AV won't stop small parties being robbed

The Alternative Vote may obviate tactical voting, but the opportunity for proportional representation has been lost to some weak arguments.

“What do we want? Doesn’t matter. When do we want it? We’re never going to get it.” Andy Parsons’ joke on Mock the Week, from back in September 2008, is familiar to anyone whose political sympathies lie outside of the big two. “What is the point in voting for a party that you don’t think is going to get into power?” he rhetorically asked of the Liberal Democrats.

This is just as true of the Lib Dems’ pet concern of proportional representation. But the compromise offer of the Alternative Vote, on which we’ve now been promised a referendum to take place next May, might see the perennial bronze-medalists perform better. For even if a lot of people do “agree with Nick”, many seem to think like Parsons as well. For a vast swathe of the public it’s not the taking part that matters after all: it’s the winning. Who can blame the Lib Dems for trying to change how elections are conducted, when their slim chances under our archaic system might lose them more than half of their potential supporters?

A YouGov poll before the election found that 49% of people would vote for the Liberal Democrats if they had a significant chance of getting a majority in parliament. Their actual share of the vote was just 23%. Much the same can be said of the Green Party: in the London mayoral contest of 2008, a crude analysis of the results from the website votematch.org.uk indicates that Sian Berry was preferred over the others. The victor, Boris Johnson, was way down in sixth place – but is often on the television.

Shortly after the general election, the website voteforpolicies.org.uk suggested that more users agreed with the Greens’ plans than those of any other party, backed by 24% of the almost 300,000 people taking the quiz. Although Caroline Lucas won the Brighton Pavilion seat, her party took just 1% of the popular vote. Could this be down to leftish bias among web users? It is possible. Yet there is further evidence from the flesh-and-blood world.

Since 1979, the House of Commons has seen 58 by-elections in seats vacated by an MP from the governing party. Half of them were lost, and another 26 were held with a reduced share of the vote – in some cases by as many as 30 percentage points. Numbers can never tell the whole story (unless you happen to understand binary) but one possible interpretation is that the smaller parties do better when there is no effect on the choice of government. That with less at stake, principle triumphs over expediency.

There are a few noble instances where conscience is the rule rather than the exception: cases where the smallest parties battle the longest odds – on the right as well as the left. Chris Mounsey became so disillusioned with voting Conservative as a least-worst option that he helped found his own alternative, the Libertarian Party – but he acknowledges facing an uphill struggle.

“I do nurse a certain amount of irritation directed at those who claim to be libertarian but who believe that voting Tory is fine,” he says. “The simple fact is that the Tories are Conservatives (and conservatives), not libertarians. Indeed, David Cameron explicitly stated that he was not a libertarian.

“That those same people then deride the Libertarian Party because they are small is little short of enraging. Yes, of course we are small, but we are also in a Catch-22 position: people won’t vote for us – or even join us – because we are small and, unless they do so, we will always be small.

“I got fed up of voting Tory just because I disliked them the least. With the Libertarian Party, I can vote for policies that I actually believe in. I have had people say that they would love to do the same, but there’s no point because we’ll never win. But, of course we’ll never win unless people vote for us.”

This is not just minor-party sour grapes. The present mood for replacing the first-past-the-post system is partly driven by the desire to obviate tactical voting. This time, electoral reform has been called for from more than the usual academic pointyheads, with 55,000 people signing a petition demanding proportional representation, and thousands protesting all over the UK. The Lib Dems’ preference was the single transferable vote (STV); the Conservatives, through gritted teeth, compromised and acquiesced to a referendum on the alternative vote as part of the parties’ coalition agreement. But the two systems are aimed at solving very different problems.

The appeal of AV is nicely illustrated by one notable exception to the above trend for byelections – the final one won by the last Conservative government. In 1989, the MP for Richmond resigned to take up a European position. The seat was contested by both the newly formed Social and Liberal Democrats and those remnants of the Social Democratic Party who had objected to the merger, but who had strong local support. This split the votes of left-leaning constituents.

Future Conservative leader and baseball-cap-wearer William Hague won with 37.2% of the vote. Total votes for the aforementioned two parties came to 54.3%, with Labour adding another 4.9 and the Greens 2.8. A clear majority had voted for progressive parties, but the constituency ended up with a right-wing MP. Had the election been fought under AV, and assuming that the supporters of each of the social-democratic outfits would have marked down the “splitters” of the other party as their second preference, the Social and Liberal Democrats would have won – and would have been more broadly acceptable to a majority of the people of Richmond.

