A fantastic explanation to a complex situation. Many thanks for the analysis, Ms Taub.
6
Very interesting, right wing reactionary governments in both Britain and the US would stand little chance of succeeding by advancing economic nationalism, anti-immigrant, and anti-welfare policies (for anyone but the very rich) without the support of electoral systems that discount the will of the majority. The Senate is about to conduct an impeachment hearing, the outcome widely expected to ignore the President's many abuses of office. Why? Here's just one example: Each senate seat in Wyoming represents 289,000 people; in California it's almost 20 million.
9
A perceptive article that explains why, paradoxically, the rise of the pro-remain Liberal Democrats ensured a massive pro-Brexit Tory victory, all due to the "first past the post" electoral system.
There are some lessons here, as well, for the United States, since the same phenomenon enabled the far-right takeover of the Republican Party, which then scraped through to a victory in 2016 by creating a hyperpartisan atmosphere that trapped more moderate Republican voters into choosing between two parties that didn't represent their views.
The problem with this political strategy is that if there is a steady movement of the electorate to the left, as there is in the United States, at some point "natural gerrymandering" doesn't work anymore. There is a tipping point, and all of a sudden there is a massive Red to Blue swing.
1
It's so easy when there are only two parties.
Winning the US presidency requires a majority of the electoral college votes. If there is no majority ... well, please read the 12th Amendment. Carefully.
There's this odd feeling that Hillary Clinton would be president if we used the direct popular vote in 2016. She had many more votes than Mr. Trump, but she did not get a majority. Procedures in the 12th Amendment would almost certainly have given the job to Mr. Trump. (Going to the direct popular vote would require replacing the 12th Amendment, and there are some tough choices to be made.)
Multi-way elections have been a serious topic for political scientists for quite a while. No proposed solution has risen to the "aha!" level.
3
The rationale behind arranging political representation by local clusters (and eventually, letting each cluster express one single winner) used to make sense when the largest share of citizens' most urgent need used to be related to being part of a local community: managing a school, having an hospital, maintening roads, water and power networks, governing police and investing for economic development. The importance of many similar local issues made it reasonable that a political representation should be focused on local constituencies, even when electing rpresentatives for larger national institutions.
In our modern world this does not mak any sense. Today, most of the issues that citizens may consider relevant for their lives go Beyond the local dimension. Our interests and needs may be common with those of others spread across other cities or regions, and even across different nations. As long as elections are arranged by geography, most of these interests will simply struggle to find any representation in democratic institutions.
There is little doubt that a proportional system is much a better way to make democracy work, allowing non-primary yet widely endorsed political organizations have their fair share of voice in national parliaments.
1
It is funny how you see this as a problem only when right wing politicians whom the media dislikes wins the election. You are forgetting the 900k voters who voted for brexit party and did not win a single seat and like seen on various other comments, UK has a parlimentary democracy meaning each constituency has it's own election and the elected reps choose their leaders. Even if you made it a choice vote inside each parlimentary constituency the results would have still resulted in a Tories winning the election with a reduced majority. Democracy has never been perfect and will never be perfect, look at Germany which has seat allocation based on percent votes, there the citizens don't get to choose the elected rep, The party bosses do and people who are sycophants get elected often who are incompetent and all come from a major city.
The conclusion is democracy is not perfect and will never be, so stop shedding tears only when the candidate you dislike wins.
8
Goodbye Great Britain! Today you are about 2% of what made up the British Empire 150 years ago and things are only going to get worse. Scotland, realizing that it will be better economically for them, will leave Great Britain and become its own nation and will remain linked to the European Union. Once this happens what will follow is Northern Ireland also leaving in order to retain their economic links to both Ireland and the EU. Finally, after that happens Wales will declare its right to independence and will do the same. Then, Great Britain will be no more as only the country of England will remain and look at how small it will become by physical size, population size and economic/military size. Goodbyes will then also have to be made to their royalty as even their illusion of grandeur will have to be buried. Very sad indeed.
