Read the report: Lessons not Learnt

What would you expect to happen if a party gained support in a fresh election?

Most people would expect them to gain MPs. It seems obvious that a change in popular support should lead to a change in the number of MPs a party gets. Most people assume it happens now.

Yet for more than half the general elections since 1935, at least one party’s fortunes went totally the opposite way to how their support changed, according to our analysis. I.e. they either gained votes yet lost seats, or lost votes yet gained seats. This isn’t about population growth or any other anomaly – this is about the share of the vote and share of overall seats. And it’s about Britain’s broken voting system.

In 2017, the Conservatives increased their vote share by 5.5 percentage points and lost 13 seats. In the same election, the Liberal Democrats lost 0.5% of their 2015 vote share and won an extra four seats. Back in 2015, Labour increased their vote share by 1.4% but lost 26 seats.

Looking back over the 21 General Elections since 1935, in 12 of them, a party’s faring in Parliament has been at opposites to what happened at the polls.

Looking back over the 21 General Elections since 1935, in 12 of them, a party’s faring in Parliament has been at opposites to what happened at the polls. Click To Tweet

This happens because most votes cast in a General Election don’t have any impact on who is elected. Votes for candidates that don’t win, and votes for the winning candidate over and above what they need to win, go to waste. Over 22 million votes (68%) were wasted this way in the 2017 election.

With so many votes having no material effect on who ends up in Parliament, it’s easy to understand how a party could lose hundreds of thousands of these votes (in seats they stood no chance of winning and in seats where they have a massive majority) and yet not lose a single MP. But how can a party lose support but gain MPs?

The flip side of millions of voters who have no power is the handful of voters that have grossly inflated power.

Some leafy swing seats only need a few voters to change their mind in order for the MP to change. Eleven seats were won by fewer than 100 votes in 2017. Had 533 votes changed in 2017 we would have a majority Conservative government today.

A party that targets a few hundred voters in seats that they were close to winning at the previous election, and in the process loses thousands of votes they didn’t need, can end up with more MPs in total.

In some circumstances, a party doesn’t actually need to gain votes in order to win these swing seats. To win you just need one more vote than the person that comes second. If a third-placed candidate takes votes from the second-placed candidate, the distance to the finishing line is reduced. And if more parties stand, the threshold for winning gets lower – you can win on 25% of the vote in a four-way race.

And a candidate who previously came second can win a seat, not because they gained supporters, but because the incumbent loses support to a third party. It’s odd sort of race where the finishing line moves depending on the speed of the riders.

Imaginary scenarios and hypothetical exercises are all very well, but this disconnect between popular support and power in Parliament has real implications. Democracy functions because the public can hold the government (and the opposition parties) to account; parties get punished and rewarded by the public based on their behaviour.

But if a party can win supporters and lose seats or lose supporters and gain seats how can the public properly hold them to account?

If a party can win supporters and lose seats or lose supporters and gain seats how can the public properly hold them to account? Click To Tweet

Beyond fostering alienation and powerlessness among the public, this disconnect influences how parties behave. When a party knows that some of its supporters matter more than others for getting power, they will target the ones that can get them extra seats and ignore the ones they think are safe. In other words, whole areas get written off as ‘not our voters’ or unimportant to a party’s fortunes. When so many votes go to waste, that’s the majority of us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The idea of gaining votes and losing seats would be alien in the majority of parliaments around the world because they use proportional voting systems. In a proportional system if a party gets roughly half the votes they get roughly half the seats. If at the next election they get a third of the vote they get around a third of the seats.

We already use proportional systems in Scotland’s Parliament and local councils, as well as the assemblies in Northern Ireland, Wales and London. It’s time Westminster caught up.

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The TV debate has become, in a relatively short period, a major part of British general elections. The expectation that Theresa May would take part, only for her to not, has even been described as a reason for the Conservatives losing their majority in 2017.

Our new study has shown that the BBC’s Question Time Leaders’ special, which both major party leaders took part in, may have swung over a million people’s votes in the General Election – with young people particularly engaged.

