger a shift further away from the large parties, making the difference even more staggering.

Tactical voting is a big thing in the UK.

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

That is true, I don't like when people dire fly translate votes from one system to another since the systems distort the type of parties that even exist, never mind who votes for them.

On the other hand, I think this generally underestimates the improvements possible by shifting to a more proportional system.

I'm interested to see how the conservatives manage to introduce some kind of English devolution while at the same time retaining their inbuilt electoral advantages.

Also any article on reform of the UK electoral system should end with "We have an unelected House of Lords that people have a birthright to sit in, and has Bishops. End this embarrassment now".

flurdy2• 11 years ago

The two biggest political parties in the UK by a country mile will loose power if PR is introduced. So I can't see it happen as they will never back it.

Tories managed to successfully seem to offer the people the pretend choice with the complete FUD that was the AV referendum, which means any other referendum is not likely for many years.

vidarh13• 11 years ago

The biggest hope in that respect is probably that the rumours of Tory attempts at redrawing boundaries to keep Labour out goes through. They attempted it this period, but where stopped by the Lib Dems. If that happens it may align Labour with the smaller parties in this question.

Couple that with continued huge over-representation of the SNP, which certainly will rub many English voters the wrong way, and maybe.

dageshi• 11 years ago

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression redrawing the boundaries wasn't some diabolical plot but rather the boundaries were set independently and intended to equal up consituency sizes? The fact that this doesn't favour Labour should be beside the point?

arethuza• 11 years ago

I think any attempt to "fix" the boundaries in Scotland to attempt to reduce the number of SNP MPs would create a very strong backlash that would almost certainly lead to a new drive to independence.

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

Its worth drawing a parallel to the Scottish Independence referendum, where David Cameron veto'd the obvious and sensible choice that 85% supported (Devo Max) and gambled the union on a direct in-out choice, which he thought would settle the matter decisively. If Scotland does leave, history will blame him personally.

Similarly, he's in charge of coming up with the EU options, when he wants us to stay in. Hopefully he won't muck that one up too badly.

In short, referendusm are political tools, not necessarily the voice of the nation.

notahacker4• 11 years ago

To be fair, the SNP would have used a vote for Devo Max (and a decisive vote against the status quo) as a rallying point to call for a straight yes-no ballot afterwards anyway: as you said, referendums are political tools.

If Scotland does leave, Cameron will deserve the blame for the "don't let the Scots have any influence" strategy that won him this week's Westminster election, but the independence question seemed fair enough, especially with oblique hints that more devolution would be forthcoming anyway.

I have a horrible feeling the EU options will hinge more on the "no" campaigners being far more motivated to vote than those satisfied with the status quo, particularly on the assumption that the "pro EU" side will appear to have enough of a lead in telephone polls and goodwill from major political parties to be just fine.

ende• 11 years ago

This begs the question: if a two party system is entrenched via FPTP/WTA plurality voting system and unlikely to ever relinquish such power, what recourse is there to change the political system? Elections won't do it because election results are shepparded by the voting system. That poses as a fundamental flaw in such democracies. The architechts of the US constitution viewed simple elections as the only vector needed to institutionalize peaceful revolution on a routine basis. When that recourse is denied, what options are left?

hackerboos3• 11 years ago

If right to recall would have passed then people could have threatened their MPs to support a bill or face recall.

nsnick• 11 years ago

No. It does not beg that question. http://begthequestion.info

thomasfoster96• 11 years ago

I live in Tasmania (state of Australia) where we have 5 seats with 5 members each (used to be 7 members per seat). It works pretty well for such a small legislature, because the members of the legislature represent the overall vote fairly well. It has particularly helped the Greens, who in any other system would probably struggle to get a seat at all (indeed in the Australian house of Reps around 10% of the vote gets them 1 out of 150 seats), to have a number of seats in the parliament roughly proportional to their actual support in the electorate. If the UK adopted something similar to Tasmania, they'd end up with perhaps 50 or a hundred electorates electing 6 to 12 members.