4
I've voted in 13 presidential elections. I think they all has at least 3 candidates/parties on the ballot, and often 4. None won because in a democracy a party is looking for 50.1% whereas in the parliamentary system there is frequently a coalition that governs with no party having an absolute majority. Which I think is good because in a parliamentary government there is only one branch of government and so an absolute majority has absolute power, limited only by public opinion and a sense of honor among it's members. As we see in UK big issues tend to cut across traditional party lines. For example, in the 1860 presidential election 4 major parties, some newly created, had presidential candidates and the new Republican Party candidate, Lincoln, won with less than 40% of the vote.
1
So it's better to have a proportional representation system where you can wait 500 days after the election for a coalition government to be formed (like in Belgium) and for the government to have a platform that not a single voter voted for?
3
@CK In Belgium the 589 days without a federal government are considered somewhat of a success. There may not have been an executive branch with full powers, but parliament continued to push legislation. The previous government remained in function with limited powers. This kept government spending to a minimum and provided stability for businesses who enjoyed almost two years of unchanging regulations.
I maybe wrong here, but I'm willing to bet that the idea of two years of radio silence from the federal government sounds appealing to many people in the US right now.
5
This article is completely wrong when it comes to Brexit. The Remain parties combined percentage would not have translated into an expression of Remain preference. Not only did Leave win the 2016 Referendum in terms of total vote, 52-48, but the breakdown of Parliamentary constituencies was 406 Leave to only 202 Remain. Even in Labour constituencies it was 142 Leave to only 84 Remain. All this shows how heavy the Remain vote was in the London area and how wrong it was for Parliament to stymie democracy and Brexit for over 3 years.
The principal reason the Conservatives won so big was that people, particularly working people, were angry that their democratic vote in 2016 was disregarded by their elected representatives who had a mandate to effectuate Brexit, remembering also that both major parties in their 2017 Manifestos promised to deliver Brexit, a promise that only the Conservatives appeared willing to fulfill.
7
Winners are grinners, and the rest can please themselves.
2
Even with two parties, First Past The Post is problematic. This is because the geography of the social bases of respective parties is so important. The working class tends to be geographically concentrated to a much greater extent than the more affluent, who are much more spread out. So historically the Labour Party experienced far more 'wasted' votes than the Conservatives: 'wasted' in the sense that Labour candidates piled up massive majorities rarely approached by Conservatives, so the Conservative Party was in a sense more economical in its voting support: it won more seats than its national share of the vote might have suggested. As a result, PR would favor parties of the left far more than parties of the right, which is why it is so contentious.
1
Any voting system, such as first past the post or the electoral college in the US perverts elections and reduces the influence of individual voters. Voter disillusionment, disaffection and apathy follow and democracy suffers. You only have to look at what is happening in Britain and the US today to see the dire consequences of not letting every vote count. For years I told friends that it was our duty to vote but today I am no longer sure that it really matters at all.
There are many options to address this, such as ranked choice voting systems but since politicians can game the current arrangements don't hold your breath waiting to see them employed.
6
The effect of the Brexit party is totally forgotten !
They only contested non Tory seats, helping split the vote further.
They got a large vote and no seats !
2
Just a minor quibble about the characterization of the German Green Party:
“ In Germany, for instance, the Green Party on the far left and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany on the far right have drawn support away from the center-left and center-right parties that have traditionally dominated politics. “
The German Green Party is hardly a “far left” party these days.
3
The comment about comparing the European elections didn't do this article any favors. Turnout mattered more than first past the post. Only 37% of the electorate voted in the European Parliamentary elections, while 67% voted last week. Apples and Oranges!
1
No mention here of Ranked Choice Voting, another alternative. Some countries use it; in the U.S. at least 1 state and municipalities use it. Has the advantage of neutralizing spoiler candidates (and also, for any voting districts that now require runoff elections, avoids that expense and delay).
3
It is not just First Past the Post. It is the combination of that method of counting with more than two major parties pulling large numbers of votes.