Electoral geography

And yet making it infinitesimally more appealing to vote for smaller parties doesn’t address why it is that some who already have a decent backing can’t even get a seat, let alone a majority. It might encourage more votes but doesn’t nearly secure a fair share of seats. The more fundamental problem can only be solved by a genuinely proportional system. That problem is geography.

Support for Labour is mainly concentrated in former industrial heartlands such as this writer’s native North East. Meanwhile, middle England, that land of tepid ale and the Daily Mail, is overwhelmingly Tory. But liberals, environmentalists, eurosceptics and British-nationalists can be found everywhere and anywhere. It’s not reds under the bed but yellows, greens, and people who dislike anybody not white. Ken Ritchie, the chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, says: “Britain’s new political map is simple. We have a blue south, a red north, and a few spots of yellow in between. It’s not a map most voters would recognise as legitimate after another broken election.”

The wider distribution of voters across the country is the main reason why the Liberal Democrats’ 23% of the vote gave them less than 9% of seats. It’s why, between the Conservatives and Labour, a difference in share of the vote of seven percentage points translated into a gap of 48 seats, while a very similar difference between Labour and the Lib Dems, of six percentage points, created a vast gulf of 201 seats. It’s why it would have been theoretically possible for the Lib Dems to win a greater share of the vote than their rivals and still come third.

The shortfall is bad enough for the Lib Dems, but the Greens, the BNP and UKIP are more underrepresented still – if the number of seats were directly related to how many crosses were marked next to their candidates’ names, they would have six, 12 and 20 MPs respectively. This huge disparity between the share of the vote and the number of seats leaves millions of supporters of the more minor parties effectively unrepresented – and gives the lie to one of the most common arguments against proper proportional systems.

It is claimed that proportional representation breaks the link between constituent and representative. But at present, although MPs are theoretically supposed to work for everyone in their defined area, in practice it may depend on the extent to which a constituent’s views chime with theirs – or whether it’s electorally advantageous for them.

As an example, back in 2007 there was a campaign to make special asylum arrangements for Iraqi civilians who were being murdered as “collaborators” for working with UK armed forces to help rebuild their country. The initiator of the campaign, Dan Hardie, was fortunate enough to have an MP, Lynne Featherstone, now the equalities minister, who was sympathetic to his aims – and who was neither happily complacent in a safe seat nor a member of the governing party reluctant to fight against its leadership. Some of the other MPs in different areas, who were asked to get involved by contacts of Hardie’s, were not so forthcoming. “The constituency system is a good one when the MP is conscientious, but I heard so many stories like: ‘Safe Labour seat so I didn’t get an answer’,” he says.

Adequate direct representation is even harder to come by for those who live in the constituency of government ministers, the Speaker of the House (ironically named since he doesn’t speak, or vote) or of one of the party whips – during the debates following the controversial arrest of Conservative MP Damian Green, the former government whip Liz Blackman admitted that her contribution was the first time she had spoken in the House of Commons for two years.

“Sometimes it is just luck as to whether your MP locally is interested in the issue you want to champion,” Featherstone says. “Sometimes there is a constituency of issue – when I was chair of transport on the London Assembly my constituency was anyone who wanted to talk about their local transport problems.”

An MP for every issue

Proportional representation can combine constituencies of issue (broadly, by party) and of geography. In large districts represented by several MPs elected via STV or party lists – such as those used for the European Parliament – there will usually be at the very least one person from each of the three major parties. Then a concerned citizen has a choice of people to approach with casework depending on the issue in question. Factory closing down? Find your nearest Labour MP. Worried about the erosion of civil liberties? Ask a Lib Dem. Want to oppress some gays? Go to a Tory.

This is how it works elsewhere. In Israel, a relatively young nation not burdened with feudal relics, members of the Knesset (parliament) are elected directly from party lists – it is small enough that the whole country works as a single electoral district. Though it’s usually assumed that proportional systems lead to politics focused on national interests, a 2005 paper by political scientists at the University of California showed that there is a large degree of regional representation both in Israel and in the Netherlands, which chooses the members of its parliament’s lower house in the same way. Members of the Knesset have their phone numbers and email addresses published on the web and citizens may approach any of them with their concerns.

Ami Isseroff, the Director of MidEastWeb, explains: “The response is spotty – it depends on the person, the party and the issue. Some MKs do make a point of helping with particular local issues and making themselves known in the area. For example, I have gotten good responses from [Meretz party leader] Haim Oron. Also, [the former committee on early childhood chairwoman] Tamar Gozansky, who is no longer in the Knesset, cooperated for a long time with my wife in trying to get legislation passed to provide neurological examination for students in the school system.”