TV debates create opportunities for headlines and for winners and losers to emerge, making them usually popular with the campaigns. Yet, there is a vital democratic aspect to TV debates too.

For democracy to properly function it needs strong lines of communication between representative and represented. The age of mass media provides many such tools, but the TV debate is direct: an opportunity for voters to compare and judge political leaders directly and for those same leaders to make a pitch directly to the public. Vitally, debates are a shared event for supporters of all parties, something that is becoming a rarity in the age of hyper targeted campaigns.

And with our volatile voting system, small changes in public opinion can have oversized impacts. ERS research shows the Conservatives could have won an overall majority with just 533 extra votes in the nine most marginal constituencies, while a working majority could have been achieved on just 75 additional votes in the right places. It suggests the Question Time special – among many other factors – could have had an impact on the final outcome.

The Electoral Reform Society is heavily indebted to academics from the University of Leeds for carrying out the study. Prof. Jay G. Blumler, widely-regarded as a founder of modern-day media studies, along with Prof. Stephen Coleman and Dr. Christopher Burchill ran two polls with ComRes before and after the debate. In the first survey respondents were asked what they expected from the Question Time special, in the second they were asked about their impressions.

The respondents were asked whether they thought the leaders would:

• Put points clearly
• Provide factual evidence
• Engage [the respondent] in the debate
• Understand people like me
• Provide clear choice

Several things are immediately notable about these results. Firstly, respondents went in broadly expecting TV debates to inform and engage, with around half to expecting factual evidence, 63% expecting to hear clearly put points, and 54% expecting the debate to engage. Fewer (43%) expected to be understood or to see a clear choice.

Broadly speaking we see a pattern amongst those who claimed to have watched all of the debate that they are more positive than those who claim to have watched only some. In part, this is probably down to self-selecting effects (for instance those who were turned off by the debate would literally turn it off), but the exception is on ‘providing a clear choice’, where the Question Time special clearly succeeded.

It is also notable that none of the statements show significant decline, suggesting voters enthusiasm stayed throughout the show.

The results are especially interesting for the youngest age group, with 18-24 year olds 18% more likely than those aged 65+ to say they found the debate engaging, 17% more likely to say leaders put points clearly and 17% more likely to say that the leaders understood people like them.

While women were less likely to show interest in the special beforehand – and fewer claim to have watched it – afterwards they were more likely to say they spoke about the debate with friends and family.

This suggests that debates reached those voters sometimes less represented by usual political channels.

The positive legacy of the BBC’s leadership special shows it’s time to make TV debates a core and established part of our elections in the UK – with party leaders expected to take part and not duck out. And they should be real head-to-head debates, open to meaningful and live challenge from opponents.

Now it’s time for party leaders and broadcasters to learn from voters’ views and make sure the debates are even better next time.

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While Labour achieved a nearly proportional result, getting just over 40 percent of the seats on 40 percent of the vote, the Conservatives took a skewed seat-share, with just under 49 percent of the seats on 42 percent of the vote.

Yet other parties that have traditionally been marginalised in this system continued to be underrepresented. The Liberal Democrats’ 7.4 percent of the vote translated into just 12 seats (less than 2 percent of seat share) and the Greens only retained their one seat despite attracting over half a million votes – the largest votes per MP ratio. UKIP also attracted over half a million votes but no MPs in return.

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If ‘strong and stable’ has been the motto of Parliament’s First Past the Post voting system, June 5^th put an end to that myth once and for all.

For the third time in a row, Westminster’s voting system failed to do what it says on the tin – produce a big government majority.

Today the Electoral Reform Society launch our report on June’s vote: ‘The 2017 General Election: Volatile Voting, Random Results’.

It shows the General Election saw the second highest level of electoral volatility – the movement of votes between parties – since 1931. People are switching sides and shopping around at astonishing levels.

But millions of those people’s votes are being thrown on the electoral scrapheap. 68% of votes had no impact on the result. That’s 22 million votes going to waste.

Amid in that sea of wasted votes, it’s the tiny ripples that make the difference. Just 0.0016% of voters choosing differently would have given the Conservatives a majority, while the election saw rise in very marginal seats: eleven seats were won by fewer than 100 votes.

