A Citizen’s Guide to Electoral Reform

Alan Renwick

School of Politics and International Relations

University of Reading

Typescript

30 September 2010


For Elma Johnston, Ishbel McBoyle,

and Ewen and Jean Macdonald,

and in memory of Jenny Sim,

great teachers.


Contents

Acknowledgements iv

1. What Is an Electoral System? 1

2. How Can We Judge the Options? 7

3. The Current System: First Past the Post 15

4. The Alternative Vote 30

5. Simple Proportional Representation 43

6. Mixed Electoral Systems 56

7. The Single Transferable Vote 65

8. Before Election Day 75

9. After Election Day 86

10. Putting the Pieces Together 92

Tables 98

Appendix: The Techie Bits 110

Appendix Tables 117

Further Reading 123

Figures separate file



Acknowledgements

Many people assisted me in the course of writing this book. I am especially grateful to those who read the draft: my parents, Maggi Brown, Martin Ceadel, Roger Cotes, David Creed, Emma Furniss, Philip Giddings, Chris Hanretty, David Ireland, Scot Peterson, Maria Pretzler, Sarah Taylor-Rozyk, and Richard Wood. All offered invaluable comments that improved the text greatly. I had very helpful conversations on varied issues with Adrian Blau, Michael Lamb, Paul Martin, and Paul Swaddle, while John Curtice, Ron Johnston, Michael Lamb, Gemma Rosenblatt, and Andy White assisted in finding, confirming, or analysing data. Again, I am deeply grateful to them all. All errors and other shortcomings remain my own.


iv


Chapter 1: What Is an Electoral System?

The rules that govern elections to the Westminster Parliament are up for grabs. We, as citizens, are going to have more influence over the form these rules will take than we have ever had before. There will be a referendum on one set of reforms. Others will be decided in parliament – but not without a great deal of public debate and contestation. These debates are crucial to the future character of our democracy, but are not always easy for non-experts to follow. This book is here to help.

Elections matter. They decide who governs. They provide our best means of influencing what those in power do: though we can scream and shout in the streets, it is only the fear of our votes in the ballot box that is likely to make politicians listen. They are the most concrete expression of our democratic society. They are our most widely shared ritual: 8 or 9 million of us now attend a religious service at least once a month; 10 million voted in the 2009 X Factor final; and 20 million watched the 2010 World Cup final; but very nearly 30 million of us voted in the most recent general election.

The rules by which these elections are conducted make a big difference. They have a major impact on who gets elected. In the 2005 general election, Labour won just 35 per cent of the UK-wide vote, but secured fully 55 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons and was thereby able to govern alone for the following five years. The electoral rules currently in place in most of the world’s democracies would have denied Labour an overall majority of seats and forced it to seek out coalition allies. In Germany in 1983, for example, the conservative Christian Democrats won 48.8 per cent support – more than any British party has obtained since the 1950s. Yet still it was short of a majority in the German parliament and had to rely on a coalition with the liberal Free Democrats.

Beyond who gets elected, the electoral rules shape the whole character of politics. They can have a big impact on whether the parties cluster towards the centre of the political spectrum or offer a more varied set of options. They influence the relationship between MPs and their constituents: whether MPs have deep roots in a local constituency or looser ties to a bigger region, and whether voters choose between individual candidates or between parties. Many electoral reformers argue that our current electoral system was partly to blame for the abuses of the MPs’ expenses system that were uncovered in 2009: MPs in safe seats, they say, can grow complacent and exploit the perks of office too freely.

The debate over electoral reform matters for all these reasons. But this is a debate that is especially worth following because, as I said at the start, its outcome lies in our hands. The government plans a referendum on whether we should retain our current “first past the post” electoral system or move towards another system known as the “alternative vote”. The other reforms that they propose – including giving citizens the right to recall MPs without having to wait for a general election – will be enacted through votes in parliament, but here too there will be ample opportunity for public debate to influence outcomes. For the House of Lords, the government is planning even more radical reform, with most members to be elected by some form of proportional representation. Many – including the Liberal Democrats and some senior figures within the Labour Party – argue that this radical option should be pursued for the House of Commons too.

So we can expect vigorous debate over the electoral system in the coming months and years, and we are going to be asked to play our own direct part in choosing between alternatives. Yet the subject of electoral reform is one that most voters find incredibly arcane. Whenever these issues are aired, we are plunged immediately into an alphabet soup of AV, AMS, STV, and MMP. Mysterious terms such as d’Hondt and Sainte Laguë are bandied about. Even the political hacks often seem only dimly aware of what such words might mean or what implications they might have for the character of our politics.

This book aims to cut through all these obscurities and help you grasp what is at stake when the electoral system is discussed. The chapters that follow will look in turn at the various options that are likely to figure significantly in the coming debates. They will outline each system and give you the information you need in order to judge what reforms – if any – you think should be adopted. I will not be arguing in favour of any particular option myself. The choices are yours: my goal is simply to help you make them.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of each system, some preliminaries are required. First, we need to think about what an electoral system actually is and in what ways electoral systems can differ from each other. Then we need to think about how to judge electoral systems – what are the sorts of thing that we might want them to deliver? I’ll pursue these two issues in this chapter and the next.

Many people, I suspect, are a bit embarrassed to ask the most basic question of all – what actually is an electoral system? They think that this, at least, is a question they should be able to answer. Yet there is no shame in not being able to define what an electoral system is. In fact, even the experts disagree about it. There are two main approaches that can be taken. I’ll call one of these the narrow approach, the other the wide approach.

