Pros and cons of proportional representation

Keir Starmer has been accused of acting like a “feudal monarchy” after the Labour leader indicated he would not put a pledge for electoral reform in the party’s next election manifesto.

Labour members overwhelmingly backed a motion at the party conference in Liverpool to replace the current first-past-the-post system with proportional representation (PR).

And the views of the grassroots membership appear to align with voters in the so-called “Red Wall” constituencies Labour needs to win back to have any chance of forming the next government. A survey commissioned by campaign group Make Votes Matter of 40 heartland seats in the Midlands, North of England and Wales found 47% supported adopting PR, compared to just 12% who were in favour of keeping the existing electoral system.

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“Yet the Labour leader’s office has been reluctant to back PR,” said The New Statesman. “It would make the party vulnerable to Tory attack lines about electoral pacts, stitch-ups and a ‘coalition of chaos’. Plus, for MPs who have won their seats and held them under the existing system, there is little incentive to change.”

So what are the arguments for and against PR?

1. Pro: better reflects voting

“Under PR systems the number of seats in parliament reflects the number of votes cast overall in elections,” said The Independent. Advocates believe, therefore, that if a party receives 20% of the vote, it should have 20% of the seats.

The current first-past-the-post (FPTP) “majoritarian system”, however, delivers disproportionate majorities that favour larger parties, voters in rural constituencies and does not reflect the true voting preference of the general public.

Under the existing UK system, for example, in the overall popular vote the Conservatives “need a lead of 5 points to secure a Commons majority; for Labour, the lead needs to be at least 12 points”, said The Guardian. If the two parties received an equal share of the vote at the next general election, the Tories would win 23 more seats than Labour, the paper said.

A more proportional system would also give smaller parties and independent candidates a better chance of getting into Parliament and introduce different voices to our national political life.

PR seldom results in one party holding an overall majority but rather leads to governments that need to compromise and build consensus. This means that – in theory, at least – stable, centrist policies that reflect a spectrum of views often prevail. This is the case in Germany, which has a government made up of centre-right free marketeers, the centre left and Greens.

By contrast, FPTP “is increasing polarisation, weakening accountability, and perpetuating an increasingly dysfunctional two-party system”, a report by The Constitution Society has warned.

2. Con: pathway for extremists

“The premise that PR can be good for fringe parties is based on a kernel of truth. In the Netherlands and elsewhere, PR helps extremist parties and radical ideas turn diffuse votes into seats in legislatures,” said the Nato Association of Canada, citing a Harvard Kennedy School of Government study that found that PR systems tend to favour extreme right-wing parties.

If the 2015 UK general election had been held under a PR system, UKIP would have been the third-largest party in Parliament, with 83 seats instead of one. Good news for its supporters but worrying for those who linked the party’s popularity with a resurgence of xenophobia and nationalism.

“It is undoubtedly true that PR allows for higher numbers of MPs from ‘non-mainstream’ parties,” said Dylan Difford on the Electoral Reform Society site.

Most European parliaments contain at least one left-wing socialist and one right-wing populist party or in the recent case of Sweden and Italy right-wing populist parties can break through and win enough votes to form a government.

3. Pro: ends ‘wasted votes’

A more representative form of PR would put an end to millions of votes being “wasted” at elections.

In 2019, for example, analysis by the Electoral Reform Society found that across the UK, more than 22 million votes (70.8%) were “ignored because they went to non-elected candidates or were surplus to what the elected candidate needed” to win the seat.

A change to PR would mean candidates having to appeal to a much larger section of the public rather than just targeting a tiny proportion of swing voters in marginal constituencies. This in turn could lead to a higher turnout at the polls, as voters feel more engaged with the democratic process.

A study into voting patterns in New Zealand after its switch from FPTP to PR in 1996 found that “voters who were on the extreme left were significantly more likely to participate than previously, leading to an overall increase in turnout”. PR also fostered “more positive attitudes about the efficacy of voting”.

4. Con: local issues suffer

One of the main arguments against PR during the failed AV referendum of 2011 was that it would weaken the link between constituents and their MP.

Under FPTP, MPs serve the constituency they campaign in, so are more inclined to tackle local issues and represent the specific views of their constituents at a national level. Under the PR “list” system, electoral constituencies would have to be much bigger in order to have multiple seats to fill proportionately, possibly leading to local issues being overlooked.

5. Pro: more representative locally

FPTP allows MPs to be elected with a small overall percentage of the vote. Some representatives have been elected to Parliament despite 75% of their constituency voting for other candidates.

According to the Electoral Reform Society, the concentration of the Labour vote in certain areas meant that in 2019 it took on average 50,835 votes to elect a Labour MP, whilst only 38,264 votes were needed to return a Conservative MP.

The alternative vote (AV) system, which is not fully proportional but is still likely to increase the representation of small parties, and single transferable vote (STV), which is truly proportional, would take into account voters’ back-up choices to end up with a candidate that satisfies a majority.

6. Con: Compromise coalitions

Talk of a so-called “coalition of chaos” made up of Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP was a feature of the Conservatives’ 2015 election campaign and fears of something similar are driving the current Labour leadership to shy away from backing PR.

In a country like the UK, which is used to long periods of single-party rule, the idea of a never-ending series of weak and indecisive coalition governments has been the main obstacle to electoral reform over the years.

Neither the trade union reforms that Margaret Thatcher pushed through nor Tony Blair’s raft of improvements to public services could have been carried through without a strong governing majority.

Detractors also claim PR carries an inherent instability. The Italian parliament, which uses such a system, is constantly in a state of uncertainty and has been prematurely dissolved three times since 2008.

There is also the messy process of forming a coalition. In Germany last year, this process took three months. And in October 2020 Belgium ended a record-breaking 653 days without a government or prime minister when Alexander de Croo was able to form a new four-way coalition, said Euronews.