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UK Election: What difference would proportional representation have made?

52 points by davidbarker 12y ago

nextweek2 12y ago
The point is moot, we had a vote on PR just after the last election. The vast majority did not vote for it.
- IanCal 12y 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_referendum,_2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote...
  - branchless 12y 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.
    - vixen99 11y ago
      Voters in Britain do not elect a parliament or a party. They vote locally for a member of parliament - namely - someone to represent all people in the constituency no matter what their party allegiance is, in the House of Commons. Everyone knows who they are and can communicate with that person. Fairness means that the person who gets the most votes, gains that privilege. Example: 3.9 million people voted in this British election to gain one single UK Independence Party (UKIP) MP. Unfair? No - given that, at this election, voters did not give majority votes to a UKIP candidate except in that one instance. Occasionally people vote for an outstanding personality who does not belong to a party they generally support. This is as it should be.
      - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        Voters in Britain (specifically Scotland and Wales) use the AMS system that takes this into account and balances both desires while also avoiding the stupidity of unpopular candidates winning because two similar candidates compete for votes, as demonstrated in the fear that UKIP votes would weaken Conservative candidates, leading to front page headlines telling you not to vote for who you wanted to vite for, but for someone else instead.
      - tormeh 11y ago
        ...But aren't campaigns fought on a party-by-party basis? Who gets to choose which politicians get the secure constituencies? If all the candidates were truly independent I might see your point, but as long as they belong to parties I don't.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        What you're essentially saying is, "the rules of FPTP were followed, therefore the outcome is just", which is a red herring when it's the system itself that's being questioned. "Voters in Britain do not elect a parliament", but shouldn't they?
      - vidarh 11y ago
        > Fairness means that the person who gets the most votes, gains that privilege. In your opinion this is what fairness means. In my opinion, this system leaves millions without a say in the direction of the country proportional to the support their opinions have in the populace. Not only do I find it unfair, I find it offensive and undemocratic, and as a result I don't see a government elected under such a system as having any legitimacy. It's worth pointing this out: It is not up to you to define what is fair. Nor is it up to a majority. It is up to everyone. When a system leaves a substantial number of people finding it unfair and feeling robbed of any opportunity to be represented, it is unfair, whether or not the majority thinks it's the most awesome system ever. If you care about fairness, you need to care about gaining consensus, not about whether or not you're above or below 50%. > Unfair? No - given that, at this election, voters did not give majority votes to a UKIP candidate except in that one instance. First of all, it is not majority of a constituency but a plurality. This is a big deal. My seat was won with 43%: The majority of his constituents wanted to be represented by other people. We won't ever know who would have been preferred by a majority of constituents under one of the many systems intended to actually get to a majority choice. Secondly, that the results matches the rules does not mean they're not unfair. When peoples votes carry different value based on where they live, then that to me by definition is unfair.
  - newaccountfool 12y ago
    It created some interesting propaganda[1]. [1]http://i.imgur.com/Row95qp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Row95qp.jpg
    - andrewingram 12y ago
      The whole thing made me really angry to be honest. The LibDems gambled their entire future electability on the referendum, and it was so plagued by FUD that it never had a chance.
    - flurdy 12y ago
      Would save even more money if there was no elections...
      - thesimon 11y ago
        Yeah, what about a man who simply decides everything. No need to worry about anything. He'll probably promise everyone a job and will improve the road network. And some people can go on a free vacation by train which will last until the end of their life. The ad is quite horrible though, a cheap way to manipulate the viewer by appealing to his emotions.
  - danieltillett 12y 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.
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      There was a lot of FUD put out against it. Since most people don't really understand voting systems, nor their pros and cons, I guess they voted for the devil they knew.
      - bshimmin 11y ago
        I think this is the key point. Proportional representation is very simple to understand, and likewise first-past-the-post (in its essence, at least; the actual implementation we have in the UK perhaps less so). Alternative vote is plainly more complex - first something happens, then perhaps something else happens, then... etc; it's not complex for smart HN readers, but even trying to explain it in a few words shows it's more involved than the other two systems. I am fundamentally uncertain that a majority of the electorate understood AV when they were voting - and this was certainly supported by my own conversations at the time with moderately intelligent people who plainly did not understand it. And, in fact, the majority of the electorate did not even vote at all on the issue. Proportional representation is undeniably more democratic than either FPTP or AV, but it does mean you end up having to live with the fact that a rather alarmingly large proportion of people have views that the majority find unsavoury (eg. the BNP managed nearly 2% of the votes in the 2010 election).
        crdoconnor 11y ago
        >it does mean you end up having to live with the fact that a rather alarmingly large proportion of people have views that the majority find unsavoury That's democracy for you. Besides, the BNP arose from a climate of austerity and declining real incomes. If you have a functioning political system that doesn't do that to the majority, you deprive the unsavory minority of political oxygen.
