The likely outcome of the May election is a hung parliament decided by minority parties.
FPTP is intended to encourage strong government by rewarding national pluralities under a two party system. Its side effect is to magnify seats won where votes are concentrated and minimise them where the vote is widespread.
It is likely that 4% of the national vote will return fifty plus MPs for the SNP, whereas the Greens will get at most 2 MPs for 8% of the vote and UKIP will get at best half a dozen seats at most for about 15% of the vote.
Will this be enough to bring FPTP into disrepute and lead to some form of proportional representation?
It hasn’t before, so I’m not entirely confident it will be. Electoral reform has become quite a partisan thing in this country. I’d suspect that the Tories will always sustain their defence of it for the next few years, and assuming Labour’s MP-stock is sustained thanks to FPTP, I don’t see them jumping to undermine it any time soon.
At least not under Miliband, who doesn’t seem to have the capacity to think beyond the present week. A future leader may see the possibility of recognising what they see as inevitable.
I was thinking more of pressure from public opinion when they realise what a mess FPTP can cause. The coalition was a fair outcome to the last election as the Tories and LibDems together garnered over fifty per cent of the vote and a majority of the seats. But if the Tories and UKIP get nearly fifty percent of the vote and Labour, LibDems and SNP AND Greens get less yet still form a government, then I can see real constitutional problems.
Under current constituency boundaries Labour have roughly a 3% advantage over the Conservatives. The tories need 3% or so more votes than Labour just to maintain MP parity with Labour. If your scenario comes to pass I think the boundary commission will come into play before FPTP is scrapped. We had a referendum only a year or two back on some form of PR; the referendum failed. It would take a lot more than one screwed up election or one unworkable Parliament to change our current system imo.
Any future constitutional problems will likely be due to the makeup of local constituency boundaries, or as a result of “The Pledge” of greater Scottish autonomy. That pledge will come back to haunt many a politician at Westminster.
Playing with constituency boundaries will make the Tory-Labour split fairer but will do nothing to make minority votes fairer. Distributed vote parties (Greens, UKIP) will get only a tenth of the seats per hundred thousand votes than the concentrated vote parties (SNP, LibDem).
That’s a feature, not a bug. You are voting for your own MP, not for anything else. A party that’s unpopular on a national scale doesn’t deserve more representation than one that’s popular locally.
And my guess is that whatever ridiculous coalition occurs in May will make people more against any change than they are now, as any for of proportional representation would guarantee coalitions in the future.
This is why I think your OP may be comparing apples & oranges. The first priority of an electoral system is it’s workability not its fairness. To be workable it needs to deliver some form of stability, pluralism, and fairness. FPTP delivers on the first two, but is not great on the latter. Your op was about a constitutional crisis not fairness.
As I said previously, we’ve just had a referendum on PR. If you wish to minimize a constitutional crisis then adjust the boundaries between Labour and Conservatives. If you wish for fairness then go for PR. To change to PR the system will have to be proven to be broken. If the system has worked for centuries then one measly election will not prove it broken.
It will only be provably be broken if MPs start being elected on a regular basis with a minority of the vote. Something that could conceivably happen with several small parties.
But this time FPTP looks like it will neither be fair nor decisive.
There is every likelihood that we have seen the last of any party getting more than a third or so of the vote. Scotland is likely to remain an SNP stronghold for at least a couple of elections, and I can see the Welsh reacting in a similar way if the SNP is seen to get preferential treatment by concentration of votes.
Certainly if a minority leftist government is formed on a vote count that is marginally rightist, then the Conservatives will cry foul. The same could easily occur if the votes fell slightly differently.
The question is how long would people put up with government formation by chance rather than by overall votes in the election.
The other advantage would be the destruction of any safe seats- if an MP was unpopular for seeming to fiddle expenses or have views outwith the norm for their party, they could easily be removed at the will of the electorate- there would be no seats where a dummy would get elected.
We had the opportunity to changed it a few years ago. We decided to keep FPTP. And PR is a complete disaster as it removes the link between MP and and constituents.
I would like us to change, but to Approval Voting.
We were not offered PR, only AV which is nothing like proportional. In Scotland, save for Westminster Elections, all our elections are proportional to some extent. We have no problem identifying a local MSP if we want anything taken up, and have the advantage of being able to approach one of several if the issue is party political.
I have found this myself as our local (Conservative) MP answers any contentious problems with excuses exculpating the coalition whereas I have the choice of Conservative, Labour and LibDem MSPs to contact if I disagree with SNP Holyrood decisions.