Although party lists result in a more proportional legislature than STV, this is the one method not seriously up for discussion. Chatting with a Lib Dem activist a few days before the election, he griped that party lists, unlike STV, let in extremists, “like that nasty Richard Barnbrook”. The politics of the BNP’s London Assembly member are certainly objectionable, but to complain that a system is biased against smaller parties and then to conspire to rig its proposed replacement against the even smaller ones is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Less readily dismissed is the charge that list-PR is ‘undemocratic’ as the parties have too much say in deciding who is elected, by getting to pick the order in which the party’s seats are allocated to its members. “Everything’s done behind closed doors, and you can’t sack an MP if they’re lazy,” the liberal leafleteer claimed. But again, it ain’t necessarily so.

With “open” lists, votes are cast for candidates, by cross or by rank, rather than just for the party. The unpopular, idle and those on the fiddle will likely lose to their more virtuous rivals. This allows the public to make a distinction between policy and personality – in marked contrast with how MPs are currently removed.

Two of the six London MPs targeted by campaign group Power 2010 over their expenses claims lost their seats in the general election, on top of a handful more across the UK. But to boot them out, the residents of these constituencies had to vote for someone from a different party: the only options were to return an MP that had made questionable use of taxpayers’ money, or to elect one whose policies they didn’t as closely agree with.

The last objection is that party lists prevents independent candidates from standing. In fact they can still stand, as one-person parties, but the general election has shown independents to be increasingly irrelevant anyway. None of those from the Independent Network won a seat, the formerly popular member for Wyre Forest, Richard Taylor, lost his, and even such a household name as Esther Rantzen polled so poorly in Luton South that she lost her £500 deposit. The only unaffiliated MP is North Down’s Sylvia Hermon – and she quit the Ulster Unionist Party just six weeks before the election.

Donkey voters

There are legitimate problems with rank-based voting without adding the imaginary and the trivial. It assumes that the electorate know enough about each candidate to be able to determine their preference accurately, which is not always the case. (Though this is perhaps partly true of first-past-the-post too, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that tradition and loyalty play a decisive role, rather than voting choice being decided solely by policy and record. A common stereotype is of the unthinking partisan who treats politics like football and “supports Labour because his dad did”.)

Evidence from elections in Ireland and in Australia, where voting is compulsory, has shown that some simply vote according to the order on the ballot paper, from top to bottom, a practice known as “donkey voting”. Preliminary findings of recent research by Coventry University psychologist Andy Johnson, however, found that candidates in the middle of a ballot paper take a disproportionate number of votes. In his study, 720 students took part in a mock election in which they voted for one candidate out of six represented by meaningless three-letter codes. The students unwittingly avoided the candidates at the top and bottom of the ballot, selecting those in the middle.

Johnson says: “With a move towards an alternative voting system this bias could be further accentuated. Data from America suggest that the less engaged a voter is, the greater the susceptibility towards such an order-based heuristic. Therefore, under systems using ranking, later allocations of preference, eg fourth, fifth and so on – where you care far less – may present greater potential for bias than the current system. But this is speculation.”

Given the ‘anyone but the Tories’ attitude common in some quarters, this could affect a huge number of votes, if the Conservative Party is widely ranked bottom and the rest are filled in arbitrarily. This can be countered, though, by randomising the order in which candidates appear on the ballot paper, as Australia did in 2004.

The asinine can in any case be tolerated if it comes closer to giving us the parliament that we actually voted for. Yet many are still unconvinced of this principle. The Conservatives hold the administrative reins and oppose a properly proportional system because the status quo usually delivers a strong government.

As first-past-the-post normally allows a party to win a majority of seats with as little as 30-odd percent of the vote, all ’strong government’ really means is unpopular government. It means allowing a party supported by only a minority of the population to railroad through laws against the wishes of the rest. Hardly surprising of the Conservatives, given that their commitment to democracy won’t even extend to including options they don’t like on the referendum ballot. However, proportional systems, and the probable coalition governments, demand consensus politics. They require that only polices genuinely supported by most of the country can be passed.

Featherstone says: “First-past-the-post and strong government: just not the case. The last government was elected on a minority of the votes cast and was anything but strong. In fact it was weak. It couldn’t win with ideas, so simply used brute force to ram through poor legislation – endlessly – often having to back down when public opinion forced them to. Also, I believe a coalition government is stronger, in that it brings parties representing different parts of the electorate together and accents the positive rather than the negative, working together for the benefit of the country.”