The British have three major parties, Conservatives (Tories) Labour, and Lib Dems. They also have some other parties that pull large numbers of votes in some areas, like the Scottish Nationalist party. They have some crank parties, like Brexit Party. They also have some common European parties with wider appeal like their Green Party.
In short, their voting system does not fit their politics. A country can have multiple parties with a way to register votes for many of them, or just two that race first past the post. They have a foot on the dock, a foot on the boat, and they fall between to get wet.
Personally I'd like the US to have the variety of British political parties, with a voting system that fits that.
Proportional representation it would require larger changes here. One Senator at a time can only be a first past the post election. One Representative for each Congressional District and Legislative District also enforces first past the post. When there is only one spot, it is by definition first past the post.
I'd like to see those changes too. Along the way, I'd like to see a bigger House of Representatives.
We could even apply it to the single post of President, by way of apportioning multiple votes from each State, like delegates to the Electoral College.
We need a new system. This one is broken.
5
Funny, the author seems. upset at how few MPs the LibDems returned, but sheds not a tear on the complete absence of Brexit Party MPs.
But with 650 000 votes, they should have had, by her reckoning, anything.between 2 and 20 parlementarians.
The first past the post system is good at returning a majority that can govern according to a program, and at throwing out politicians. It also means any really popular idea will be integrated into one or the other's political.programme. vide Brexit.
Any form of proportionality creates a range of single issue politicians who have to be bought at every vote for a government to do something. It also entrenches politicians. However unpopular, good manoeuverers will be near the top of the list and guaranteed reelection.
3
@Guasilas -- Proportionality has its own problems. We see that today in Israel, which cannot get a majority government.
However, no system is perfect. What is the trade off?
We see in the US two parties, neither of which is representative of anything but their own re-election and the donors they need to get that. They've neglected the needs and desires of voters for decades, at least since the 1980's, and it has only gotten worse.
The death blow was Gingrich's GOPAC, that elevated donor money, and control of that in blocs, to control parties with bureaucratic inevitability.
Now they've killed our system, we need to try the other one.
In Israel they seem to have killed that system. Maybe it must go back and forth, running a system until the politicians inside it poison it for their own selfish ambitions.
They are after all politicians, and the selfish ambition of a narcissist is the only defining characteristic any have shown for a very long time.
3
@Mark Thomason Our system's latest 'poison' was the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opinion.
4
This article explained in one word - Wrong.
Taub would interpret this as an election all about Brexit, but exit polling shows otherwise. The results reflect voters' positions on a range of isssues. Brexit may have been the top priority for many voters, but not for all.
Some Liberal Democrats are pro-Brexit, but find the party's positions on other issues more important. Some Conservatives are anti-Brexit but give precedence to other issues.
So Taub's dream of a grand anti-Brexit coalition that represents a majority of British voters is just that, a dream. Every indication is that the majority of British voters are pro-Brexit.
The best measure of voter sentiment on Brexit is the 2016 Brexit vote, a simple popular vote. (And more participated in that election than in the current parliamenary election.) Subsequent polling has consistently found that Brexit folks are still in the majority.
A coalition that resulted in Britain staying in the EU would subvert the popular vote, the opposite of what this article claims would be the objective of a coalition. If you want to decide an issue based on "...the total national vote," then Brexit wins.
3
@Hugh -- For three years, nobody talked about anything but Brexit. Every issue was re-interpreted back to Brexit. It took all the political oxygen in the room for three years.
To now expect an election to be about anything else is fantasy. They can't even think about any of their very many other issues. It is monomania.
2
Whining about long established political systems after losing elections is a bad look.
7
So, in short, folks on the left either don’t understand math or are too stubborn to work together.
Is that how I am supposed to explain this to my eight year old?
11
I predict civil wars in Scotland and northern Ireland as both try to exit the UK.
6
Not an impressive article, blaming the electoral system for an outcome that could well have been different without a different system. Jeremy Corbyn will go down in history as one of the worst British party leaders in living memory. He is the reason why Labour lost. He has been an unbelievably terrible leader, and this disastrous outcome is his fault and his alone.