  - vidarh 12y 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.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Your representative is not supposed to represent individuals, but communities. By definition this is going to be the majority opionion of everyone in your community. I don't expect my representative to share my views, but I do expect that they will reflect those of my community. If I want to change something I lobby my community not my representative.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        To me, that makes matters worse, not better. You are telling me that disenfranchising people like me that hold non-mainstream political views is by design. That's outright offensive to me. You are also wrong: It is not by definition going to be the majority opinion of everyone in my "community". For starters, the person who won the seat I live in got 43% of the vote. The majority of my community wanted other people to represent them. The current system the worst of both worlds: Single seat constituencies without even the pretence of trying to find a candidate a majority would stand behind. Secondly, lets disabuse ourselves of the notion that the electoral boundaries matches a "community". They do not. My seat includes uppper class areas in Shirley, with million pound mansions, as well as council estates like New Addington - the latter is one of the places in the UK with the lowest average life expectancy. The electoral seat encompasses perhaps a dozen separate communities that rarely mixes other than superficially. We can see clearly how divided this seat is - as many others - by looking at council election results, where various wards go very, very firmly on way or the other, while the seat as a whole is a very marginal seat (this election the Tory incumbent held onto his seat with a 165 vote plurality). In reality, if one were to draw up geographically based communities based on how people actually live and work and interact together, there'd be maybe a dozen separate areas. Apart from the flaw of thinking that areas as large as a parliamentary seat - even in London where the population density means the physical areas are fairly small - will be homogenous enough or closely enough linked to represent a single community, when you look at the overall electoral results you see pretty clearly that "community" does no longer - if it ever did - match geographical boundaries. Communities are split between parties that stands so far apart that pretending that community is geographical is a joke. But in the end whether or not you believe that the representative should represent a community, or that the point is to represent the voices of the people, the fact is that this system leaves millions upon millions of users without a voice where it matters, and without the ability to influence decisions in parliament if they vote their conscience. You may think that's acceptable. I don't. I find it an affront to the very idea of democracy.
- shrikant 12y 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 11y 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 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique
  - vidarh 11y 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.
  - ZeroGravitas 11y 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".
flurdy 11y 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.
- vidarh 11y 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 11y 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?
    - rwmj 11y ago
      Correct - the Boundary Commissions (there's one for each nation) are independent and come up with the new boundaries, based on simple mathematical principles. Parliament then votes them through. In 2012/2013 Labour managed to defeat the government in the vote. The boundary changes would undoubtedly have favoured the Tories, but that's because the Tories are more popular, not because of some nefarious plan.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      There is basically no way of redrawing those boundaries that is apolitical. It may not be a "diabolical plot" but constituency size is not all of it. How you alter that inherently alters vote distribution in a FPTP system, and as such it is a major problem. Even if you supposedly makes it fairer by evening out constituency sizes, and even if the people doing it are trying to be fair, the net effect due to the electoral system can very easily be to disenfranchise the voters even more.
thomasfoster96 11y 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.
- rdc12 11y 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).
danmaz74 11y 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.
- danieltillett 11y 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.
  - jsnell 11y 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?
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Because it stops you having to tactically vote. With AV you can vote for a minor party you support without this vote helping the candidate you hate most. You don't need to vote for some candidate you don't like just because you hate another candidate more who might win. You just number tha candidates from 1 to x in your personal preference. The end result is the consensus candidate is elected while allowing everyone to vote for who they want. It is simple and it works well in practice.
      - jsnell 11y ago
        Tactical voting is still a thing in AV. If I think A > B > C, I might still want to vote A > C > B in an effort to drop B out first (hopefully giving A an easy win in a showdown with C).
seanalltogether 11y 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.
- vidarh 11y 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 11y 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.
  - vixen99 11y ago
    Can't vote out Ed Balls? You just did!! http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-balls-tories-portillo-moment-shadow-chancellor-loses-seat-labour http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-ba...
    - leapius 11y ago
      No he means personally vote him out. Only the residents of Morley had the power to vote him out, which they did of course (thankfully!)
- ZeroGravitas 11y 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.
icebraining 11y ago
I'm always happy to have a relevant reason to post a Yes, Minister excerpt: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs The episode is called "A Victory for Democracy".
- tormeh 11y ago
  "The universities. Both of them."
  - hackerboos 11y 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.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      I'm a little surprised, in a way, about the seeming indifference towards Imperial College.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - IanCal 11y ago
    Ah, Cambridge and Hull?
tormeh 11y 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.
- platz 11y 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.
  - tormeh 11y 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.
    - platz 11y ago
      I agree promises to voters end up being silly. Interesting ideas though, I'm sure given enough thought (I certainly don't have the experience in these theings) it could work.
  - higherpurpose 11y 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.
    - platz 11y ago
      No, but maybe something like Canada's. If the majority loses favor with the public, (simplifying a bit here) they just schedule an election and vote them out .
SeanLuke 11y 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.
- rwmj 11y ago
  Naming 3 countries doesn't count as evidence.
  - SeanLuke 11y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Advantages
- vidarh 11y 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 11y ago
Interesting video on voting systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
- ramanan 11y ago
  CGP Grey! I came here to post the same link. His entire series is very informative. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638
- iopq 11y 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.
  - higherpurpose 11y 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 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.
    - iopq 11y ago
notahacker 11y 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
- vidarh 11y 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).
  - notahacker 11y 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
higherpurpose 11y 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 http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04

