First Past the Post

I was so busy during the past week settling into my new day job and taking care of other business, that I did not carry through with my plan to heavily blog about and Tweet about the UK general election. This is probably a great relief to my fellow Americans who probably don't share my fascination with British elections. So I'll instead just offer this one post about the concepts of "first-past-the-post" and "proportional representation," which have become major subjects of discussion this year in the UK, especially since the May 6 general election ended with a distorted result as far as representation of the popular vote (normal for their elections) and a hung parliament (rather unusual). 

"First-past-the-post" means simply that the party's candidate who gets the most votes gets that constituency's seat in the House of Commons. Not necessarily a majority of the votes, just more votes than any other party. This is basically how members of the US Congress in most districts and the President of the United States are elected. If the leading Presidential candidate does not win more than 50 percent of the vote, we do not have a run-off election. The winner is simply the one with the most votes in the Electoral College, which does not require winning a majority of the popular vote, just being the one with the most votes enough times in more states with more electors than the other guy. An effect of this system--and the chief argument in favor of it--is that it tends to weed out tiny political parties and anomalous results, and makes it less likely that governments will have to form potentially unstable multi-party coalitions in order to govern. In the United States, this system has stifled (to the annoyance of Greens, Libertarians and other fringe parties) the emergence of a viable "third party" that can actually contest and win elections. I've had many debates over the years with people who want to make their "voice heard" and register their opinion by voting, for example, for Ralph Nader for President. You see how that went in 2000: it helped secure the election of George W. Bush (thanks a lot, jerks!). In the case of Nader and the other fringe candidates (remember Pat Buchanan?John Hagelin?), there was absolutely no chance whatsoever that any of them were going to win a single state's electoral votes much less the whole election, thus supporters of these candidates were literally wasting their votes (they hate when I say that, but it's absolutely true, and if they understood first-past-the-post, they'd understand why). But it's a little different in Britain.

In the UK, they do have a viable national third party, the Liberal Democrats, the successors of the old Liberal Party who have not been in power for most of century but nonetheless command a decent share of the vote in general elections. Also, small regional/nationalist parties are viable in their areas and regularly win seats in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So, unlike in the United States where there really are only two viable political parties nationally and where it is exceedingly hard to form a lasting major new one (last happened in the 1850s when the Republicans emerged and replaced the short-lived Whigs as the main opposition to the Democrats). This combination of multiple viable political parties plus first-past-the-post produces the phenomenon of distortion in the final results and the current strong support for going to a system of proportional representation like many other European countries.  Consider this year's result in terms of seats won by the three largest parties versus approximately how many they would have under a pure proportional system:

2010 UK General Election (of 650 seats)
Conservative:          306  (47% of seats, but 36% of popular vote and 234 seats under PR)
Labour:                     258  (39% of seats, but 29% of popular vote and 188 seats under PR)
LIberal Democrat:   57    (8% of seats, but 23% of popular vote and 149 seat under PR)

There's that distortion: the Lib Dems actually increased slightly their share of the popular vote nationally since the 2005 election, but they also lost six seats at the same time because they were edged into second place in several of their constituencies. And notice how both Labour and the Tories are getting many more seats than what seems "fair" based on their percentages of the vote. So there's a third party which is fully in the game with Labour and the Tories as far as public support, but they can't manage to get first past the post in anywhere near the number of seats that would seem fair. 

Here's another result, this from 1997 when Tony Blair led "New Labour" into power after the long, grinding Thatcher/Major age:

1997 UK GENERAL ELECTION 1997 (of 659 seats)
Labour:                   418 (63% of seats, but 43% of popular vote)
Conservative:        165 (25% of seats but 31% of popular vote)
Liberal Democrat:  49  (6% of seats but 17% of popular vote)

Here the distortion created by first-past-the-post was really remarkable. With less than half of the popular vote, Labour ended up with a historically huge majority in Commons, reducing the opposition Tories, who lost a stunning 171 seats in that election, to virtual irrelevance after most of two decades in government. The Lib Dem result in 1997 is also interesting, and sort of the reverse of what happened to them this year. In 1997, they actually declined a percentage point in popularity from 1992, but more than doubled their number of seats in Commons, from 20 to 46 mostly by pushing the Tories into second place in marginal Conservative seats. 

First-past-the-post is supposed to yield a clear majority and governing mandate for a single party, and it generally has. But this year no party won a majority and the British government is in an unusual limbo as the parties attempt to come up with a coalition agreement. This interesting article by Johann Hari contends that first-past-the-post creates another kind of distortion, toward conservative politics and policies in a country that he describes as overwhelmingly liberal and social-democratic in its character. Here in the US, I think a similar thing has happened gradually over the years thanks mostly to the right-wing noise machine's success at convincing people to vote against their own interests again and again. But because we have only two real parties here, the distortion is less pronounced in the House of Representatives than it seems to be in the UK's House of Commons. It's very evident, however, in the 100-member US Senate, where most members are elected in a first-past-the-post fashion and where representation is based on land (talk about archaic!). In the Senate, the 41 conservatives who manage to slow or block the majority's progress on most matters, represent much, much less than 41% of the US population. But they hail mostly from the huge swaths of territory where conservative politics prevail. It would be interesting to see what would happen here if we went to PR. Would we end up with new smaller parties flourishing? Would Congress be a coalition affair? Would the Republicans fragment into their components (fascists, teabaggers, religious nuts, whack-jobs, and the few remaining old-style fiscal conservatives) and become three or four parties? Would Democrats split, with the so-called "Blue Dogs" going their own way (maybe hand-in-hand with those last few old-style Republicans)? Would the Greens finally realize their dream of electing someone to at least one office above city council level somewhere? It will be interesting to see if the UK actually does reform its electoral system now that every party claims to be interested in the idea.