Posted By Dr Rajesh Venugopal
For those (such as myself) who are more used to following elections and newly crafted election systems in post-conflict countries, the British electoral system often seems like a blast from the past. Westminster's first past-the-post, winner-takes-all system had many takers in the 1950s and 1960s, when the 'mother of all parliaments' was cloned in numerous decolonising Commonwealth countries. But it has distinctly gone out of fashion in the years since, and is frequently singled out in textbooks and lectures as a crude and flawed model of institutional design that produces lop-sided majorities, and that condemns any sizeable, but territorially dispersed minority (e.g. the Lib Dems) into perpetual under-representation and powerlessness.
In comparison, today's new democracies and post-conflict polities have voting systems that are state-of-the-art : Iraq, El Salvador, and Guatemala have various forms of party-list PR. Afghanistan has a single-non-transferable vote with multi-member constituency system. East Timor has a hybrid list-PR/plurality system. Closer to Westminster, the new legislatures that have sprouted since 1997 in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have all recognised the shortcomings of FPTP, and have all designed far more sophisticated ways of translating voter choice into representation.
I'm not going into a long excursus into the benefits of PR, or the myriad and mind-bogglingly complicated array of options for voting reform that exist out there. But what stands out is that the freak winner of these elections, in which all three major parties have reason to moan and mourn, has been electoral reform. Nick Clegg's pound of flesh can potentially transform British politics for years to come - most obviously because once it has been brought into being, a PR system will be difficult to dislodge. Opposition to PR would probably come from the Tories - but since the Tory vote share hovers in the mid 30's (and has been in slow secular decline since the 1950s), PR will make it very difficult for them to achieve the standalone majority they will need in the future to reverse PR and go back to the bad old days of FTPT. This is why a Cameron-Clegg marriage will be difficult to work out, and may end up rocky and short-lived.
What will a PR future look like in Britain? If it happens through a Lib-Lab coalition, we may end up with something like the AV plus system that the Roy Jenkins Commission recommended in 1998. That's a very difficult system to guestimate, but here for example, is a very crude simulation of what this election would have looked like if votes were counted under the Scottish AM system, which retains many elements of FTPT, so is far from radical (caveat: this assumes that the AM votes were cast for the same party as the constituency vote) :
Con 274 (306 actual)
Lab 228 (258 actual)
LibDem 99 (57 actual)
Other 50 (28 actual)
Both the Conservatives and Labour lose out under this system, but the Lib Dems almost double their count. It is in their interest not only to get some form of PR done quickly while they can, but also to pick a fight with their partners and precipitate mid-term elections right after so that they can benefit quickly from the gains of that new system. A coalition with Clegg would thus be bad for either party, but particularly bad for the Conservatives.
If this simulation exercise is repeated to see how previous Westminster elections since 1979 would have turned out under the Scottish system, the results are revealing. Only four out of the last eight elections would have produced a clear one-party majority (1983, 1987, 1997, 2001). Margaret Thatcher would not have won a majority in 1979 and Tony Blair would not have won a third term in 2005 - both of which sound like good reasons to implement this system without delay.