52 points by davidbarker 12y ago

nextweek2 12y ago

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

IanCal 12y 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_referendum,_2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote...
- branchless 12y 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.
  - vixen99 11y ago
    Voters in Britain do not elect a parliament or a party. They vote locally for a member of parliament - namely - someone to represent all people in the constituency no matter what their party allegiance is, in the House of Commons. Everyone knows who they are and can communicate with that person. Fairness means that the person who gets the most votes, gains that privilege. Example: 3.9 million people voted in this British election to gain one single UK Independence Party (UKIP) MP. Unfair? No - given that, at this election, voters did not give majority votes to a UKIP candidate except in that one instance. Occasionally people vote for an outstanding personality who does not belong to a party they generally support. This is as it should be.
    - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      Voters in Britain (specifically Scotland and Wales) use the AMS system that takes this into account and balances both desires while also avoiding the stupidity of unpopular candidates winning because two similar candidates compete for votes, as demonstrated in the fear that UKIP votes would weaken Conservative candidates, leading to front page headlines telling you not to vote for who you wanted to vite for, but for someone else instead.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      ...But aren't campaigns fought on a party-by-party basis? Who gets to choose which politicians get the secure constituencies? If all the candidates were truly independent I might see your point, but as long as they belong to parties I don't.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      What you're essentially saying is, "the rules of FPTP were followed, therefore the outcome is just", which is a red herring when it's the system itself that's being questioned. "Voters in Britain do not elect a parliament", but shouldn't they?
    - vidarh 11y ago
      > Fairness means that the person who gets the most votes, gains that privilege. In your opinion this is what fairness means. In my opinion, this system leaves millions without a say in the direction of the country proportional to the support their opinions have in the populace. Not only do I find it unfair, I find it offensive and undemocratic, and as a result I don't see a government elected under such a system as having any legitimacy. It's worth pointing this out: It is not up to you to define what is fair. Nor is it up to a majority. It is up to everyone. When a system leaves a substantial number of people finding it unfair and feeling robbed of any opportunity to be represented, it is unfair, whether or not the majority thinks it's the most awesome system ever. If you care about fairness, you need to care about gaining consensus, not about whether or not you're above or below 50%. > Unfair? No - given that, at this election, voters did not give majority votes to a UKIP candidate except in that one instance. First of all, it is not majority of a constituency but a plurality. This is a big deal. My seat was won with 43%: The majority of his constituents wanted to be represented by other people. We won't ever know who would have been preferred by a majority of constituents under one of the many systems intended to actually get to a majority choice. Secondly, that the results matches the rules does not mean they're not unfair. When peoples votes carry different value based on where they live, then that to me by definition is unfair.
- newaccountfool 12y ago
  It created some interesting propaganda[1]. [1]http://i.imgur.com/Row95qp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Row95qp.jpg
  - andrewingram 12y ago
    The whole thing made me really angry to be honest. The LibDems gambled their entire future electability on the referendum, and it was so plagued by FUD that it never had a chance.
  - flurdy 12y ago
    Would save even more money if there was no elections...
    - thesimon 11y ago
      Yeah, what about a man who simply decides everything. No need to worry about anything. He'll probably promise everyone a job and will improve the road network. And some people can go on a free vacation by train which will last until the end of their life. The ad is quite horrible though, a cheap way to manipulate the viewer by appealing to his emotions.
- danieltillett 12y 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.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    There was a lot of FUD put out against it. Since most people don't really understand voting systems, nor their pros and cons, I guess they voted for the devil they knew.