It’s true that most of the time first-past-the-post gives a clear choice and allows us to kick out an administration that has woefully let us down, like that of Gordon Brown. But if the point of electing a parliament is to create a representative democracy, then with millions of votes wasted and millions of people put off from voting for their most-favoured party, right now this is failing miserably. q

First-past-the-post

Our current system is probably the easiest to understand, and is the second most common voting method in the world. The country is divided geographically into constituencies, which elect one MP each. Voters pick one candidate and whoever comes away with the most votes wins.

Used: Currently in the House of Commons and throughout the world, particularly in former British colonies, such as the US and Canada.

Pro: Easy to understand, close links between constituent and representative, tends to produce stable majority governments

Con: Encourages tactical voting; wastes huge numbers of votes; creates safe seats where re-election is virtually guaranteed, allows MPs to be elected on tiny amount of support

Election results, 2010 general election (in England, Scotland and Wales)

Conservative 306Labour 258Liberal Democrat 57Scottish National Party 6Plaid Cymru 3Green Party 1

Alternative vote

Like FPTP, the alternative vote is used to elect a single MP to a regional constituency. But rather than simply voting for one candidate, they are ranked in preference order. If a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes she is elected; if not, the votes for the bottom-placed candidate are reallocated. This continues until a candidate has a majority.

Used: In the Australian House of Representatives, by-elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, many students’ unions

Pro: Discourages tactical voting, MPs have support of a majority of constituents, retains close link between voters and MP

Con: Can be less proportional than FPTP, still biased against smaller parties, risks candidates being ranked randomly after the first and second preference

Projected results if the 2010 general election had used AV (in England, Scotland and Wales)

Conservative 281Labour 262Liberal Democrat 79Scottish National Party 5Plaid Cymru 3Green 1Independent 1

Single transferable vote

Candidates are ranked as in AV, but with a number of MPs elected to a larger constituency. The Electoral Reform Society’s guide explains: “Candidates don’t need a majority of votes to be elected, just a known ‘quota’, or share of the votes, determined by the size of the electorate and the number of positions to be filled. If your preferred candidate has no chance of being elected or has enough votes already, your vote is transferred to another candidate in accordance with your instructions.”

Used: Generally in Ireland; in Assembly, local and European elections in Northern Ireland; local elections in Scotland; and in Malta, the Australian Senate, and the Indian upper house.

Pro: Fewest votes are wasted (cast for candidate with no chance of winning, or unnecessarily for one that has already won); no need for tactical voting; no safe seats, thus dissuading complacency by candidates and forcing parties to campaign everywhere

Con: Not as proportional as party lists, perception of weak link between constituent and representative, hard to understand how seats are assigned

Projected results if the 2010 general election had used STV (in England, Scotland and Wales)

Conservative 245Labour 207Liberal Democrat 162Scottish National Party 14Plaid Cymru 4

Party-list PR

Like STV, list PR uses multi-member constituencies, or sometimes an entire country. Rather than picking candidates, votes go to the party. The number of candidates elected from a particular party depends on the number of votes they receive. In “closed” lists, the order in which candidates are elected is set by the party, while in “open” systems it is determined by the voters – depending on how a particular system operates, they can either cast one vote each for a handful of candidates or rank them preferentially. The latter case is equivalent to an additional single transferable vote taking place within the party.

Used: For British elections to the European parliament, and, via the d’Hondt method of allocating seats, to assign ministerial positions under the power-sharing agreement in the Northern Ireland Executive. Party-list PR is the most commonly used voting method in the world, with a lot of variation from country to country. The Israeli Knesset uses list PR with the whole country as one electoral district; in Spain, the Congreso de los Diputados uses the 52 Spanish provinces as constituencies. “Open” lists are used in Iraq, one of the most recent countries to become a democracy.

Pro: Highly proportional, all votes count equally, high degree of representation of women and ethnic minority groups – Ayaan Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992 and was a member of the Dutch lower house by 2003.

Con: Perceived weak link between voters and MPs, “closed” lists put too much power in the hands of the party machinery, constitutionally enshrines parties, makes it hard for independent candidates to stand

Projected results if the 2010 general election had used party-list PR (in England, Scotland and Wales)

With government regions as constituencies*:

Conservative 238Labour 201Liberal Democrat 151Scottish National Party 12Plaid Cymru 4UKIP 15BNP 8Green 2

With parliament directly elected as one national district*:

Conservative 238Labour 191Liberal Democrat 151Scottish National Party 10Plaid Cymru 3UKIP 20BNP 12Green 6English Democrats 1

* Using the modified d’Hondt method of apportionment