7
@John
The author does not only blame the electoral system. She specifically calls out Corbyn disastrous approach who, I agree, is awful. But there is no doubt that the Conservatives benefited hugely from the fact that Remain votes were divided between Labour and the Lib Dems, when the leave votes were all with the Conservatives. In terms of the overall popular vote, the non-Conservative parties got over 50% of the vote to the Conservatives' 46%. This is what happened in the US with Trump. A sizable majority of the country is appalled by him but will struggle to get rid of him in 2020. This is not democracy and it will not stand. You can only disenfranchise people for so long.....
6
@John
Totally agree. Here in Aus we have multiple small parties in addition to the two main parties, and preferential voting. That didn’t save the Aus Labor party from a disastrous result early this year, largely due to an unelectable leader with some very unpopular policies. I say politicians that ignore key policy issues do so at their own risk, no matter the voting system.
1
@MJ you are correct. It is not a Democracy. It is a Republic. Our system is designed to temper the passions of the majority and to respect the rights of all citizens.
Losing elections is not the same as being disenfranchised.
3
An excellent and relevant article. I wonder what your assessment is of the outcome of the vote in Scotland, where the UK-wide parties were joined by the SNP (and to a far lesser degree (at least in FPTP elections by the Greens)?
It was, after all, the SNP who ended the LibDem leader's tenure, reduced Conservatives to their rich farmland-owning base and returned Scottish Labour to a single MP once again. In the case of Labour in Scotland, the return to central London party control must have played a part, but not the whole story.
I recently joked that tactical voting was FPTP's version of the Single Transferable Vote system, and I was only partly saying so in jest.
1
The answer for the US is the open primary, with the top two candidates going on to the general election. Something similar could work for Britain (e.g. ranked choice voting.)
For the US, the benefits would be manifest - greater opportunities for third parties, but no third party spoilers, less chance for the extremes of either party to dominate primaries, and a likely decrease in polarization in the country.
3
Same problem in my county. The slow growth candidates split the vote in the primary and the fast growth guy had won for 16 years.
2
First past the post has one huge benefit, it translates a confused set of views in the electorate into a clear decision. This result has swept away the confusion of the last couple of years. Often no decision is the absolute worst decision.
the upside to the impending success of Brexit will be Scotland's independence and Ireland's unification as a truly independent Republic within a decade.
5
The problem with proportional representation systems is that voters don't get to vote for candidates, but for parties. We like to pretend that candidates matter and politicians don't just rubberstamp their party's official position on everything.
The better system is instant run-off. This system ensures that third parties can't spoil and the result is the more popular of the two most popular candidates.
4
Jo Swinson lost her riding by 149 votes, to the SNP candidate. Her riding had a turnout of 80%, far above the national average. In Canada, proportional representation is usually supported by the opposition parties, who promptly drop the concept once elected. (The various Canadian conservative parties wandered the political wilderness until finding a way to unite and gain power.)
I fear a system that empowers single interest parties, like in Israel, which is looking at a third election this year.
FPTP is frustratingly imperfect, but it means it comes down to a simple problem of getting out the vote.
2
They are not called ridings in the UK, that has a different meaning than it does in Canada. They are called seats or constituencies.
@John Stroughair
They are the exact same:
Riding = Electoral District = Constituency
First past the post generally secures strong government in a parliamentary system. Nor does it necessarily work poorly in a multi party election. Britain for example has been host to three major parties for most of the 20 century. It still hosts 7 parties in the Parliament. The reason the Left doesn’t like the system is that most electorates tend to be conservative because most people are. That gives a conservative texture to most governments, even governments of the Left. Proportional voting by contrast generally forces coalitions, often of a weird construction and favour an entrenched and generally policy rather than electorate focus, breeding a political culture focussed on policy to the exclusion of genuine representation of flesh and blood people. The FPTP system is centred on the notion that an elected representative represents a defined group of people and focuses the attention of the politician on their needs. This is surely positive. Proportional representation may be “fair” at some level, ie fair to abstract political ideas, but it loses out on the solid delivery of benefits to one’s electorate or district. Just look at Italy.