Who’s to know how the vote would have gone if people had opted for who they really believe in? This was the ‘hold your nose’ election: we estimate that 6.5 million people voted tactically, alongside surge in smaller parties standing aside.

The effect of all this is totally different across the UK – and highly unpredictable. More than that, First Past the Post is exaggerating regional and national divisions: Labour secured 29% of South East vote but got just 10% of seats, while Conservatives won 34% of the North East vote but got just 9% of seats.

The result of this is making the North seem ’pure Labour’, the South ‘pure Conservative’ – when the picture is much more complex. Meanwhile, the SNP continue to be over-represented in Scotland, as is Labour in Wales, while Northern Ireland voters are forced into two camps.

And while the UK-wide picture seemed relatively ‘proportional’, in every region and nation where people actually live and relate to, we see seats not matching votes. For example, the Conservatives largely benefited from the discrepancy between votes and seats, winning 56% of English seats on 46% of the vote – while seeing their vote rise in Wales and their number of seats fall. The voting system is struggling to keep up with huge changes in partisan alignment.

There are other ways of doing things. Through YouGov, we modelled the results under three other voting systems, asking 13,000 voters how they’d vote using the Alternative Vote, the Welsh Assembly/Scottish Parliament’s Additional Member System or Northern Ireland’s Single Transferable Vote system.

We still see no party with more than half the seats – that’s what people voted for, after all – but there is better representation for smaller parties, far less divisive regional/national results, and, crucially, millions fewer wasted votes or tactically-cast ballots.

But the current system means a diverse and shifting public are having to work around a broken two-party system. The result is volatile voting, and random results in many parts of our country.

We need to move towards a means of electing our MPs where all voices are heard and where people don’t feel forced to hold their nose at the ballot box.

2017 was the third strike for First Past the Post. It’s out.

This article was first published at politics.co.uk

Read the full report here

According to recent research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2017 was the first general election where online news over took TV as the most popular source of news. But whilst this means that people can get their news from a wider variety of sources, it also opens up new terrain for our democracy.

With the rise of online news, there is more information out there than ever. But at the same time, as people are gaining new ways to find out information, they are still feeling ill-informed.

During the EU referendum campaign, we looked at how people felt about the campaign itself. A week before the referendum just 33% said they felt well informed or very well informed about the issues. Meanwhile 28% said they were poorly informed or very poorly informed.

But this lack of information was not caused by people not being uninterested.

A full two months before the vote 69% said they were interested or very interested in the campaign. The eventual voter turnout of 72% – the highest turnout in a UK-wide ballot since the 1992 general election – underlines this point. The following snap general election’s 68.7% turnout once again proves that this wasn’t a one-off.

There is obvious a thirst for clear and trust-worthy information that it seems the public felt the traditional media were not sating. But the corresponding shift online brings up new challenges.

For a political debate to happen citizens need a shared set of information to work from. For all its flaws, a national media can deliver this. But the growth of hyper partisan sites targeted at supporters of just one side of a debate means that it becomes far harder to reach a common understanding of a problem – or indeed that many people simply aren’t hearing the ‘other’ side at all.

And while even trained journalists do make mistakes, there are mechanisms and codes of practice for putting it right in print and on broadcast. You can complain to Ofcom or IPSO, but there is no online equivalent to either of these bodies.

For example – broadcast journalism is regulated to ensure there is balance, but there’s a risk that the move to online electioneering resembles something of a ‘wild west’ – a rules-free zone, with all the corresponding dangers for civilised, pluralist democratic debate. But even if there was, the landscape has moved far beyond the traditional boundaries of journalistic ethics.

Fake news sites are another part of this – a step beyond hyper-partisan blogs. Using political stories to make a quick profit, rather than to influence the political debate, many of these sites operate with impunity, without concern for the damage they do to our democracy. When that becomes the case, the issue of political debate is not just that people are coming at problems from different positions – but that the problem may not even exist at all.

