py_megapixel
Established Member
There's a fundemental problem with any proposal to move away from FPTP, which is that it is always in the interest of the largest parties to reject it!
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UK voting system
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hexagon789
Veteran Member
My preference would be to federalise the UK fully. Give England a devolved legislature elected using AMS; make all the nation's devolved administrations have equal powers, downsize Westminster to say 400 MPs and make the Lords an elected Senate of say 100-150 members.
I would keep FPTP for Westminster in such a situation.
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
If - and it is a big "if" the Liberal Democrats were to win a general election though, they must for the long term future change the voting system one would have thought.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
Wouldn't that depend on whether it was to their advantage or is that too cynical of me?
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
IMHO you are being too cynical. After all these years they would have to otherwise they would have zero credibility for at least two generations.
Yes. I had not realized this but did some research.
Would PR solve all the anomalies one wonders?
hexagon789
Veteran Member
My thoughts were that if they could win a majority then wouldn't they want to keep that as other parties do?
Depends precisely on the system you use, each has drawbacks of some nature and none are totally perfect. The German electoral law requires perfect proportionality but even with overhang seats this isn't achieved.
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
I posed the question in 1982 to a Liberal (SDP were around but had not merged yet) colleague - actually my boss. It seemed as Liberal/SDP could form a majority with the by-elections etc they were winning. His answer was "We would have to get PR on the statute books even if we win on FPTP. We would absolutely have to" .
No system is perfect, but it can be pretty good. The Nordics all use Leveling seats to make sure the number of MPs a party gets is as close to its share of the vote as possible. In Sweden e.g., 310 of the 349 seats in the parliament are regular seats with each constituency given a number of seats to fill. Usually around 10-15 but it varies from 2 to 39. The other 39 seats are then distributed according to a mathematical model to make sure underrepresented parties get extra seats.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
Presumably to hold on to some seats even if their voteshare dipped. Though even that isn't always enough, the FDP in Germany (effectively their Lib Dems) lost all their seats two elections ago under a mixed-member proportional system
Though they use Party List which wouldn't fit the UK democratic tradition of having a local MP as you have much larger constituencies with a much larger representative diaspora and MPs who can often be quite remote from many even quite sizeable communities.
My preference under PR is for a form of the AMS/MMP systems used in Scotland, Wales, Germany and New Zealand where you still have single member constituencies with local MPs
brad465
Established Member
No system is perfect, but like everything there's a cost-benefit analysis to be made, and overall I think a number of different PR systems are better than FPTP.
What might help is if we get a Hung Parliament where a potential coalition partner demands the introduction of PR, or at least a referendum on it. Not conceding to the poor AV referendum in 2011, while the 2017 Hung Parliament was more of a "bung Parliament", where the DUP weren't hooked on demanding that system change.
edwin_m
Veteran Member
I think I'd favour constituencies electing about 10 members, which would be roughly equivalent to a county, so that any interest commanding more than about 7.5% of the vote in that constituency would be represented. Currently if you have a single member constituency it's clear who your MP is but in many constituencies less than 50% voted for them. This system also allows voters to vote for people not parties, although it might be possible for people to vote for a party list under such a system.
Another option would be to keep single-member constituencies but add a top-up which would be the closest losers. That way everyone elected has to have gone before the electorate, rather than just being whoever curries favour enough with the party apparatchiks to secure a place near the top of the list.
Another option would be to keep single-member constituencies but add a top-up which would be the closest losers. That way everyone elected has to have gone before the electorate, rather than just being whoever curries favour enough with the party apparatchiks to secure a place near the top of the list.
Bevan Price
Established Member
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One problem with PR is that minority, often extreme, parties can exert excessive influence. They agree to support one party to form a "stable" coalition only if the coalition government party will favour some of the more extreme viewpoints.
Personally I would like to see some type of hybrid system, maybe half the seats decided by first past the post, but the other half decided by some form of regional PR (e.g. regions of roughly equal population comprising areas of England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland) - but with a proviso -- any party must receive at least 5-10% of the votes in a region before it qualifies to get any seats.
Personally I would like to see some type of hybrid system, maybe half the seats decided by first past the post, but the other half decided by some form of regional PR (e.g. regions of roughly equal population comprising areas of England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland) - but with a proviso -- any party must receive at least 5-10% of the votes in a region before it qualifies to get any seats.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
That's basically AMS as used in Scotland and Wales though the % threshold is more akin to Germany where it's 5% iirc.
It's pretty rare for systems to not have a 5% threshold, even if only implicitly because few systems allocate more than 20 seats to an individual block. It's also pretty rare that extreme parties manage to have a significant say in government - occasionally they are dragged in in return for one of their more palatable policies being accepted, or given lip service. The main risk is that they get more publicity and to look more official than they might otherwise achieve, but that seems far-fetched in the UK given the amount and quality of coverage Farage was able to get in the UK for no elected presence at all.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
In practice it tends to be the other way, as a small player in a grand coalition the extremism gets diluted. They might get thrown a bone, but that's it. The risk is that they get a veneer of respectability and/or get a platform, as we saw with Nigel Farage using his MEP status to goose-step his way around the joint.
