And in Britain the votes are in …

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, July 5, 2024 (image by the tendentiously named Parrot of Doom, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

… and the meaning is (not) clear. The Labour Party has a powerful mandate to govern, a near record majority. Some 33.7 per cent of votes said so, on a surprisingly low turnout, just 59 per cent of those eligible and the lowest in more than 20 years. A near-record “landslide” on just 20 per cent of the possible votes.

A lot of commentators have made that point. Fewer made this one:

For as long as the party has existed, the Liberal Democrats have urged the UK to adopt proportional representation, which would help pull the traditional though not recent “third” party out of its slough of despond. Third by votes, that is, but not by seats. As the Financial Times put it: “The Liberal Democrats have bounded out of electoral irrelevance after quadrupling the number of MPs in the best performance in the party’s history.”

Indeed, the Lib Dems won big: 72 of the 650 seats, up from just eight. They received 12 per cent of the vote and 11 percent of the seats, the third largest in the new parliament. So far, so proportional. This time, unlike before.

However, Reform UK, the upstart right-wing party of Nigel Farage whose policies differ in every way from the Lib Dems, won its first five seats. Reform UK got more than 14 per cent of the vote – 600,000 more than the Lib Dems – but just 0.7 per cent of seats. So far, still so disproportionate.

Those figures mean the Lib Dems will be the third largest party and thus entitled to certain privileges in parliament. Under a strictly proportional system, they would be in fourth place, and without those extra perks. Will they now join Nigel Farage of Reform UK in calling for an immediate change in the system or be silent on their long-held principle?

Elsewhere, the Green Party received the fifth largest vote, nearly two million. That’s less than half the number of Reform UK received and 55 per cent of what Lib Dems got. It won just four seats. The Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, which wants Wales to break away from the United Kingdom, got four seats, too, on fewer than 200,000 votes, a tenth of those of the Greens.

The lesson for the Lib Dems? Be careful what you wish for.

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Constituency-based voting confers democratic legitimacy through the accountability of individual legislators to their own voters. Another virtue of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting is its ability, most of the time, to secure governability – the ability of government to function, pass and enforce legislation, pursue its policy agenda when voters have the choice of a wide variety of candidates. But it brings with it the perverse results we’ve just seen.

What about other approaches? Is the German system better? It has two tiers, a party list and a constituency list of candidates, which has the effect (the benefit or drawback?) of guaranteeing seats for party leaders. Britain’s Conservatives might think it is today, now that several of its biggest names found themselves outside the parliamentary party and thus out of the running to lead the opposition. But that system lacks legitimacy in that it lacks direct mandates for party big shots.

What about the French alternative: a two-phase election, the first week with a lot of candidates standing, and the second week with a shortened list, and in presidential elections just two? We’re about to learn whether that system is any better at making increasingly fractured polities any less ungovernable, after yesterday’s [i.e., July 7, 2024] second round, just a week ahead of the 235th anniversary of the French revolution on 1789.

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The subject of voting systems is an area of considerable theoretical and practical concern. One development concern the technology, for example, the ways in which blockchain might provide a mechanism for greater assurance (Huang et al., 2022), or how voting platforms can inspire or impede trust in the electorate (Acemyan, Kortum, & Oswald, 2022).

The more elusive question whether any system can create equity, legitimacy and governability at the same time. A wide range of the models have been theorised and tested (Passarelli, 2020), whether the German, two-vote approach; the French two rounds of voting; the ranked preferences in a single ballot; or other, increasingly complex ways; Ireland uses a “single transferable vote” system. Other models have proliferated: the open-list formula with single or multiple votes, open endorsement systems with single or multiple votes can break the party leaders’ stranglehold on candidate selection, but at the risk of losing voter affiliation with the parities themselves. In the European Union, some countries use different systems for the different levels of polity, local, national and supranational.

The greater the complexity, the lower the likelihood of public trust in the system. The simpler the system, the less legitimate the outcomes can seem. And that’s why this issue matters. We are, as Dennis Pilon (2013) says, “wrestling with democracy”.

Acemyan, C. Z., Kortum, P., & Oswald, F. L. (2022). The Trust in Voting Systems (TVS) Measure. International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.4018/IJTHI.293196

Huang, J., He, D., Obaidat, M. S., Vijayakumar, P., Luo, M., & Choo, K.-K. R. (2022). The Application of the Blockchain Technology in Voting Systems: A Review. ACM computing surveys, 54(3), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3439725

Passarelli, G. (2020). Preferential Voting Systems Influence on Intra-Party Competition and Voting Behaviour. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Pilon, D. (2013). Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth-Century West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.