The Case against Electoral Reform

Electoral Reform is very much desired by the British electorate. According to a bi-annual YouGov poll, 44% of the population wishes for a more representative system vs 27% who feel more comfortable with First Past the Post, which the poll posited that it would be more likely to result in a majority Government. We can’t tell if that skewed the results, but it’s interesting to look at this data.

The only demographic to like First Past the Post more than the prospect of a more proportional system is the Conservative voter group, and people above 65, which is not that puzzling, it does benefit them the most out of any parties. Labour and Lib-Dems support the prospects of Electoral Reform strongly at around 60%.

So we know that support for Electoral Reform is high, especially amongst those most diminished by its effects as no one didn’t see coming. But the interest of this article is not an appeal to popularity, but rather, to ask why the 21% of those polled said that they wish to keep the system as is.

We are going to be looking at the many points put forward by opponents of reform and be aiming to argue against them, to hopefully settle these aspects of the debate.

It wont because this project is a passion project and not written by an academic in the subject or expert in electoral systems, just a very unhealthily passionate-about-electoral-reform guy, and also its not going to reach all 70 million people in the UK even if it were written by an expert, but a man can try.

This article was written with the help of the folks on reddit, on the ukpolitics subreddit, who offered me arguments and concerns against Electoral Reform at my request, that I felt like was overall very well written and well put together. In the interests of summarising certain points and arguments, I’ve had to abstract away a great deal of nuance in some cases, and my bias may have been at play. For that reason, I urge you to read the thread afterwards here if you feel like you want to delve deeper into the case against Electoral Reform.

First Past the Post leads to stronger, more stable governments.

This is a common point, sprouting from a disgust of coalition-based governments and observations of other countries with unstable political situations such as Italy. This argument hinges on the premise that a coalition of parties is much more chaotic and difficult to manage than singular parties.

However, this becomes dispelled by the fact that countries like Germany have exceptionally stable political situations (ignoring the global crisis’), and yet they have coalitions in power. Italy is a proportional representation based democracy, but it has some political quirks that have led to the chaos, like ridiculous levels of corruption and a leading populist party that has suffered too many resignations from its leader (which had to eventually be blocked by the Italian President at one point) that bellied up harsher and harsher from the party having contradictory views.

There is an element of truth to this. But it feels like its more to do with the fact that when one group has 100% of the control, they don’t really need to worry about what anyone else thinks outside of that group and won’t need to honour agreements. In a Coalition, chaos can occur if parties don’t cooperate, which might be alarming based on what we know about our mainstream parties, but Coalitions under our current system are seen as an electoral disaster, and under a different system, parties would be more willing to share power as it becomes a fundamental prerequisite to having control in parliament.

PR means we must remove local MPs and individual candidates!

This stems from a misunderstanding that occurs due to Proportional Representation typically being conflated with Party-List Proportional Representation (great naming conventions, guys.). A system can be a Proportionally Representative system and have individual candidates that you can vote for at a local level, such as the Single Transferable Vote.

The referendum on the Alternative Vote means that the Electorate does not want Electoral Reform.

AV was not a proportionally representative system, or even a Mixed Member Proportional system. It simply removes the spoiler effect from the equation. We do not believe that this system was adequate to the needs of our country’s democracy, and we thank the British public for rejecting it. This mandate exists purely for this system, as it would have resulted in such a drastically different electoral landscape that we cannot agree that it is a mandate against Proportional Representation.

Under many alternative systems, the Loser can Win!

This argument stems from an idea that voting is about winning, and about showing your competence well enough to convince a strong plurality of a local electorate to vote for you.

First we want to address this point made by the commenter we are basing this point off. The Single Transferrable Vote still enforces this, ensuring that any given Party must take on the test of convincing a community of people to pledge their faith into them. This commenter posited that under Proportional Representation, you can simply pander to a group and win votes that way., In a way, votes come to you, and you don’t need to fight to win the hearts of the people. I would agree if we are talking about Party List Proportional Representation, but STV, as I said, this can’t happen. Worries of people who simply keep to themselves and pandering to their ideologies that have no local consensus or debate regarding them isn’t possible in STV, as proposals for the systems tend to require 20/25% plurality in order for a seat to be won. This is enough of a plurality to recognise that the local community recognises that candidate as significant, and deserves the seat.

However, the Plurality project does not agree that elections should be about “victory”. It should be about the people having a say in the way that the government is run. This is not accomplished by First Past the Post, as you only have 2 realistic options, in which neither may be how you wish to see the government be run. For example, in 2017 and 2019, there was no good centre-left or centrist option, despite these being completely valid desires for the government to be run. In a Winner Takes All system, the majority gets to be heard, and the rest forgotten. Shouldn’t the parliaments be a place of compromise and debate, where arguments contend between every nuanced take we can have? Isn’t that the essence of democracy, a compromise between opinion and putting that into action? As someone argued elsewhere in the post, the parties themselves do this already, but we have no say in how powerful the negotiative forces are, and how these parties compromise. The parties compromise on our behalfs, and then we are forced to compromise our true beliefs and choose one of two compromises set before us.

Losers deserve a say too. Majoritarian systems essentially state that ideas that aren’t popular are inherently worthless, which can be dangerous and lead to ultimately good but electorally unpopular ideas being thrown aside, such as expensive infrastructure projects.

