I know that in the UK general election of 1951, the Labour Party won the most votes nationwide, but the Conservative Party won a majority of seats and formed the next government. Wikipedia tells me that there were a further two UK examples of a party losing the popular vote and winning a plurality of seats, but not a majority (1929 and Feb. 1974).
Of course I know about the electoral college and the US presidential election winners who lost the popular vote.
What are some examples from other countries of a similar thing happening? Has this ever happened in, say, Canada?
In parliamentary governments it often happens that no one party wins by enough margin to hold power. So they have to form a government with one or more of the losing parties. Not exactly what you are looking for but in many countries the clear loser in an election can retain a lot of power due to the coalition.
Current government of Israel – led by the Likud party, with 27/120 members of Knesset (parliament), while Kadima (originally 28/120) is in the opposition.
[And yes, the number of MKs (Members of Knesset) is directly proportional to the number of voters.]
In the 1961 Federal Election in Australia, the Liberal/Country coalition won a bare majority of 62 out of 122 seats in the parliament. They won 42.09% of the vote compared with 47.90% to the Labor (ALP) opposition, but that is complicated by the 8.71% going to the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), which had split from the ALP and directed preferences to the coalition. The Wikipedia article cited above gives a notional two-party preferred vote of 50.5% to the ALP and 49.5% to the coalition, so the ALP won the popular vote. It isn’t only DLP preferences that explain that: the ALP would have had more ultra-safe seats building up unnecessarily large majorities, while the coalition would have won more seats by narrower margins.
1993 and 2008 elections in Pakistan, the Government of the day failed in it’s relelections bids despite winning the popular vote. India in 1996 the party* which formed the government actually came in third in both votes and seats.
*Admittedly they were more a groups of smaller parties than a singke pary but still
In both the 1978 and 1981 elections in NZ, the party that formed the government, NZ National Party, got a lower percentage of the popular vote than the opposition parties, but won the most seats. In 1978, National got 55% of the seats from 39.8% of the vote!
1978
Party % Seats
National 39.8 51
Labour 40.4 40
Social Credit 16.1 1
1981
National 38.8 47
Labour 39.0 43
Social Credit 20.7 2
It was as a result of these elections that a call for electoral reform was made. The Fourth Labour Government set up a Royal Commission to investigate voting systems and make recommendations for any changes.
In the Saskatchewan provincial election of 1986, the Progressive Conservative Party came in second in the popular vote (44.61%, less than the NDP’s 45.2%), but won a majority of seats (38 PC to 25 NDP).
In Quebec politics, this has happened four times: in 1886, 1890, 1966 and 1998. A shady fifth one was the election of 1878, after which power shifted several times because of moving alliances.
It’s possible in Finland for a party to have the most votes but not the most seats in a parliamentary election. This has actually happened twice, and beside that there have been a few near misses. This is because even though Finnish elections are determined proportionally using d’Hondt method, the method is not applied nationwide in the parliamentary elections but locally in each electoral district, and there is no equalization mechanism. In addition, local electoral alliances, where two or more parties make an agreement to be treated as one list in some electoral district, are allowed. What all this means is that a party that has geographically concentrated high support in the smaller rural electoral districts holds a small advantage and is likely to get a few extra seats, which in close election might lead to it losing the popular vote but winning the election.
In practice, the rural-based Agrarian League (the current Centre Party) has twice won the most seats while the Social Democratic Party has got the most votes. In 1929, SDP got 27,4% of the vote and Agrarians 26,2%, but Agrarian League got 60 seats and SDP only 59. In 1948 again, SDP got 26,3% of the vote and Agrarians 24,2%, but similarly Agrarian League got 56 seats and SDP 54. Neither of these results caused any particular problems in forming the government, though. If that happened nowadays, however, it could be tricky. The new Finnish practice is that after the election the leader of the new largest party has the privilege and mandate to try to form a new government first. But now, if the party with the most seats had lost the popular vote, it’s likely that this mandate would be questioned a lot, even if ultimately accepted.
It is not necessary here [UK] to win a majority of the popular vote nor have many governments done so in recent times, not least because the old two-and-a-half party system has largely gone now in large areas of the country.