The short answer from the other side of the equator is First-Past-the-Post, compounded by single member electorates and voluntary turnout.
P.S. we in Australia also have our own distortions and you have another different set of distortions in the US.
Not denying the American system is distorted, just trying to understand the distortion in UK elections.
A vote counting system in which in single-member electorates where there are more than two candidates, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of whether or not that number is more than 50% of the votes cast in that electorate.
A vote counting system in which in single-member electorates where there are more than two candidates, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of whether or not that number is more than 50% of the votes cast in that electorate.
650 MPs, so really ‘the election’ is 650 mini elections. Each seat returns the candidate with the most votes, with no minimum threshold for votes or turnout.
So you might get a two horse race in one place (in practice, there’s virtually never that few on the ballot) where the winner wins by a country mile, or a multi-way split where three get broadly the same, again the one of those three that nevertheless gets the most wins.
What that means is that national ‘x party got y percent of the vote’ isn’t quite meaningless, but it’s also not that helpful, because it’s not really a national vote when it comes down to it. It’s 650 local votes.
A vote counting system in which in single-member electorates where there are more than two candidates, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of whether or not that number is more than 50% of the votes cast in that electorate.
The way US presidents are elected, for example.
Not really, the electoral college is a whole other level of arcane. If US presidential elections were FPTP Hilary would have won. And Gore.
A vote counting system in which in single-member electorates where there are more than two candidates, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of whether or not that number is more than 50% of the votes cast in that electorate.
The way US presidents are elected, for example.
Not really, the electoral college is a whole other level of arcane. If US presidential elections were FPTP Hilary would have won. And Gore.
Is about where the votes are concentrated. A party that puts all its effort into winnable seats will do better than a party that spreads its efforts equally across the whole country. Thats why the Lib Dems did much better than Reform, for example. The Lib Dems pushed hard in seats where they were second and had a chance of winning, and didnt campaign so hard in unwinnable seats.
Its all about winning seat by seat, not about national percentages.
Quick question: under the principle of one person, one vote, please explain to this American how Labour can earn 60% of the seats when, in fact, they earned just 30% of the vote?
Easily. If support were completely evenly spread, whichever party had the highest vote share, however low, would win all the seats. This is how the SNP won nearly all Scotland's seats a few years ago on 50% of the vote.
Once you get a sufficient vote share to start being the largest party in a majority of constituencies you start winning a majority of the seats, even if you're only polling around 30% in each.
When we only had two main parties, it worked reasonably well, except when the popular vote was very close. But with lots of parties getting significant shares of the vote, being the largest no longer requires a particularly large share.
Is about where the votes are concentrated. A party that puts all its effort into winnable seats will do better than a party that spreads its efforts equally across the whole country. Thats why the Lib Dems did much better than Reform, for example. The Lib Dems pushed hard in seats where they were second and had a chance of winning, and didnt campaign so hard in unwinnable seats.
Its all about winning seat by seat, not about national percentages.
This is entirely predictable and predicted. The LibDems have an excellent local campaign infrastructure. (They are only limited by resources and hence concentrate on where they can win). Reform UK Ltd has almost no infrastructure - partly because they're not a real party. Hence the relative performance of both is much as expected.
Quick question: under the principle of one person, one vote, please explain to this American how Labour can earn 60% of the seats when, in fact, they earned just 30% of the vote?
Easily. If support were completely evenly spread, whichever party had the highest vote share, however low, would win all the seats. This is how the SNP won nearly all Scotland's seats a few years ago on 50% of the vote.
Once you get a sufficient vote share to start being the largest party in a majority of constituencies you start winning a majority of the seats, even if you're only polling around 30% in each.
When we only had two main parties, it worked reasonably well, except when the popular vote was very close. But with lots of parties getting significant shares of the vote, being the largest no longer requires a particularly large share.
Indeed. The one important caveat to any discussions on this is to remember that voter behaviour changes when you change the voting system.
Indeed. The one important caveat to any discussions on this is to remember that voter behaviour changes when you change the voting system.