    - bshimmin 11y ago
      I think this is the key point. Proportional representation is very simple to understand, and likewise first-past-the-post (in its essence, at least; the actual implementation we have in the UK perhaps less so). Alternative vote is plainly more complex - first something happens, then perhaps something else happens, then... etc; it's not complex for smart HN readers, but even trying to explain it in a few words shows it's more involved than the other two systems. I am fundamentally uncertain that a majority of the electorate understood AV when they were voting - and this was certainly supported by my own conversations at the time with moderately intelligent people who plainly did not understand it. And, in fact, the majority of the electorate did not even vote at all on the issue. Proportional representation is undeniably more democratic than either FPTP or AV, but it does mean you end up having to live with the fact that a rather alarmingly large proportion of people have views that the majority find unsavoury (eg. the BNP managed nearly 2% of the votes in the 2010 election).
      - crdoconnor 11y ago
        >it does mean you end up having to live with the fact that a rather alarmingly large proportion of people have views that the majority find unsavoury That's democracy for you. Besides, the BNP arose from a climate of austerity and declining real incomes. If you have a functioning political system that doesn't do that to the majority, you deprive the unsavory minority of political oxygen.
- vidarh 12y 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.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Your representative is not supposed to represent individuals, but communities. By definition this is going to be the majority opionion of everyone in your community. I don't expect my representative to share my views, but I do expect that they will reflect those of my community. If I want to change something I lobby my community not my representative.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      To me, that makes matters worse, not better. You are telling me that disenfranchising people like me that hold non-mainstream political views is by design. That's outright offensive to me. You are also wrong: It is not by definition going to be the majority opinion of everyone in my "community". For starters, the person who won the seat I live in got 43% of the vote. The majority of my community wanted other people to represent them. The current system the worst of both worlds: Single seat constituencies without even the pretence of trying to find a candidate a majority would stand behind. Secondly, lets disabuse ourselves of the notion that the electoral boundaries matches a "community". They do not. My seat includes uppper class areas in Shirley, with million pound mansions, as well as council estates like New Addington - the latter is one of the places in the UK with the lowest average life expectancy. The electoral seat encompasses perhaps a dozen separate communities that rarely mixes other than superficially. We can see clearly how divided this seat is - as many others - by looking at council election results, where various wards go very, very firmly on way or the other, while the seat as a whole is a very marginal seat (this election the Tory incumbent held onto his seat with a 165 vote plurality). In reality, if one were to draw up geographically based communities based on how people actually live and work and interact together, there'd be maybe a dozen separate areas. Apart from the flaw of thinking that areas as large as a parliamentary seat - even in London where the population density means the physical areas are fairly small - will be homogenous enough or closely enough linked to represent a single community, when you look at the overall electoral results you see pretty clearly that "community" does no longer - if it ever did - match geographical boundaries. Communities are split between parties that stands so far apart that pretending that community is geographical is a joke. But in the end whether or not you believe that the representative should represent a community, or that the point is to represent the voices of the people, the fact is that this system leaves millions upon millions of users without a voice where it matters, and without the ability to influence decisions in parliament if they vote their conscience. You may think that's acceptable. I don't. I find it an affront to the very idea of democracy.
shrikant 12y 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 11y 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 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique
- vidarh 11y 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.
- ZeroGravitas 11y 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".

