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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Votes for the two largest parties came to just 67.3% combined, with 36.9% of the electorate voting Conservative and 30.4% voting Labour. The number of votes cast for parties other than the Conservatives, Labour or Liberal Democrats on the other hand, rose to its highest ever level (24.8%) – nearly a quarter of the votes cast (up from 11.9% in 2010).

Over ten million people voted for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and other smaller parties – a third of all votes cast. Yet whilst the SNP managed to translate support into electoral success, elsewhere these votes have little weight in a system designed to favour the two largest parties.

Read our full election report

It’s official: this election was the most disproportionate in UK history.

We’ve just released our new report on the May 7th General Election, A Voting System in Crisis. And it makes for worrying reading for fans of democracy.

The report, launched today, has already hit the headlines, with ERS Chief Executive Katie Ghose appearing on BBC Breakfast, the Today programme, Daily Politics, Radio 5 Live, Sky, ITN and Channel 5 to discuss it already. We found:

• 50% of votes in the election (15m) went to losing candidates, while 74% of votes (22m) were ‘wasted’ – i.e. they didn’t contribute to electing the MP
• 2.8m voters were likely to have voted ‘tactically’ – over 9% of voters
• Under a more proportional voting system – the Single Transferable Vote – the Conservatives would have won 276 seats to Labour’s 236, while the SNP would have secured 34, UKIP 54 and the Lib Dems 26. The Greens would have won two more seats – in Bristol and London
• The ERS was able to call the winner correctly in 363 of 368 seats – a month before polling day – due to the prevalence of ‘safe seats’ under First Past the Post
• This election saw an MP win on the lowest vote share in electoral history – 24.5% in South Belfast
• 331 of 650 MPs were elected on under 50% of the vote, and 191 with less than 30% of the electorate.

The problem goes deeper than these shocking statistics though. First Past the Post is artificially exaggerating divides in the UK – giving the SNP nearly all Scottish seats on half the vote, while excluding Labour from the South of England and over-representing them in Wales and under-representing the Conservatives in the North of England and Scotland.

At the same time, cross-community parties in Northern Ireland got a tenth of the vote and no seats, yet the DUP received nearly half the seats on just a quarter of the vote. This situation is unsustainable if the Prime Minister truly wants a ‘one nation’ Britain.

It doesn’t have to be like this

But it’s not all terrible news. There are better ways of doing elections – after all, we’re the last country in Europe to use the outdated and broken system of First Past the Post.

We commissioned YouGov to find out voters’ party preferences so that we could work out what the results might have looked like under different voting systems:

639 Votes Are All That Would Be Needed to Change the Result of the 2015 election

The 2015 election was won by only six seats. If six constituencies had voted differently then Britain would have a hung parliament and parties would have to work together to secure power.

In the six most marginal Conservative knife-edge majorities exist. In Gower only twenty seven votes separate Labour from the Conservatives. If just fourteen voters in Gower had decided to vote Labour instead of Conservative then it would have been held by the Labour Party.

Overall if 639 votes spread across these constituencies had voted Labour rather than Conservative Britain would now have a hung parliament.

This demonstrates the randomness of Britain’s FPTP electoral system. It also demonstrates the core reliance on a tiny number of swing voters in a tiny number of constituencies.

If you were to judge British public opinion from newspaper headlines, you would assume we were terrified of the idea of political parties working together. The horror stories of smaller parties ‘holding the country to ransom’ suggest an electorate fearful of multi-party politics and utterly committed to the old model of single-party majority rule.

But this ignores an inconvenient truth – Britons actually quite like the idea of parties working together. A recent ComRes poll of voters in the 40 most marginal Conservative-Labour constituencies – in other words, where you would expect two-party competition to be fiercest – found 78% think “the Opposition should work with the government on issues they agree on”, while 54% believe “parliament works best when no party is too dominant so that cross-party agreement is needed to pass laws” (against just 28% who thought the opposite). These are not the attitudes of an electorate yearning for the comfort of one-party rule.

This contrasts with other polls which suggest people don’t like coalition. But perhaps that’s because we don’t have enough experience of what power-sharing is like, at least at the Westminster level.

That’s why the Electoral Reform Society, in its recent report Working Together, asked senior politicians from the UK and overseas to give their advice on how to make power-sharing work. And a key lesson from the report is that there are a multitude of different ways to do it.