AFZ
Interestingly there was a Glasgow seat where early voters were given the wrong instructions and were told to give a ranked choice rather than putting a single X. They decided not to void the ballot on the grounds that they could just use the first choice as the X. But that's not really fair as if you knew your first choice was unlikely to win you might not have put your X by them! So really there should be a re-run in my opinion.
When we only had two main parties, it worked reasonably well, except when the popular vote was very close. But with lots of parties getting significant shares of the vote, being the largest no longer requires a particularly large share.
I guess this is what the French two-round system is supposed to ameliorate. But I think we should just go to some form of PR already!
Quick question: under the principle of one person, one vote, please explain to this American how Labour can earn 60% of the seats when, in fact, they earned just 30% of the vote?
A short answer is that it would be fairly easy to imagine, under the first past the post system, a seat where a candidate is elected on only 30% of the vote.
Suppose we have candidates A to F.
A gets 30% of the vote
B is narrowly pipped to the post with 28%
Smaller parties C and D get around 15% each.
Two no-hoper parties E and F share the remaining 12%.
A wins the seat.
Of course in real life any of the parties may win comfortably in some seats. In my constituency the MP won over 60% of the vote on a 69% turnout. But in principle, under the FPTP system, a party only needs a narrow lead over the other parties to win a seat, and to get enough MPs to form a government.
Hence the push for a PR system of voting. ([tangent]That would however mean, AFAICT, weakening the link between constituencies and MPs since it would mean larger multi-member constituencies. At the moment, my home constituency is large and mostly rural. If we went for multi-member constituencies of, say, six MPs then the entire county (2,600 square miles) could be a single constituency, with no guarantee that an MP would be anywhere near the constituents. Whereas Croydon and Bromley (where I grew up) could form a multi-member constituency of seven MPs covering only 90 square miles. I understand and appreciate the problems PR voting is intended to address, more obvious in this election than in others, but I haven’t seen any attempt by its proponents to address the problems of alienation from MPs, and difficulty of effective representation that I can see it would create.[/tangent])
@Gramps Don't similar issues arise with your Senate, your House of Representatives and congressional districts? How are they elected? Am I right also that with the Senate, each state has the same number of senators, irrespective of the population of the state? Or have I got that completely wrong?
Another point of blank incomprehension that often arises between UK and US people talking about politics is a failure on both sides to understand quite how differently their two constitutions work. The UK does not have separation of powers. I think I am right in thinking that those who made that such an important part of the US constitution got the idea from French political philosophers, who themselves were constructing political theory from within a state which was at the time an absolute monarchy where the king wasn't answerable to anybody at all. In the UK, and in other Westminster derived systems, the ministers, i.e. the executive branch, are elected Members of Parliament, sit in Parliament, i.e are part of the legislative branch, and are directly answerable to it.
That is probably quite disturbing to you, but to us, it's pretty disturbing that day to day the President and the Secretaries of State don't appear to be answerable to anyone. They don't have to turn up each week to answer questions in the Congress. And furthermore, the legislature can pass laws, including pass or refuse budgets, but it isn't responsible for making them work, or apparently, for very much else.
([tangent]That would however mean, AFAICT, weakening the link between constituencies and MPs since it would mean larger multi-member constituencies. At the moment, my home constituency is large and mostly rural. If we went for multi-member constituencies of, say, six MPs then the entire county (2,600 square miles) could be a single constituency, with no guarantee that an MP would be anywhere near the constituents. Whereas Croydon and Bromley (where I grew up) could form a multi-member constituency of seven MPs covering only 90 square miles. I understand and appreciate the problems PR voting is intended to address, more obvious in this election than in others, but I haven’t seen any attempt by its proponents to address the problems of alienation from MPs, and difficulty of effective representation that I can see it would create.[/tangent])
Living in a constituency that is already well over 2600 square miles on its own I do understand the concern. However, the mixed member system used for the Scottish Parliament is reasonably effective at balancing proportionality with constituency representation, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that some members have a regional rather than just a local remit. There is the problem of list MSPs being hard to get rid of, but the circumstances where a sitting MSP who continued to hold their party's whip would be selectively removed by the electorate seem pretty narrow. In that respect it's little different from a safe constituency seat.