Ideally in Tasmania we probably should also be thinking about abolishing our upper house (Legislative Council) and adding more members into the House of Assembly. The LC has ended up with around 70-80% independent members, incumbents almost always win their elections if someone even bothers to challenge them, and public engagement is almost non-existent. The Legislative Council won't be abolished anytime soon however, because the Legislative Council has to vote to change the state constitution and they wouldn't abolish themselves anytime soon.

rdc122• 11 years ago

That seems to be a fairly common problem for Green parties around the world, popular in the global vote but not popular enough to be elected in the more local votes (for generel elections anyway local goverment is another matter).

danmaz743• 11 years ago

A proportional system means that most (if not all) choices are made AFTER the vote by horse-trading between the parties. With decades of experience with proportional systems in Italy, I warmly advise against it.

danieltillett8• 11 years ago

This is why AV (preferential voting) is so much better. You vote for the candidates in the order you like and the candidate the majority prefer wins. You get to vote for minor parties without ending up with chaos.

jsnell2• 11 years ago

That argument makes little sense to me.

You dislike PR since it'd allow small parties to actually get representation and thus "cause chaos". If you think AV doesn't have this problem, it must be because you think AV would keep the small parties out just like FPTP. But if that's case, why bother switching to a system that changes nothing?

vidarh13• 11 years ago

Consider that the "horse trading" involves actually ensuring that more opinions are represented. If you support one of the larger parties, that means more compromises, yes. But for all of the people who supports smaller parties, it means their vote actually matters a bit too, and that they're not consistently railroaded by supporters of the biggest parties.

danmaz743• 11 years ago

That's a fair argument, but it's a matter of trade-offs. All that bartering means that no-one's program will be actually enacted, and when things don't go well there is nobody to take the actual responsibility - including voters, because everybody can always say "well but this wasn't what the party I voted for was proposing" - even if that party got a relative majority.

Personally, I favor a system where there is a clear winner chosen by the majority of popular vote, but where minorities have a "right to representation" where they can make their voices heard in the political debate. Not easy, but possible.

tormeh7• 11 years ago

You sure that's not just corruption as opposed to a flawed voting system?

danmaz743• 11 years ago

This system probably also helps corruption, but by horse trading I wasn't talking about corruption. I was talking about the fact that it's almost impossible to enact clear reforms because you always need to barter this norm for that norm, etc. etc.

seanalltogether• 11 years ago

In PR, how does the electorate vote out an individual candidate that you don't like? It seems weird that support for a party implies support for all candidates fielded by that party.

vidarh13• 11 years ago

Depends on the system. In Norway, parties fields lists, but you can strike out the names of candidates you don't like, or add additional names.

The list you vote for determined how many seats that list (party) get in each region, but striking names or adding names of people on other lists alters the order in which seats will get allocated to the people on the lists.

It is not very often used, but when particularly controversial candidates are fielded it sometimes does affect who gets in.

ealexhudson• 11 years ago

Right now, in the UK, we have no say in candidates other than our local constituency. I can't vote out Ed Balls. I don't get a say in the Prime Minister. I can't vote for Julian Huppert. So I don't really see how this is much of an difference in practice.

vixen992• 11 years ago

Can't vote out Ed Balls? You just did!!

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-ba...

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

Why do you believe that you can do that in FPTP? We just had an election the day before yesterday when various party bigwigs getting voted out was acclaimed as an astonishing, once in a century upset, and even then it was fairly localised.

rdc122• 11 years ago

Depends on the model of PR you go for, in NZ we have MMP and on the party vote side of things you can't say I vote for this party but not Joe Bloggs.

If you look at the Australian model, you actually can do this. You can either vote above or below the line (forget which is which), with one you vote for the list the party derived, the other you select the party and then rank all of their candidates. In practice thou the majority don't rank and it is sort of irrelevent that you can.

IMHO, even with individual candidates it is more or less the party they represent that decides the winner anyway.

keeperofdakeys• 11 years ago

In Australia the 'above or below the line' voting system is used for the upper house (senate), which is state-based representation (and you can only select a single party, or number 40+ boxes below the line).

For the lower house, we have optional preferential voting. So you number from 1 to something, and stop when you want. Then a slightly complex counting system occurs where votes for least-voted candidates are redistributed to the next preference, and repeated until you get a result.

The upper house voting system does have some issues though. Most people consider voting below the line complex, and you can only mark one party above the line. Then independent senators only appear below the line, since they are in no party (which has caused an independent senator to make a party, just to appear above the line).

gpvos• 11 years ago

Assuming the party-list system. It depends on how high the party has placed him on the list. If you vote for a candidate so low on the list that he probably wouldn't be elected, he might get enough preferential votes to oust out the last person on the list that would normally get a seat through the top-down assignment, but that only really works for getting someone in, not to get someone out.

Better vote for another party instead.

With the party-list system, you generally vote for parties and not for persons.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

I'm always happy to have a relevant reason to post a Yes, Minister excerpt: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs

The episode is called "A Victory for Democracy".

tormeh7• 11 years ago

"The universities. Both of them."

hackerboos3• 11 years ago

For those that don't know it's in reference to Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge). The joke is that the rest don't matter.

