Progressives and left-leaning pressure groups have long called for electoral reform in countries like the UK and the USA, pushing for voters to elect a ruling party directly. With so many elections taking place this year, is it finally time to bring in proportional representation, or will fears of far-right extremism secure first-past-the-post for years to come?
The UK’s election this month saw some of the highest disparity between vote share and seats won since records began. However, with Labour’s recent landslide and France’s left-wing alliance using the electoral system to keep out the far right, liberals might be starting to rethink their position.
How do we vote now?
In the UK, the USA, and many other democracies across the world, you don’t directly vote for the party you want to form a government. Instead, you vote for who you want to represent the small area you live in (called constituencies in the UK or districts in the USA). This person will usually be from a political party, or they can be an independent.
This means that the number of votes a particular party receives does not translate to how many seats they get in the House (of Representatives or Parliament, depending on the country). This is because no matter how many votes a party receives across the whole country, they only get a seat in the House if they have enough votes in one particular area to elect a representative.
Why don’t people like it?
The problems start to arise when the share of the vote a party gets in an election is drastically different from their share of seats, or when the overall result of the election is different from how people voted.
For example, in 2016, only 45.9% of the USA voted for Trump, compared to 49% for Hillary Clinton, but Trump won because more Republicans were elected to the House of Representatives.
This infographic from the UK-based pressure group Electoral Reform Society uses arrows to show how much a party benefitted, or suffered, from the voting system in this year’s election. Labour benefitted the most, with 63% of seats from 33% of the vote, and Reform UK, the far-right party running on a mainly anti-immigration slate, suffered the most, with 14% of the vote translating to less than 1% of seats.
This result, among others from 2024’s bumper crop of elections, is prompting a rethink among left-wing campaigners for electoral reform. Historically, ‘First past the post’ (or ‘winner takes all’) has favored not only large political parties but those on the right disproportionately. This comes down to a variety of factors, including the concentration of left-wing votes in densely populated urban areas, while the right tends to have more rural support.
Left-wing voters are also likelier to spread their votes among different parties or candidates, while the right rallies behind one. Left-wing and smaller parties, therefore, have mostly been behind calls for proportional representation (when voters directly elect a party to govern).
What do they want instead?
In 2022, 200 political professors, lawyers, and academics wrote an open letter to Congress calling for a change in how the country elects the legislature. In the same year, the Labour membership voted in favor of proportional representation for the first time at the party conference (though electoral reform was notably not in Labour’s manifesto this year.)
The letter claimed that over 90% of US districts are so-called ‘safe seats,’ where parties don’t need to bother campaigning, leaving most of the population ignored in elections. They argued that each of these districts should elect multiple representatives, according to how many votes the party received.
Under their proposed system, a Republican district that voted 60% Republican, and 40% Democrat would get three Republican representatives and two Democrats. The Democrat voters haven’t ‘wasted’ their vote under this system, even though they don’t make up the majority. The overall makeup of Congress more accurately reflects how the country votes. The downside, according to critics, is the sidelining of local issues, as there is no longer one clear representative for each area.
How does proportional representation affect the far right?
Many democracies across the world have some form of proportional representation, including Italy, New Zealand, and Japan. Germany and Italy both elect their representatives using a mixture of majority voting and proportional representation. In Italy, two-thirds are directly elected, and in Germany only half are.
Such systems, in theory, encourage centrist parties to govern together, which has been the case in Germany in recent years. In Italy, however, it facilitated the election of a far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose party managed to form a coalition with the main right-wing party.
Germany’s far-right group Alternative for Germany, while not in government, holds a substantial 77 of 733 seats, and made further gains in the recent European Parliament elections.
By contrast, France recently avoided a far-right and center-right alliance using their Alternative Vote system, a modified form of first past the post. After the right did unexpectedly well in the first round of voting, the left-wing parties formed a hasty alliance. Candidates with fewer votes stood down, allowing the left to consolidate their votes and beat right-wing candidates.
Are things actually going to change?
If there was ever a time to evaluate different voting systems, it is now. Dubbed ‘The Year of the Election’, 2024 sees 49% of the world’s population going to the polls in over 60 countries. However, the rise of the far right and its success in countries with more proportional voting systems certainly give the left a reason to think twice about implementing the electoral reform they have been calling for.
A party with the power to change such systems is by default one that has benefitted from them. Even smaller parties like the UK’s Liberal Democrats, which has always made electoral reform a key part of their campaign, might be reluctant to overturn a system that has just won them 12% seats on 11% of the vote. Combine this with the specter of the far-right, which would have just won itself a substantial voice in Parliament under a different system, and change seems highly unlikely. First past the post appears to be here to stay – at least until the next election, that is.