If you're going to have two democratically elected Houses of Parliament making one of them proportional and the other constituency based seems like a fair compromise. The problem would be to arrange things so that representatives in one house didn't just rubber stamp the decisions of the other.
How about reinstituting the Athenian system of ostracism? As well as voting for a party you could vote for one person to be excluded from Parliament for the next session. Anyone clearing more than 5% is out for the next 5 years!
How about reinstituting the Athenian system of ostracism? As well as voting for a party you could vote for one person to be excluded from Parliament for the next session. Anyone clearing more than 5% is out for the next 5 years!
An intriguing idea - a thread for The Circus, maybe?
It's not true that the UK doesn't have separation of powers. It is just that it is not as complete, because the executive is derived from the legislator and not as formalised because of the fluid nature of a non-codified constitution. This is both good and bad, in practice.
The UK has very clear separation between the executive and the judiciary. There is some weak separation between the executive and the legislature.
The big failing in the UK system comes from how much control the government has over the business on the Commons. Through the Leader of The House, the executive has close to total control of the agenda which significantly compromises the ability of Parliament to hold the executive to account. The executive has power of the legislature to which it is accountable. It's not all bad Ministers are restricted by law and must answer to Parliament. This has been watered down a lot but in principle the (independent) speaker can summon any minister at any time.
However, the separation of the judiciary in the UK is really strong. To me, the politicalisation of judges in the US is unbelievably disastrous. Even more so now that the Roberts Court is making a naked power grab.
UK governments regularly lose judicial reviews - I.e. a judge decides that a minister has exceeded their legal authority - and the porogation decision was fundamental. In recent years, certain government ministers and newspapers have indulged in shameless attacks on judges but because they have virtually no power over judges (they are independently appointed) this has not broken the separation wall.
The UK separation of the judiciary is stronger than it once was, since the House of Lords used to be the top court of appeal until relatively recently. But the mixing of the executive and legislature has its problems.
I think the US system has a lot of separation on paper but unfortunately recent events show that a constitution is only as good as the political culture surrounding it.
The UK separation of the judiciary is stronger than it once was, since the House of Lords used to be the top court of appeal until relatively recently. .
Like a lot of things in the UK the main change has been semantic rather than substantive. The top court of appeal was the appellate committee of the House of Lords, aka the Law Lords. All the Supreme Court has done is to move the Law Lords off the Parliamentary estate, at a pretty obscene cost (mostly renovation of the old Middlesex Guild Hall).
also, Law Lords in practice tended to be like the bishops who sit in the Lords. They didn't take party whips, they just happened to be there as Lords as part of their seniority. You'll note that in the new system they still 'happen to be there' as Lords as part of their seniority, they just have a new office over the road too.
I'm not sure a) that there was a problem that the Supreme Court was intended to fix or b) whether its establishment has fixed it!
I suppose that if the House of Lords were reformed (as I think it probably will be quite soon) the members of the Supreme Court would remain so, but might (should?) no longer be members of the second chamber.
I suppose that if the House of Lords were reformed (as I think it probably will be quite soon) the members of the Supreme Court would remain so, but might (should?) no longer be members of the second chamber.
I think the bigger problem was consequential - there were so many things that hinge on having Law Lords in the Lords that they panicked and didn’t go through with it properly.
I’d imagine the next time they look will be the same.
It’s like when Labour tried to abolish (and they did try) the office of Lord Chancellor. They got as far as achieving their replacement as presiding officer in the Lords but not abolishing the office because it’s in the ‘desirable but too difficult’ pile. See also disestablishment.
The problem with constitutional reform is it’s almost never done by constitutional experts. Which means it either goes wrong, ends up as a repaint to hide embarrassment about changing very little, or the government panics and backs off because it’s not as simple as it looks.
I predict removal of the remaining hereditary peers may well be as far as Lords Reform gets with this government.
I don't want to see an elected second chamber. I don't feel as strongly about it as I do about elected judges which is a crazy idea but I think we can have better governance by reimagining what a revising chamber could look like.