There are systems that ensure that public choice is not constrained by party politics and results are seen as fair. Each of the Governments elected in Scotland since 1997 has held public support and reflected popular opinion over each parliament. It treats Conservatives very fairly whereas on FPTP they would have no seats at all!
I think the important part of your post here is the phrase this time. We have no idea how the electorate will split in future. It would be presumptuous to assume that because the 2015 election returns a splintered vote we will always see a splintered vote from now on. I really do believe that if we have a system that works(and it does work even though its far from perfect) then we should be wary of changing it. The system has served us well in the past. What may turn out to be a little local difficulty of the early 21st century should not result in the destruction of our functioning electoral system. On the other hand if we have a decade or two of constitional crisis as a result of FPTP then I would agree that we needed change.
Again, many of your arguments are about the benefits of some sort of PR over FPTP; they are not about a constitutional crisis. Weve had the PR debate already. It fell by the wayside in a referendum.
AV is not Proportional Representation. We are yet to have that debate.
I would suggest that both Labour and Conservative have reached their maximum core vote now that parties to the left and right of them are available. FPTP ensures that such votes are wasted unless concentrated in a particular region. Given the current (decade long) “plague on all your houses” approach to politics, I can only see more dilution of the top two parties’ vote share.
A period of instability may well make us seek a better way to make a government.
Considering political advantage, an agreement between SNP, Greens and Labour to have a referendum on, say multi votes in multi member constituencies would benefit all three parties in the medium term as Labour’s vote is concentrated in the North and London, SNP’s in Scotland; LibDems have many wasted votes in both North and South West as do Greens. UKIP have strength in Sotho and East England with wasted votes. The only party to be disadvantaged by PR are the Tories who have fewer wasted votes than any other party.
On current polling and given the concentrations above, Parliament would be comprised of about 250 Labour, 230 Conservative, 40 LibDem, 30 SNP, 50 UKIP, 30 Green, 30 NI.
With these figures, we would have a stable centre left government for much of the time. Of course when the Conservatives were in the ascendancy, their governments would be almost entirely English and when Labour was in the ascendancy, much of England outside the Sour East excluding London would be under a non-shires Government.
Well I also guessed it was UK, though I was not aware of the list of countries having FPTP elections this year. It would have been better to mention UK in the thread title.
Hopefully. The only remotely sensible defence (in the context of British politics, where electoral dictatorships are seen as desirable things) of the current clusterfuck of a voting system we’ve been lumbered with is that it avoids coalitions and delivers strong governments. The new reality in the UK is that even FPTP cannot deliver massive electoral landslides any more, hence we are stuck with all of FPTP’s weaknesses and none of its strengths. We’ve moved to a situation where coalitions are now looking to be the new norm going forward, but we’re delivering them with a voting system designed to avoid them at all costs.
What? PR is not an electoral system, it’s a property that an electoral system has. STV removes the constituency-MP link, but MMPR does not.
The spectrum of political opinion in Britain hasn’t suddenly widened: the segment of it represented by the major parties has shrunk. Cameron and Blair both learned the lessons of triangulation from Clinton, and moved their parties towards the centre as part of a deliberate strategy. (Blair more successfully, in terms of internal party discipline, than Cameron.) This left space on the left and the right for new parties to emerge, which they duly have done. The SNP, in particular, are successful and left-wing because that’s what the ecosystem will support.
For a return to two-and-kind-of-three-sometimes party politics, the Tories and Labour would have to broaden their tents sufficiently that current “disaffected” voters felt they were represented. It is of course possible that, following this election both Cameron and Miliband will step down and be replaced with leaders who will adopt that strategy with a series of reverse clause-IV moments. But it’s unlikely. For example, even if the Tories were to promise, and run, an EU referendum in the next couple of years, the inevitable vote to stay in would only make UKIP more attractive to the kind of people who think about voting UKIP.
So I think we are looking at a medium-term future of multi-party democracy, and we should have a voting system that’s designed to accommodate that. However, I think it’s very unlikely that the next government will want anything to do with it. Electoral reform is geeky as hell - most people can’t be bothered to understand the nuances, and will see it as tinkering for advantage (cf. the Lib Dems pushing AV) rather than dealing with the big problems. Frankly, pro-reform as I am, I wouldn’t want too much of the next parliament’s time spent on this, compared to, say, addressing the funding of public services and the demographic crunch.
It would need someone to propose a system that was easy to grasp, easy to implement, offered a clear solution to whatever is perceived as the problem, and didn’t excessively benefit whoever was proposing it. Good luck with that.