Being able to identify real issues that need solutions, then engage in meaningful debate around them is crucial to a modern democracy. To do this we should look at how we good, honest reporting and debate online – in sum, how we can make life easier for those who care about our democracy.

Though it feels like early days, unless we think now about how to support good journalism in the online sphere, the online wild west will be left to the cowboys.

So, the Conservatives and DUP have agreed a deal. Despite the two previous elections failing to secure a ‘strong and stable’ government, few saw this coming.

There’s a reason for that. Despite all evidence to the contrary, people are still locked in the mindset that these past few elections have just been anomalies. Not so.

What lies behind this shift is a much longer-term change in how people vote – away from party tribalism, class lines and who your grandparents voted for, to a more fluid situation which sees people’s voting choices changing over their lifetime. But there’s a contradiction.

Because first past the post is supposed to lead to lead to single-party government, any other outcome is treated with surprise.

And that means voters are given false pretences about walloping majorities – and no countenance for deals. Of course, the result then comes in, and – oh – they must make a deal after all.

Whilst proportional voting systems are criticised for creating small-but-powerful king-makers who strike deals behind closed doors, the picture is rather different when we look at places where some form of proportional voting is commonplace – we’re now getting the worst of both worlds: deals are having to be made, but based on skewed results (DUP won 10 MPs for under 300,000 votes, Greens won 1 MP for over 500,000).

Not only that, but they’re being made post-fact, with no transparency for the public. They are shut out of those ‘smoke-filled rooms’.

That’s not inevitable. Where power-sharing is the norm, the campaign is different, with open expectations and discussion about the partnerships that may arise. There is a maturity to it – members are involved, it’s a big part of TV debates, and out goes the shady veneer you get from panicked and shut-off brokering after polling day.

And it’s nothing new here, either. After years of power-sharing governments at Holyrood and Cardiff Bay (and of course built-in coalitions at Stormont), it’s odd to see such resistance at Westminster to the very idea. Labour (in 2015 and 2017) felt it had to reject the notion outright. That’s not a healthy approach or grown-up politics.

Voting guru John Curtice has long predicted there will be more parliaments where no party got more than half the seats – and indeed he was one of the few people un-shocked by the result on June 8th.

So the key question is: if we are to have more power-sharing, it’s surely better to arrive there via a system that fairly rewards parties with most support – and makes sure they are round the decision-making table – rather than one that creates bizarre electoral anomalies.

Like, for instance, the fact that 2017’s result came off the back of record tactical voting – one in five people opted for their second or even third-choice party. Is that the basis for healthy deal-making?

Despite that artificial two-party squeeze, voters have chosen not to hand over keys to No 10 to any one party. The deals which come out of the meat-grinder of First Past the Post are always going to be contested, skewed and favour geographically-condensed parties, rather than the under-represented (and geographically spread-out) Liberal Democrats, Greens or UKIP.

Working together shouldn’t be a dirty phrase. The trick is having those conversations in the open before elections – as happens in many developed democracies.

In an era of voter volatility and much more complex relations between social class, ethnicity, identity and party support, perhaps the parties should stop hoping the system will magically fall back to how it worked in the 1950s, and instead think about changing the system.

This piece was originally published in the Times

Voters won’t be bossed about – perhaps that’s the first lesson we should take from the election. From voting for a parliament where no party got more than half the seats in an election hinged on ‘strength and stability’, or rejecting the notion that the election was all about Brexit, the public broke out of any boxes pundits or parties have tried to put them in.

And despite the focus on the national picture, we’ve seen a huge amount of local variation. Unpredictable, close and even random results defined this election – and sadly, record numbers were forced by an old-fashioned system to vote tactically, inevitably distorting the results.

We shouldn’t be shocked by voter volatility. The one stable feature of politics over the few decades has been the gradual shift in social attitudes which underpin political preferences – most profoundly the shift from 98% support for Conservative and Labour in the 1950s to record numbers voting for parties outside the ‘Big Three’ in 2015.

As we have become less deferential and more diverse – socially as well as in other respects – we don’t toe the party line any longer, because most of us don’t belong or feel life-long allegiance to one party any more. That we are surprised is because a winner-takes-all system made it ‘normal’ to give one party a lion’s share of seats on a minority of the votes – regardless of how the majority voted. That is clearly no longer the case.