I have some big thoughts on electoral reform and I will create a thread soon. I will fold Lords reform into that too...
I think the bigger problem was consequential - there were so many things that hinge on having Law Lords in the Lords that they panicked and didn’t go through with it properly.
I think the bigger problem was consequential - there were so many things that hinge on having Law Lords in the Lords that they panicked and didn’t go through with it properly.
Interesting - what sort of things hinge on it?
I think (IIRC) as much as anything else it was the sheer volume of what does exist in terms of codifying the relationship between parliament and judiciary, how far back we're going, acts contingent on other acts etc, that the feeling eventually was 'no one's going to touch disestablishment because it'll gum up parliament for 10 years to the exclusion of all else, obviously. Oh. This is almost another disestablishment isn't it? Back away. Whistling.'
Essentially a single clause risked blowing things up and all sorts of unintended consequences, doing it properly would take genuinely YEARS.
So they bravely bought them a new building and said effectively 'we've stopped the House of Lords being the top appeal court.'
Yeah right. Or as my Scottish friends would say, 'did ye aye?'
I like the reverse - pr lower chamber with primary legislative power and fptp upper house with revisory / veto role.
So do I in theory. In practice the upper house would usually have a majority of one of the government parties; in which case it's revisory/veto role would have all the teeth of a pampered house cat. The contrary situation where the veto chamber had a majority that wasn't part of the governing coalition would probably result in deadlock.
Maybe if election to a constituency was for life so that members needed no future support from their party machinery, unless the constituency recalled them for misbehaviour or not doing their job.
Quick question: under the principle of one person, one vote, please explain to this American how Labour can earn 60% of the seats when, in fact, they earned just 30% of the vote?
Given that exactly the same electoral system elects members of the US house of representatives, it shouldn't be too hard for you to work out.
The difference is that the US doesn't have a significant third party presence anywhere, whereas in the recent UK election, the split in the right-wing vote between the Conservative party and Farage's "Reform" outfit means that in a typical constituency, the vote is divided between Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservative, Reform, Green, and the Scottish or Welsh nationalists if you're in those countries.
An example of how multi-party elections can give that effect would be Dumfries and Galloway where the difference in votes between the Conservative candidate who won (on just under 30%) and the third place Labour candidate was less than 2000 votes (4% of the vote). Such three-way marginals are unusual, but do illustrate how a voting system that doesn't do too badly in an effective two party election (though, again, it's not uncommon for the vagaries of constituencies/colleges to give victory to a party with the smaller number of votes) can give very odd looking results when there are 3 or more parties.
An example of how multi-party elections can give that effect would be Dumfries and Galloway where the difference in votes between the Conservative candidate who won (on just under 30%) and the third place Labour candidate was less than 2000 votes (4% of the vote).
That constituency is also, I think, a rather neat encapsulation of the story of this election, which is a significant rejection of both the Conservative party and the SNP. You'll note that the only reason the Conservative MP retained his seat is that the SNP support dropped by a similar amount.
Comments
Not denying the American system is distorted, just trying to understand the distortion in UK elections.
The way US presidents are elected, for example.
650 MPs, so really ‘the election’ is 650 mini elections. Each seat returns the candidate with the most votes, with no minimum threshold for votes or turnout.
So you might get a two horse race in one place (in practice, there’s virtually never that few on the ballot) where the winner wins by a country mile, or a multi-way split where three get broadly the same, again the one of those three that nevertheless gets the most wins.
What that means is that national ‘x party got y percent of the vote’ isn’t quite meaningless, but it’s also not that helpful, because it’s not really a national vote when it comes down to it. It’s 650 local votes.
Not really, the electoral college is a whole other level of arcane. If US presidential elections were FPTP Hilary would have won. And Gore.
Sorry, wasn't taking into account the EC.
Its all about winning seat by seat, not about national percentages.
Easily. If support were completely evenly spread, whichever party had the highest vote share, however low, would win all the seats. This is how the SNP won nearly all Scotland's seats a few years ago on 50% of the vote.