IanCal3• 11 years ago

Ah, Cambridge and Hull?

tormeh7• 11 years ago

I'm of the opinion that majority governments are a problem. I would actually go even further than PR in evening out the seats. That is, as a party wins seats, each new seat should require more votes to win. Capturing more than, say, 40% of the seats should be impossible, and the biggest party has to form a minority government.

platz4• 11 years ago

Sounds like a recipe for even more gridlock. Seems like the party with the most votes couldn't pass anything (i.e. satisfy voter mandates), even though they won.

tormeh7• 11 years ago

No, remember that the opposition is similarly divided. The governing party just have to shop around for votes, with a variety of smaller parties to bargain with.

Promises to voters (which I think is what you mean with voter mandates) are just the worst. They tend towards the unrealistic and assume party control over a majority of seats without defectors. Everything about them is dumb. Good riddance.

higherpurpose3• 11 years ago

Would you prefer China's model more then? Just one party. No gridlock, ever.

Having more parties is a good thing. It implies negotiation between them and it leads to more rational laws. When you have just one or two parties it's much easier for them to abuse their power and pass crazy laws.

panarky• 11 years ago

Similar to quadratic voting.

http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/

tormeh7• 11 years ago

But you can buy votes here and it's designed by economists... The field of economics generally assume wildly improbably things about the distribution of money. Look, there's already too much money in politics, and I'm just going to dismiss any idea that advocates more money in politics.

I guess that in lieu of money, you could portion out votes. 1000 votes per person, for example. And then they can be spent in the same way that money is spent in quadratic voting.

BurningFrog• 11 years ago

So the big parties would split into a few smaller ones.

That might not be bad.

vidarh13• 11 years ago

It's basically what you often get in PR systems anyway. New parties form, or split off to fill perceived voids to the left or right of one of the big parties and eat into their voting base.

Many countries with PR systems rarely if ever have single party majorities. In Norway the current two party coalition is a minority government that needed a supply agreement with two further parties (technically one of them would be sufficient) to secure a majority. In the recent past we've had coalitions with up to four parties, several of the coalitions being minority governments. Our last single party majority government was in the 60's I think.

hackerboos3• 11 years ago

There are parties within parties already. Only when three-line whips are in place does the entire party toe the line.

Think 'Blue dog' democrats.

SeanLuke2• 11 years ago

A proportional system, I suspect, would be extraordinarily damaging to the UK. It's true that the current system is unfair, but it does have one critical redeeming quality: it tends to reduce the race to a two-party system. Two-party systems are stable and generally moderate, as the winning party will be the one which successfully captures the center. Much of the historical success of the US government can be attributed to the stability afforded by its two-party system. On the other hand, consider the proportional system parliaments in other countries which are outright disasters, unable to form stable coalitions and thus unable to govern successfully for any significant length of time. Italy is the canonical example.

rwmj2• 11 years ago

Naming 3 countries doesn't count as evidence.

SeanLuke2• 11 years ago

Actually, I don't think I'm saying anything that isn't common wisdom in political science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Advantages

vidarh13• 11 years ago

My counter-example: Norway.

Coalition governments, often still minority governments, have been the norm for half a century.

All of Scandinavia for that matter.

For my part, I see reducing the race to a two-party system as exactly what should be avoided. It leaves the opinions of a large proportion - often a majority - of society unrepresented or overruled.

As an example: The Tories now has a majority in parliament despite gaining only 36.9% of the vote. The majority of British voters does not want Tory policy. Yet it's what Britain will get. Yes, the rest disagree on what the differences should be. But a proportional system forces the parties to negotiate and find solutions that actually has majority support - the least bad solutions.

I would take that over stability any day, if that was the choice. But it isn't. Unless you're going to claim that the Scandinavian countries are unstable.

100timesthis• 11 years ago

Interesting video on voting systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

ramanan• 11 years ago

CGP Grey! I came here to post the same link. His entire series is very informative. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638

iopq2• 11 years ago

Also leads to a two party effect because of the elimination property. You should still strategically vote for Gorilla as #1 because otherwise you could have Owl first eliminate Gorilla and then lose to Tiger, for example.

So if you prefer Owl > Gorilla, you still have to go with Gorilla as #1 because Owl might not have enough to beat Tiger. This means it still leads to Tiger vs. Gorilla two party system.