4
This, of course, happened in the NY senatorial contest in 1970 when the Conservative James Buckley was elected with 39% of the votes and the remaining 61% was split between the Democrat Ottinger (37%) and the Republican Goodell (23.9%).
Both Ottinger and Goodall were liberals but the Conservative got the seat.
The solution to the system that gives the candidate the most votes is a run-off between the two top vote getters when no candidate gets 50+% of the vote.
The English Conservatives increased their vote by only 1.2% from the previous election, but got some 60 more seats.
2
The central point of the article is correct and important, but the part on the German parties is horribly bad. The Greens are not far left anymore, in many of the federal states they are right of the center-left Social Democrats! Furthermore, there are five main parties, including The Left, whose position I don't think I have to explain.
4
Thank you for this piece. This all reminds me of the early 1930s in Germany. The left leaning parties were split and badly fractured, which allowed the rise of Hitler. He never won an outright majority of German votes. Of course, after he was named Chancellor he quickly amassed power, control of the police and cemented the reign of the National Socialists by terrorizing and jailing his many opponents. Von Papen and virtually every other political leader underestimated his brutality.
I’m not in the least suggesting a parallel between British leaders and Hitler. But when a minority takes control in any country they especially tend to embrace and advance the electoral conditions that allowed them to win in the first place. The left should learn this lesson and join together to be a more effective force. A detailed mathematical analysis of each precinct’s vote could be enlightening.
2
@Michael Bill Clinton won with 40% because of Ross Perot's 3rd party. So, it can go either way. Insinuating that only right parties might abuse their minority elected positions is without merit.
2
@Michael
Paul - Actually subsequent analyses indicated Perot split the Bush and Clinton vote. Didn’t matter in that instance. I never said the right’s vote couldn’t also be split as well.
2
a critically important factor overlooked by the author is the fact that Nigel Farage's Brexit Party stood down from all and every race in all and every constituency.
1
That is factually incorrect. The Brexit party only stood down in seats the Conservatives already held. The Brexit party played a major role in many Labour held seats.
@GOP-destroying democracy No it did not. Are you trying to sew chaos by lobbing obvious untruths into the arena?
Shades of Ralph Nader.
In Canada, there are two leftish parties and one rightish one. If an election looks close, you get what we call "strategic" voting: the voters flee from the NDP (don't ask) and support the Liberals in order to overcome the Conservatives.
In several referendum tries, new systems to replace first past the post have been defeated. Sad. And governments are remain reluctant to alter the system that brought them to power, eh.
I think run-off elections make a lot of sense.
3
@Ben
There has never been a referendum in Canada on FPTP.
Ever.
@SteveRR
A more typical Canadian reply would have been, "Gosh, Ben are you sure about referendums?"
Steve, if you have a moment, you might want to please see the bunch of referendums about voting mentioned in Wikipedia. Thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Canada
2
@Ben
There is a modest difference between "Proposed Referendums" never enacted and - you know - Actual Referendums that are voted on.
As I said - ever.
I wish this article had included a fuller description of the "Brexit Party" of Nigel Farage (the engineer of the original leave campaign in 2016). The party is under a year old and first ran candidates in the European Parliament elections in May, where it won better than 30% of UK vote. After that, Farage kept pressure on Conservatives through plans for his party to contest over 600 districts. In early November, though, after Johnson demonstrated full commitment to "getting Brexit done", the party abandoned its plans to contest Conservative seats. Mr. Farage is a significant force in rightwing European politics as well as among conservative Britons, and has been working to strengthen alliance with Donald Trump.
2
@Maggie Mae
Yes, Maggie Mae: I, too wish the article had addressed Farage. If they ever get around to posting the comment I submitted here nearly an hour ago, which concerns his UKIP party's fate in the 2015 election, you will better understand why Ms. Taub preferred not to discuss him.
This article confuses two issues, first past the post voting and single member electorates.