For instance, as former New Zealand Labour minister (and ERS Deputy CEO) Darren Hughes points out, you can have all sorts of mechanisms for involving smaller parties in minority or confidence-and-supply arrangements. A recent feature of power-sharing agreements in New Zealand is “the appointment of ministers from support parties who do not become members of the government but are bound by Cabinet collective responsibility for the portfolios they held”. It is innovations such as this which make power-sharing seem less scary and more possible.

As former Lib Dem MP and special adviser Julia Goldsworthy notes, “more change and adaptation will be necessary” after the coming election, to reflect the changed political circumstances and different parliamentary arithmetic. But we don’t even have to look overseas to find inspiration – we have a wealth of experience of power-sharing in the devolved institutions and local government.

In fact, the UK has seen every conceivable form of power-sharing from full coalition to minority government via confidence-and-supply and minority coalition. You just have to read our report to realise that’s the case.

So, when it comes to sharing power, what is there to be afraid of?

Read more about Working Together here

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Image: Robert Clemens

Some things can be done in a hurry, but forming a Government certainly shouldn’t be one of them. In our recent report, Working Together, we set out the guidelines for forming power-sharing arrangements based on the experience of successful coalition and minority governments in Scotland, Wales and across the world.

In 2010, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives attempted to plan five years of government activity in just five days of frantic back-room talks. If 2015 sees more power-sharing negotiations, will it be similarly rushed?

Back in 2007 Former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan decided to play the long game in his negotiations with Plaid Cymru, taking a full two months to negotiate their coalition agreement. Negotiating the formation of a government is never going to be easy, and as Rhodri Morgan attests in our new report, it can be difficult and stressful. But investing effort at the start helps ensure that the next five years will be successful. Beyond the obvious gain of having a full plan for the coalition’s legislative agenda, taking your time leads to a more stable coalition to deliver it.

Like any relationship, the stability of a coalition rests on all the parties knowing what they’re getting into from the start. Internal disagreements can be nipped in the bud before they threaten the government’s stability, and ministers can be more open with where parties disagree with each other, as they have already agreed their programme of action.

As our report shows, it’s better to take your time to put together a solid plan for government, than risk years of inaction or instability because your plan ran out. You can read the full story behind Rhodri Morgan’s 2007 coalition in Chapter 1 of Working Together.

Yesterday the views of Brits were unveiled to the world. And in some ways, they make for some startling reading.

The British Social Attitudes Survey – a renowned national study of voters’ opinions – was released on Thursday. It covers all sorts of issues on what citizens think. But a few things stood out for us.

Firstly, just 17% say they trust governments “just about always” or “most of the time”. This lack of faith in our democracy is pretty startling.

It’s not that people are apathetic – 32% express “quite a lot” or “a great deal of interest” in politics, actually an increase on the same survey in the ‘80s, while nearly two-thirds (65%) follow political news on a daily basis. But they don’t feel like Parliament currently responds to their political views: “only 16% believe that, if they made an effort to do something about an unjust law, parliament would give serious attention to their demands.” It’s a sorry indictment of our democratic institutions.

So it’s no wonder then that in a time of continuing distrust of politicians, and given the litany of scandals we’ve seen over the past few years, support for coalition government has taken a hit. Just 29% of voters say they prefer coalition to single-party government. Yet that is with the experience of only one coalition arrangement (and one that took place under a very unrepresentative electoral system).

When you dig deeper into public attitudes, you find that people actually want to see parties working together. Our new report Working Together, released this week, shows that even where the old two-party battle is fiercest (ie. in the 40 closest Tory-Labour marginals), 78% believe the Opposition should work with the government on issues they agree on (against just 9% who support the opposite) while 54% believe Parliament works best when no party is too dominant so that cross-party agreement is needed to pass laws (against just 28% who support the opposite).

In other words, coalition and minority government isn’t necessarily as unpopular as the British Social Attitudes Survey suggests.

Perhaps one of the responses to people’s alienation from politics, so startlingly demonstrated by this survey, is to embrace the fact that people want to see multiple parties at the top table of politics. After all, with six or seven parties commanding a decent chunk of the vote this year, people are voting with their feet. Our electoral system may still be stuck in the two-party past, but people have moved on. And as they do so, the idea of parties sharing power will become increasingly normal.

Shouldn’t we embrace the future, and accept that it’s time for parties to work together?

This week we launched our new report, Working Together, highlighting the benefits of parties sharing power.