flurdy 11y 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.

vidarh 11y 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 11y 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?
  - rwmj 11y ago
    Correct - the Boundary Commissions (there's one for each nation) are independent and come up with the new boundaries, based on simple mathematical principles. Parliament then votes them through. In 2012/2013 Labour managed to defeat the government in the vote. The boundary changes would undoubtedly have favoured the Tories, but that's because the Tories are more popular, not because of some nefarious plan.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    There is basically no way of redrawing those boundaries that is apolitical. It may not be a "diabolical plot" but constituency size is not all of it. How you alter that inherently alters vote distribution in a FPTP system, and as such it is a major problem. Even if you supposedly makes it fairer by evening out constituency sizes, and even if the people doing it are trying to be fair, the net effect due to the electoral system can very easily be to disenfranchise the voters even more.

thomasfoster96 11y 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.

rdc12 11y 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).

danmaz74 11y 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.

danieltillett 11y 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.
- jsnell 11y 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?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Because it stops you having to tactically vote. With AV you can vote for a minor party you support without this vote helping the candidate you hate most. You don't need to vote for some candidate you don't like just because you hate another candidate more who might win. You just number tha candidates from 1 to x in your personal preference. The end result is the consensus candidate is elected while allowing everyone to vote for who they want. It is simple and it works well in practice.
    - jsnell 11y ago
      Tactical voting is still a thing in AV. If I think A > B > C, I might still want to vote A > C > B in an effort to drop B out first (hopefully giving A an easy win in a showdown with C).

seanalltogether 11y 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.

vidarh 11y 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 11y 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.
- vixen99 11y ago
  Can't vote out Ed Balls? You just did!! http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-balls-tories-portillo-moment-shadow-chancellor-loses-seat-labour http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-ba...
  - leapius 11y ago
    No he means personally vote him out. Only the residents of Morley had the power to vote him out, which they did of course (thankfully!)
ZeroGravitas 11y 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.

icebraining 11y ago

I'm always happy to have a relevant reason to post a Yes, Minister excerpt: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs The episode is called "A Victory for Democracy".

tormeh 11y ago
"The universities. Both of them."
- hackerboos 11y 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.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    I'm a little surprised, in a way, about the seeming indifference towards Imperial College.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- IanCal 11y ago
  Ah, Cambridge and Hull?

tormeh 11y 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.

platz 11y 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.
- tormeh 11y 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.
  - platz 11y ago
    I agree promises to voters end up being silly. Interesting ideas though, I'm sure given enough thought (I certainly don't have the experience in these theings) it could work.
- higherpurpose 11y 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.
  - platz 11y ago
    No, but maybe something like Canada's. If the majority loses favor with the public, (simplifying a bit here) they just schedule an election and vote them out .

SeanLuke 11y 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.

rwmj 11y ago
Naming 3 countries doesn't count as evidence.
- SeanLuke 11y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Advantages
vidarh 11y 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 11y ago

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

ramanan 11y ago
CGP Grey! I came here to post the same link. His entire series is very informative. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638
iopq 11y 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.
- higherpurpose 11y 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 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.
  - iopq 11y ago

notahacker 11y 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

vidarh 11y 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).
- notahacker 11y 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

higherpurpose 11y 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 http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04