It's already implemented in Australia and they still have a two party government.

higherpurpose3• 11 years ago

AV/IRV is indeed not much better than FPTP. Approval/preferential voting is, though.

Here's an example here:

http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting-versus-irv/c1mmu

With IRV Obama would've crushed all of his competitors when he got elected for the 2nd term. IRV seems to favor incumbents greatly, which is probably why things haven't changed so much in Australia either - so not much better than FPTP in the US. People still very much vote strategically with IRV.

With approval voting on the other hand, Stein (Green Party candidate) would've had a huge chance in the election. Maybe she would've still lost, like the chart predicts, but we would've had much better kind of debates than Obama vs Romney.

Romney would've been crushed because he was so disliked. In fact many other "fringe" candidates that were liked in that election would've done much better under approval voting than under FPTP or IRV.

notahacker4• 11 years ago

What the graph actually illustrates is that, leaving aside the number of voting decisions that were tactical[1], we'd have the same party leading the government, in a majority coalition with the more right-wing UKIP that would leave those who had voted for the other parties even more upset by the outcome. PR is certainly not a panacea for high proportions of voters getting a vastly different government from the one they wanted. (personally I'd love to see used in an elected House of Lords replacement with a lot less vote trading but a lot more teeth to veto unpopular legislation, but that's a different matter)

[1]Whilst many individuals' tactical decisions would look different in a PR election, it's difficult to see the pattern of vote shares being hugely dissimilar; with there still being a media-fed late frenzy of English voters backing the right as an alternative to "being held" to ransom by coalitions involving the nationalists

vidarh13• 11 years ago

You're assuming the Tories would opt for UKIP over Labour for a coalition, which is not at all obvious. The Tory right wing certainly would prefer that, but the Tory left wing certainly would not. The question would be which wing of the party would hold the most influence. Cameron certainly is far from the most right wing part of the conservative party.

And that consideration is also a reason why I don't think you can assume the pattern of votes would be all that similar: You would not get rid of tactical voting - you would get tactical voting in different ways where e.g. parts of the uncertain Tory voters on the left wing would be more likely to vote Lib Dem or Labour out of fear of a Tory/UKIP coalition.

I'm Norwegian, living in the UK, and in Norway coalitions are the norm these days, and voting patterns certainly are strongly influenced based on perceptions about whether or not you're enabling a coalition you might not lead. Currently we do have the equivalent of a Tory/UKIP coalition, and it has lead to a massive resurgence for our Labour party, and the centrist parties that enabled the coalition have largely collapsed in polls as it's clear a lot of their voters don't want to help prop up such a coalition again (the parties does not have a majority but negotiated a supply agreement with our liberal party and christian democrats).

notahacker4• 11 years ago

Cameron is far from the most right wing of the Conservative Party, and I still don't think he'd find it possible to work with anyone to the left of Tony Blair (i.e. Miliband and the vast majority of the Labour Party), and I think the reverse is even more true. It would be difficult enough to imagine them collaborating on more than a single vote at a time, and basically impossible to imagine Cameron preferring such a fractious arrangement to a deal with UKIP, whose sole price of support is a referendum Cameron had already promised, and whose views on other matters closely match factions within his own party. Sure, the other cost of that coalition would be the risk of losing the political centre ground to a Labour campaign, but that's still less likely to be electorally damaging than the minefield of trying to work with his arch rivals.

We didn't have PR in this week's election, but we did have near-universal expectations that future governments would be enabling some form of coalition or supply agreement. Ultimately the Labour campaign foundered precisely because voters anticipated the Scottish nationalists and other minority parties extracting a heavy price for coalition. By contrast, the Conservatives had shown themselves as able to dominate a coalition agenda, and the only UKIP agenda that centrist or tactical Tory voters might have actually feared as opposed to finding distasteful was promised to be decided by referendum anyway; that wouldn't have changed if UKIP had been expected to win a sizeable chunk of seats.

I'm not saying that votes wouldn't change at all, but I am saying that unless the parties also radically altered their campaigns or more lefties turned out to vote, a right-leaning, Conservative lead coalition would have been an even more likely victor under PR

higherpurpose3• 11 years ago

Much better in the second case, even if the two biggest winners are the same, but 1) they have less power and 2) it gives the others a chance to keep growing at the next election and replace the 2 biggest ones in 1 or 2 terms. And 3) the power is more distributed among 5 or 6 bigger parties - much better than just having only 2 or 3 parties.

That said, approval voting would've worked even better:

http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04

UK Election: What difference would proportional representation have made?

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