Extremists can be more easily voted in within Proportional Representation systems.

I feel like this is an exclusionary take. I feel like it is strongly undemocratic to discount more extreme parties. Even though I fundamentally disagree with parties like Reform, I will fight for their right to be heard in parliament. In 2015, they received 13% of the vote, but only 0.2% of the seats in parliament. To me, that is a horrible flaw of our system. Even if I would have hated living under a Conservative and UKIP coalition, that was what the people were voting for, even with tactical voting in mind.

Extremism isn’t inherently a negative thing either. Extreme ideas are merely ones that stray from the status quo and its current discussions and values. A few decades ago, you’d probably get weird looks for saying that Car Dependancy is bad, but in recent years, it has become more and more mainstream that there should be alternative means of travel and Cars shouldn’t be the primary means of getting around within cities. The merit of this ideas isn’t the important part, its just to say that the status quo itself adheres to a political ideology and set of values, and an extreme idea tends to challenge one of those values fundamentally. And sometimes an extreme idea is what needed.

But then this argument also glosses over the fact that if one of the two major parties go on an extremist platform, they can get elected! The two parties can simply put forward an extremist leader with extreme policies, and now you’re stuck choosing between two extremes, and even with just one extreme, many people vote in a loyalty fashion and out of fear of the other guy, so they’ll still vote for the extreme platform, and also because it might be the only platform that has anything remotely close to what they want and is viable. In a proportional system, if your party starts going absolutely insane, you can just swap to an alternative but less extreme party, and not risk wasting your vote. And in a coalition, where extreme parties may enter a coalition with other parties, they can be reigned in by the more centrist parties, and far less extreme ideas get implemented as of a result because they would have less negotiating power compared to the bigger, more appealing centrist parties.

New systems can be more confusing and result in First Past The Post behaviour from voter laziness

This isn’t a great argument honestly, but I can see why it’s being raised as a concern. Ranked Choice Voting can be confusing due to the idea of a “runoff” requiring a bit of an explanation. Someone in the initial Reddit thread asked if having 2nd or 3rd choices would lower the chances of your first choice. It wouldn’t, it’d be the best case scenario for them if you voted them as the 1st choice. But it did illustrate to me that if the Single Transferable Vote were to become our system of choice, it’d need a proper campaign to teach the electorate how to use it, how it works, and to make it so its taught in schools so newer members of the British electorate can grasp the system.

Coalitions mean compromising ideas you voted for, whereas parties under First Past the Post have already compromised between different factions with their policies, that you then can vote for.

This was one of the most compelling points I saw that was in favour for First Past the Post. For that reason, I really want to delve deep into this person’s point, and give it a proper spotlight.

They let me characterise their point as such.

"In First Past the Post, coalitions are often agreed before elections in the form of a unified party, and rarely form coalitions post-election, and in a Proportional system, coalitions are rarely agreed before elections as a unified coalition of parties, and they often form coalitions post-election."

They stressed to me though, that I point out that it matters because of so; when this pact is formed pre-election, it lets you vote on that agreement and you know exactly, at that ballot box, what the promises are, and that they are likely to be carried out if they get into the drivers seat. But in a post-election pact, you can’t vote on that agreement (unless the Party allow its members to vote on the agreement, in which case if you’re a member you could? But I’m not sure how common that is within Multi-Party systems.)

This argument came with a bigger heap of details, like parties forming coalitions with parties they should be opposed to, and how policies you voted for can be discarded in the terms and conditions of that agreement.

This is unfortunately true, and it is a flaw of any multi-party system. Just take a look at the Irish Republic's Greens being in coalition in the right winged parties, despite being a self-described left winged party themselves! It's a flaw I'm happy to concede in the debate for Electoral Reform, but I do believe that a multi-party system has more benefits that outweigh this flaw.

Some coalitions in multi-party systems ARE negotiated during the lead up to elections, but also, in the case of a post-election pact, by voting for a party you believe in, you get to give them more negotiating power in that agreement if it happens post-election.

I like to imagine this as First Past the Post requiring voters to compromise their beliefs and values at the ballot box, and a Multi-Party system forces the parties (the actual professionals that know politics and government systems and have advisers) to do the compromise on our behalf based on our given mandate. When you phrase it like this, the flaw can be seen as a strength, and then we can characterise this as a double-edged sword of the system. Sometimes its fair and great, and sometimes, the parties just do extremely weird stuff like the Irish Greens.

It’s also that I feel like giving a mandate-based weight to the negotiating power of what would be factions within these parties allows us to have more fine-tuned control on how a Coalition will look at the end of it all, and that’s ultimately something I prefer, I think this is ultimately where there is no strong rebuttal, and wasn’t something I thought about before this post brought it to my attention. So I thank the user in question, LycanIndarys, for their time and well formulated arguments. I urge the reader to take some time to read it, as I feel like I can’t summarise it in good faith as it has a good deal of nuance that will be missed by doing so.

People push for PR purely to spite the parties that benefit the most, and to benefit their favourite.

This is unfortunately true. You can’t help that unfortunately. I feel strongly that making the issue partisan overall hurts the push for these changes in our system. The Right in our country deserve a choice other than the Conservatives.

The party I don’t like will benefit!!!!!! And they might form coalitions with the OTHER bad people!!!!

Stop.