The Narrow Approach: The Electoral System’s Core

The narrow approach focuses on election day itself. It sees the electoral system as comprising two elements: the rules that determine the kind of vote that we can cast; and the mechanisms by which the votes cast are translated into seats in parliament.

In elections to the House of Commons at present, the vote that we can cast is a very simple one: all we can do (assuming we don’t want to spoil our ballot paper) is vote for a single local candidate. Voters in some other countries – such as the United States, Canada, and India – are asked to make a similar choice. But voters in most countries cast some different kind of vote. Some systems, such as the electoral systems in Australia and Ireland, allow voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. In others – and in elections to the European Parliament in Great Britain – voters cast their ballot not for a single candidate, but for a list of candidates put up by a party or other group. In still others, voters can indicate separately their preferences among parties and among candidates. In Sweden, for example, voters choose a party and then, if they wish, also select one of the candidates that this party has nominated. In Germany, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales, voters cast two separate votes: one for a local candidate and one for a regional or national party slate, making it possible to support one party’s candidate locally, but another party nationally. We’ll be exploring these many possibilities further in later chapters.

In terms of the translation of votes into seats, meanwhile, the system used for Commons elections is again straightforward. The country is divided into constituencies; within each constituency, the candidate who wins most votes is elected as its MP. Here too, many alternatives exist. Some systems – such as those used in France and Australia – require the winning candidate to get not just more votes than any other candidate, but, rather, more votes than all the other candidates combined – an absolute rather than a relative majority. Others dispense with constituencies or divide the country into large constituencies each of which elects several MPs; they then distribute the seats across the parties in proportion (at least roughly) to the votes those parties have won. These are systems of proportional representation (PR), and variants are used across much of Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.

These two features – the nature of votes and the translation of votes into seats – sum up what most experts and enthusiasts focus on when they think about the electoral system. They define the core of the system. The UK system that I have just described is what is generally known as first past the post. The coming referendum will offer a choice between first past the post and another system that can be defined in terms of the same two features, namely the alternative vote.

Because most of the debate concentrates on this narrow conception of the electoral system, the chapters of this book will mostly focus here too. I’ll begin in Chapter 3 by looking at first past the post in more detail. Then I’ll examine the alternative vote – the reform option on offer in the referendum – in Chapter 4. In subsequent chapters, I’ll look at several versions of proportional representation. We won’t be given the opportunity to vote on such systems in the referendum, but many people will argue we should be, and the government wants to introduce such a system for the House of Lords.

It would be wrong, however, to focus on the narrow understanding of the electoral system entirely. Many other rules influence the conduct and the outcomes of elections, and changes to some of these are currently under discussion. So it is time now to turn to the wide view of electoral systems.

The Wide Approach: The Electoral System Broadly Understood

According to the wide approach, the electoral system is best understood as including all the rules that govern the process of electing parliament. Whereas the narrow approach focuses just upon what happens at the polling station and the election count, the wide approach recognizes that elections are about much more than that. Before any votes can be cast, the date of the election needs to be set, and there are many rules governing when this can happen and who can do it. Then we need rules governing who can be a candidate and how they are selected and formally nominated. Elections are always preceded by campaigns, so there are rules shaping how these campaigns are conducted and financed. Come election day, it needs to be clear not just what kinds of vote can be cast, but also who can cast them, so rules on who is eligible to vote – and whether they are required to vote – also matter. And we might pay attention to the mechanics of voting: whether, for example, voting is computerized or involves marking an old-fashioned ballot paper. Finally, even after election day, the electoral process is not necessarily over. In particular, the idea that we should be able to recall a miscreant MP without having to wait for another general election has built up extraordinary momentum in the UK in the last couple of years.

There will be space in the following chapters to discuss only some of these many aspects of the broader electoral system in any depth. So I’ll offer a quick overview of them now.

Rules on when elections take place. All democracies define a maximum period within which fresh elections must take place. In the UK, this is currently five years. (Strictly speaking, Parliament must be dissolved not more than five years after it first met. Allowing for the election campaign and the interlude between election day and the first session of the new parliament, this means that the time between elections can in fact be a little more than five years.) Among stable democracies, such a lengthy term is actually quite unusual. Most European countries have a four-year limit. In Australia and New Zealand it is three years. In the United States just two years elapse between elections to the House of Representatives.

A related issue that has been much debated in the UK recently concerns who can call an election and in what circumstances. Until 2010, there were two possible routes to an election before the maximum five-year term was up. First, the prime minister could ask the monarch to call an election just about any time under the powers of the royal prerogative. Second, an election was called if the government lost a vote of confidence in parliament and no alternative government could be formed. The coalition government is changing this. Henceforth, the prime minister has no power to seek a dissolution of parliament on his own: instead, so long as the government retains the support of the parliamentary majority, a two-thirds vote in the House of Commons will be needed to call an early election. It will still be possible – contrary to much misleading media comment – to remove the government by simple majority in a vote of no confidence and this will still lead to fresh elections if no new government can be formed. But a fourteen-day delay on dissolution is now introduced, presumably in order to dissuade prime ministers from engineering their own defeat in a confidence vote so as to trigger an early election. These changes bring the UK closer to practice in most other democracies, where early elections are the exception rather than the rule.