For three elections in a row, Westminster’s voting system has failed to work even on its own terms – producing two Parliaments where no party got more than half the seats, and in 2015 a wafer-thin majority amid the most disproportional result in British history. When the vote shares of both main parties significantly increases and yet neither can nail a majority to govern alone, something is well and truly bust.

Consider this – Theresa May’s vote share matches that of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, who had landslides in 1979 and 1997. Jeremy Corbyn has secured around the same seat share as Gordon Brown in 2010, but Brown’s 258 seats were delivered on only 29% of the vote. Seats never matched votes, but amid today’s volatile politics, the equation is ever more erratic.

There’s a silver lining – as the PM seeks to form a workable government by negotiating with others, her party is practising grown-up politics. This is normal in countries the world over where proportional systems ensure seats match votes, and coalitions are formed to reflect voters’ choices.

But while there’s nothing unstable about parties combining forces, the difference is that a fairer voting system shines a light on alliance-building during the campaign and creates real legitimacy: parties and voters know that power-sharing power is possible, and they’re ready for the results.

Democracy should celebrate diversity. So politics should work with the grain of people’s diverse views – with governments formed that can reflect the electorate in all parts of the country. Voters once again have refused to give a mandate to any one party. They will expect parties to work together to form a government now.

This has been the third strike for First Past the Post: it’s out. We’ve witnessed an election where 21^st century voters have collided with a 19^th century system, second guessing each other and holding their nose at the ballot box. The results have been correspondingly erratic.

It’s time to bring how we vote into line with how people want to vote, to give the public a democracy that can reflect all voices, and to make every vote count. It’s more clear than ever that voters have changed. Now the system needs to change too.

This article originally appeared in The Times

We’ve heard it time and time again in different forms: First Past the Post is ‘strong and stable’. It seems that myth has been well and truly bust.

This is the third election in a row where Westminster’s voting system has failed to do what it long promised – produce a clear government.

At the close of the polls on Thursday, people in Scotland will have faced 10 opportunities to vote in the last eight years. Of these elections and referendums, the general election is the only completely non-proportional vote, using First Past The Post to decide who we send to Westminster. Where Scottish democracy has moved forward and matured in recent years, developing a multi-party system and one of the most trusted governments in the democratic world, UK general elections represent a step back, likely to be far from representative of the Scottish electorate’s interests.

The Independence Referendum of 2014 saw a democratic surge across Scotland. The constitutional question ignited debates and shared learning in recently abandoned town halls across the country. More people than ever before were reading news, politics increased in popularity among young people, and people who had never been activists campaigned and organised their local communities. This grassroots participation led to the biggest collective political learning experience in living memory.

Meanwhile, the elections for office in Scotland have encouraged a multi-party and plural system. The Scottish Parliament has representatives from five parties, elected with the semi-proportional Additional Member System. Council elections use the Single Transferable Vote, which has seen an increase in independent candidates standing for office, increasing opportunities for everyone to find representation. These elections build the trust of Scottish voters, encouraging them that their decisions at the ballot box in the Scottish Parliament and Council elections count, whether they vote Green, Lib Dem, Conservative, Labour, SNP, or Independent.

The democratic upskilling of citizens and the building of trust in our electoral systems mean growing a more nuanced political culture, where the bounds of the debate need not simply contain the two biggest parties. And this means a more robust democracy for everyone. The blunt tool of FPTP in the General Election, however, is on track to undermine and threaten this.

With a winner takes all system, the complexities of the increasingly sophisticated multi-party system of Scotland will not be represented. It is possible, for example, that Scottish Labour will come second in the polls overall in Scotland, but third in seats. It is also possible that the SNP will retain their majority, but with a much thinner margin and many more wasted votes. This inequality in democratic firepower is borne out in polling, where tactical voting has increased. Taking a step back from the forward momentum of building a stronger democracy in Scotland, the General Election will be at best alienating to a huge proportion of voters, and at worst, a democratic catastrophe.