Coalitions in PR work very differently to coalitions in FPTP, where the tail gets to wag the dog, as we periodically see with the terrorists and head cases in the DUP.
Here, the electoral system is...interesting. Members of the House of Keys (MHKs) are elected to our parliament, Tynwald, on a FPTP basis. The elected MHKs choose a Chief Minister who then handpicks the other ministers. It's a toady's paradise. You get some real crazies in positions of power as gratitude for their toadying, like our Environment Minister who seriously wants to import non-native animals and birds to the island so we can shoot them in the name of conservation.
brad465
Established Member
This is very opinionated, but one can argue that the extremes have taken over the main parties already. In this case I think Momentum hijacked Labour (although for now under Starmer their influence has dropped), while the ERG and other strong Brexit supporters seem to have a great influence in the Tory Party now, to the point that some very "Conservative" MPs lost the Whip last year, with arguments that "the Conservative party left them". There maybe other examples of extreme minorities influencing moderate parties in recent years, but these seem the most prolific at the moment.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
I think you could make a strong case for saying that happens under FPTP too: The difference is that, with FPTP, minority/extreme groups will gain influence by infiltrating one of the main parties rather than by setting up their own party (Militant, Momentum, and the Tory Brexiteers are good examples of that.
Correct, it is based on party lists. And that means it will probably be an MP in your constituency that you actually voted for. I honestly can't see the benefit for a tory voter in having a local momentum MP, or how a labour voter can benefit from an ERG MP.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
I assume you mean with FPTP, because you don't get that direct link of a "local" MP with Party Lists
No I meant with party lists. As someone living in a country with party lists, what kind of direct link am I missing?
hexagon789
Veteran Member
Depending on the size of constituency you could live in a small village and all your elected representatives live literally hundreds of miles away (not uncommon in some countries for most MPs to be based entirely in the major cities) with FPTP you have a clear local representative even if you didn't necessarily vote for them.
You have a good chance of a direct link under proportional representation with multi-member constituencies. FPTP and single-member comstituencies means that a very large proportion of the electorate cannot feel that they have any representation of their political views at all, even if the local member migh tbe very good at acting as a glorified local ombudsman for all over administrative complaints.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
Yes, that's what I was driving at earlier that by mixing FPTP with PR in the firm of the Additional Member System or Mixed Member Proportional you keep the benefits of having "local" MPs and candidates directly chosen by the electorate rather than by the party hierarchy with pure party lists and you ensure more voters have someone representing their views in Parliament through the additional members which also serve to make the overall result at the very least significantly more proportional if not as near as one can reasonably get.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Even without a national list system, the mere idea of having multi-member constituencies would mean that you have a choice of several MPs to approach. You'd need to work out some rules about how that would work, but I imagine one advantage would be that - since in most constituencies, MPs would come from different parties - you'd be more likely to be able to find someone sympathetic to a particular complaint - unlike the present system where, if for whatever reason your one MP doesn't want to listen to you about something, you're basically screwed.
Having a Brexit Party MS I have to question that. She was elected standing for UKIP, at a time when the last MEP election had returned more UKIP members than of any other party and we were in the final stages of the EU referendum campaigning. UKIP had two elected MPs, both Tory defectors who both won subsequent elections standing as UKIP candidates. After UKIP, the Brexit Party became the largest party in the European Parliament.
And that's without mentioning that Farage himself was an MEP for 20 years, nor mentioning all the UKIP and Brexit Party councillors.
That notwithstanding, it's clear that the Westminster voting system as it stands has never prevented him from getting his message in the media, so concern over other electoral systems allow a voice and a platform to people like him shouldn't be a reason to oppose them.
Correct, but they can also live all over the constituency. And even in first past the post there can be some large constituencies.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
I appreciate that's true even in the UK, some of the Welsh and Scottish rural seats for instance, but the average disparity is less than with most proportional systems. Even STV would be preferable to pure Party List in such an instance in my view, but to me AMS is the best of both worlds and given it's used at the devolved level in parts of the UK already I think it would be the most likely PR system chosen and perhaps the most readily accepted if/when that day comes.
The one thing I’ve always struggled with to understand in multi-member constituencies is who to write to if there is a problem.
Currently many councils have the worst of both worlds with both wards with more than one Councillor, but still having FPTP.
With a recent issue I had locally I ended up writing to all three Councillors (fortunately they are all the same party, yet despite coping in all 3 to the original email got a reply from each one indicating what they had all done), on top of that I then wrote to the London Assembly members; of which I not only have one "local" (he represents nearly 650,000 people), but also 11 London-wide members, in this instance quite whom (if any) I should communicate any problems to is unclear.
Again AMS presents a good solution. Everybody gets their own FPTP MP, representing a constituency 50-100% larger than now (and potentially no bigger at all if you increase the number of MPs a bit), and then you have a pool of party list members. The way these work across relatively small regions in Scotland means that effectively you have your own MSP to contact, and then probably a regional MSP from your preferred party to contact if you get no joy from them.
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