Once you get a sufficient vote share to start being the largest party in a majority of constituencies you start winning a majority of the seats, even if you're only polling around 30% in each.
When we only had two main parties, it worked reasonably well, except when the popular vote was very close. But with lots of parties getting significant shares of the vote, being the largest no longer requires a particularly large share.
This is entirely predictable and predicted. The LibDems have an excellent local campaign infrastructure. (They are only limited by resources and hence concentrate on where they can win). Reform UK Ltd has almost no infrastructure - partly because they're not a real party. Hence the relative performance of both is much as expected.
Indeed. The one important caveat to any discussions on this is to remember that voter behaviour changes when you change the voting system.
AFZ
Interestingly there was a Glasgow seat where early voters were given the wrong instructions and were told to give a ranked choice rather than putting a single X. They decided not to void the ballot on the grounds that they could just use the first choice as the X. But that's not really fair as if you knew your first choice was unlikely to win you might not have put your X by them! So really there should be a re-run in my opinion.
I guess this is what the French two-round system is supposed to ameliorate. But I think we should just go to some form of PR already!
A short answer is that it would be fairly easy to imagine, under the first past the post system, a seat where a candidate is elected on only 30% of the vote.
Suppose we have candidates A to F.
A gets 30% of the vote
B is narrowly pipped to the post with 28%
Smaller parties C and D get around 15% each.
Two no-hoper parties E and F share the remaining 12%.
A wins the seat.
Of course in real life any of the parties may win comfortably in some seats. In my constituency the MP won over 60% of the vote on a 69% turnout. But in principle, under the FPTP system, a party only needs a narrow lead over the other parties to win a seat, and to get enough MPs to form a government.
Hence the push for a PR system of voting. ([tangent]That would however mean, AFAICT, weakening the link between constituencies and MPs since it would mean larger multi-member constituencies. At the moment, my home constituency is large and mostly rural. If we went for multi-member constituencies of, say, six MPs then the entire county (2,600 square miles) could be a single constituency, with no guarantee that an MP would be anywhere near the constituents. Whereas Croydon and Bromley (where I grew up) could form a multi-member constituency of seven MPs covering only 90 square miles. I understand and appreciate the problems PR voting is intended to address, more obvious in this election than in others, but I haven’t seen any attempt by its proponents to address the problems of alienation from MPs, and difficulty of effective representation that I can see it would create.[/tangent])
Another point of blank incomprehension that often arises between UK and US people talking about politics is a failure on both sides to understand quite how differently their two constitutions work. The UK does not have separation of powers. I think I am right in thinking that those who made that such an important part of the US constitution got the idea from French political philosophers, who themselves were constructing political theory from within a state which was at the time an absolute monarchy where the king wasn't answerable to anybody at all. In the UK, and in other Westminster derived systems, the ministers, i.e. the executive branch, are elected Members of Parliament, sit in Parliament, i.e are part of the legislative branch, and are directly answerable to it.
That is probably quite disturbing to you, but to us, it's pretty disturbing that day to day the President and the Secretaries of State don't appear to be answerable to anyone. They don't have to turn up each week to answer questions in the Congress. And furthermore, the legislature can pass laws, including pass or refuse budgets, but it isn't responsible for making them work, or apparently, for very much else.
Living in a constituency that is already well over 2600 square miles on its own I do understand the concern. However, the mixed member system used for the Scottish Parliament is reasonably effective at balancing proportionality with constituency representation, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that some members have a regional rather than just a local remit. There is the problem of list MSPs being hard to get rid of, but the circumstances where a sitting MSP who continued to hold their party's whip would be selectively removed by the electorate seem pretty narrow. In that respect it's little different from a safe constituency seat.
An intriguing idea - a thread for The Circus, maybe?
The UK has very clear separation between the executive and the judiciary. There is some weak separation between the executive and the legislature.
The big failing in the UK system comes from how much control the government has over the business on the Commons. Through the Leader of The House, the executive has close to total control of the agenda which significantly compromises the ability of Parliament to hold the executive to account. The executive has power of the legislature to which it is accountable. It's not all bad Ministers are restricted by law and must answer to Parliament. This has been watered down a lot but in principle the (independent) speaker can summon any minister at any time.
