Posted by Tom Flynn, Politics PhD student
So much of the election debate (particularly in the main stream media) has been around the issue of a hung parliament, and the subsequent coalition that would be required to form a Government. Nick Clegg’s recent revelation, that he’d refuse to prop up a Labour Prime Minister if the Labour Party finishes third in the popular vote, therefore throws up a number of very interesting possibilities. It might, of course simply mean that we’ve totally misconstrued what Nick Clegg said. It is quite plausible, for example, that he was signalling to the Labour Party that should the Lib Dems finish second, then it would be a case of the former joining the latter in government – meaning Clegg himself might demand the position of Prime Minister, supported by a few high profile Labour ministers in some key roles. Of course, if this were to happen, it’s difficult to imagine Gordon Brown himself taking a lesser position in government – leading almost certainly to a Labour leadership election.
Or perhaps the reason this is all so surprising in the first place is because it’s been difficult to see a Lib Dem/Conservative coalition in the face of Cameron’s point blank refusal to look at the voting system used in general elections. And this is the real point of this entry – to address the misunderstanding of how electoral systems work that politicians, the media, and commentators appear to have fallen prey to.
I’ll break the argument down into a number of sections.
SOME REALITY
1. The Liberal Democrats want proportional representation because they (quite correctly) realise it will lead to an increase in the number of seats won by the smaller parties – themselves included. They also believe in changing to a voting system known as STV (single transferable vote), which is one of several systems that involve ranking candidates in order of preference rather than simply marking X next to the one most preferred.
2. The Conservatives reject any idea of proportional representation, as they believe it will remove the link between ‘the electorate and the MP’.
The current perception is that these positions are entirely contradictory – and that a compromise would be impossible. Therefore how could Nick Clegg possibly form a Government with the Conservatives? This assumption though, is based entirely on a conflation of preferential voting and proportional representation.
SOME THEORY
Let me illustrate the difference with an example.
Constituency A has the following results from the 2005 general election:
Conservative: 45%
Labour: 25%
Lib Dem: 17%
Green Party: 13%
Now, under the current system, the best strategy for the Labour party would be to persuade all Liberal Democrat and Green voters to switch to them, in order to beat the Conservatives. If the argument is successful (as it often has been), we might end up with the following result:
Conservatives: 45%
Labour: 55%
Lib Dem: 0%
Green Party: 0%
The problem for the Liberal Democrats and Greens has traditionally been that many of its supporters have accepted such arguments, leaving the smaller parties unable to challenge for seats effectively.
Consider the same situation under STV. Under STV, votes from the least-preferred candidates are ‘transferred’ to more-preferred candidates until an overall winner emerges. Let’s assume that the majority of voters have the following preference orderings:
Conservative Voters: Conservative > Lib Dem > Labour > Green
Labour Voters: Labour > Lib Dem > Green > Conservative
Lib Dem Voters: Lib Dem > Labour > Green > Conservative
Green Voters: Green > Lib Dem > Labour > Conservative
Now let’s see what happens:
Greens get knocked out in round one, which gives:
Conservative: 45%
Labour: 25%
Lib Dem: 30%
Labour are then knocked out in round two which gives:
Conservative: 45%
Lib Dem: 55%
In short, preferential voting has delivered a result that seemed impossible under single preference voting.
Back to Reality
What is important for this argument, of course, is that this result has nothing to do with proportional representation. STV can be deployed within single constituencies – maintaining the link between MP and the electorate, whilst at the same time also going some way to addressing the problems that smaller parties face with tactical voting. STV does not guarantee proportionality of parliament overall; it is just a different way of choosing the individuals within it.
The question is this: will Nick Clegg and David Cameron realise this, and come to a compromise on electoral reform – making a Lib Dem/Conservative party coalition a possibility?