However, the separation of the judiciary in the UK is really strong. To me, the politicalisation of judges in the US is unbelievably disastrous. Even more so now that the Roberts Court is making a naked power grab.
UK governments regularly lose judicial reviews - I.e. a judge decides that a minister has exceeded their legal authority - and the porogation decision was fundamental. In recent years, certain government ministers and newspapers have indulged in shameless attacks on judges but because they have virtually no power over judges (they are independently appointed) this has not broken the separation wall.
AFZ
I think the US system has a lot of separation on paper but unfortunately recent events show that a constitution is only as good as the political culture surrounding it.
Like a lot of things in the UK the main change has been semantic rather than substantive. The top court of appeal was the appellate committee of the House of Lords, aka the Law Lords. All the Supreme Court has done is to move the Law Lords off the Parliamentary estate, at a pretty obscene cost (mostly renovation of the old Middlesex Guild Hall).
Here are the members of the Supreme Court:
https://www.supremecourt.uk/about/biographies-of-the-justices.html
It's the Law Lords, just with a spangly new logo and their own building. They're all still peers.
I'm not sure a) that there was a problem that the Supreme Court was intended to fix or b) whether its establishment has fixed it!
I think the bigger problem was consequential - there were so many things that hinge on having Law Lords in the Lords that they panicked and didn’t go through with it properly.
I’d imagine the next time they look will be the same.
It’s like when Labour tried to abolish (and they did try) the office of Lord Chancellor. They got as far as achieving their replacement as presiding officer in the Lords but not abolishing the office because it’s in the ‘desirable but too difficult’ pile. See also disestablishment.
The problem with constitutional reform is it’s almost never done by constitutional experts. Which means it either goes wrong, ends up as a repaint to hide embarrassment about changing very little, or the government panics and backs off because it’s not as simple as it looks.
I predict removal of the remaining hereditary peers may well be as far as Lords Reform gets with this government.
We’ll end up with a ‘temporary’ fully appointed second chamber for a couple of decades as the next baby step I reckon.
I have some big thoughts on electoral reform and I will create a thread soon. I will fold Lords reform into that too...
AFZ
Interesting - what sort of things hinge on it?
I like the reverse - pr lower chamber with primary legislative power and fptp upper house with revisory / veto role.
I think (IIRC) as much as anything else it was the sheer volume of what does exist in terms of codifying the relationship between parliament and judiciary, how far back we're going, acts contingent on other acts etc, that the feeling eventually was 'no one's going to touch disestablishment because it'll gum up parliament for 10 years to the exclusion of all else, obviously. Oh. This is almost another disestablishment isn't it? Back away. Whistling.'
Essentially a single clause risked blowing things up and all sorts of unintended consequences, doing it properly would take genuinely YEARS.
So they bravely bought them a new building and said effectively 'we've stopped the House of Lords being the top appeal court.'
Yeah right. Or as my Scottish friends would say, 'did ye aye?'
Maybe if election to a constituency was for life so that members needed no future support from their party machinery, unless the constituency recalled them for misbehaviour or not doing their job.
https://bylinetimes.com/2024/07/03/reform-uks-invisible-candidates-who-are-they-hiding/
Given that exactly the same electoral system elects members of the US house of representatives, it shouldn't be too hard for you to work out.
The difference is that the US doesn't have a significant third party presence anywhere, whereas in the recent UK election, the split in the right-wing vote between the Conservative party and Farage's "Reform" outfit means that in a typical constituency, the vote is divided between Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservative, Reform, Green, and the Scottish or Welsh nationalists if you're in those countries.
That constituency is also, I think, a rather neat encapsulation of the story of this election, which is a significant rejection of both the Conservative party and the SNP. You'll note that the only reason the Conservative MP retained his seat is that the SNP support dropped by a similar amount.
The election is over and a new government in place. Consequently I am closing this thread.
If you want to continue discussing recent topics, feel free to start new threads on them.
Hostly beret off
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host