First past the post voting is clearly antidemocratic and has no redeeming features. It lends itself to vote splitting. For instance in the European Parliament elections in the UK the conservatives and the Brexit party outvoted Labor and Lib Dems, but because the pro remainers got their act together and voted strategically they won more seats. Another famous example is vote splitting by the Greens in the US election where Gore would have won if there had not been a popular Green candidtate.
Vote splitting does not happen in Australia because we have preferential voting. Big partie (in the US Democrats and Republicans, in the UK Labour and Conservative) prefer first past the post because it discourages people from voting for small parties and entrenches the two party system. However from time to time vote splitting disadvantages even big parties.
UK voters had an opportunity in introduce preferential voting in a referendum but chose to stick with first past the post.
Single member electorates are a different issue. On the one hand by keeping electorates relatively small they enable legislators to keep in close touch with their electorate. On the other hand they lend themselves to gerrymandering and even without deliberate gerrymandering the gographic distribution of voters can mean that it is possible to win a majority of legislators with a minority of votes.
@Paul Pentony The European elections use proportional representation rather than first past the post, so the Brexiteers were hardly outmanoeuvred in that contest.
This article employs fuzzy math and makes little sense.
Labour had the same opportunity to win as the Conservatives and lost. Show me any election and I can give you fuzzy math where the opposition would have won under different rules.
9
Looking at our own politics, for Democrats to win in the EC, they need to attract some rural voters. But to attract those voters will require abandoning some positions that their current hard core supporters demand. Drop those and those hard core supporters stay home. The line the Democrats need to walk is very fine. And it is going to get finer or disappear altogether.
1
And how do you explain any cohesiveness in the Republican Party whose voters are all over the lot? The only thing they seem to have in common is that Donald Trump is the resurrection of Baby Jesus.
3
Making excuses when your side loses an election is Never helpful and often the reason you will lose the next one too. The system used in the UK was not just invented. Everyone knows the terms of the contest. You can imagine all sorts of other outcomes if the rules were different. None of that matters because IF the Rules were actually different so would be the voting patterns being seen. Remains were never the majority. Never or they would have won at least one of the elections that have been held to decide this outcome. Cry about if you want. Make excuses if you don't care about the next election. Lick your wounds and make the changes you need to make if you do want to win a future election. Choice is yours to make.
11
For the record, Swinson didn't lose by 336,038 votes. She lost by 149 votes, the difference between her and the Scottish Nationist candidate who beat her.
1
@Charles Coulthard
Further for the record. It would not have changed the outcome of the overallelection if Swinson had won or the SNP won. The problem was Labor's terrible showing in traditionally Labor districts.
1
The losers trot this argument out at every election. We had a referendum a few years back to possibly change to a more representative system. It was decisively rejected
2
The Remain crowed was the loudest, leading remain leaning political parties to be overly zealous and shaped much of Labor's stance.
That was not the case and the silent majority made their voices heard where it mattered the most. In the ballot.
A harbinger for the US upcoming elections.
1
I think first-past-the-post is an undemocratic system but the history presented in this piece is way, way off. UK politics has been multi-party for a very long time. Really ever since the early days of the Labour Party there've been at least three parties with appreciable national support. It's really not a recent phenomenon, and it definitely isn't post-Brexit - in the 2010 elections for example the two major parties took 65% of the vote between them, in last week's it was over 75%.
2
In other words, your grievance is with the fact that the winner WON, got the most number of votes in his constituency, and not in some gerrymandered "national poll" that then gives seats to people who DIDN'T WIN that constituency.
7
@JOHN How can a national election based on proportional representation be gerrymandered?
By all means lets have proportional representation in the UK.
So there are 4 big parties instead of 2.....and no party has a governing majority.
I think we should have at least 4 parties in the USA.
A Conservative, Republican, Democratic and Socialist parties.
This should make governance in both countries much easier.
Or am I missing something here?
2
Oh, goodness. If only the system were different!
I doubt this article would have been written or published if other than the Tories had won.
14
I know by the incessant coverage that I'm supposed to care about British politics, but I must admit I simply do not.
@Stevie So why are you on here, then?
6
My objection to proportional representation is not addressed in this article: that this system can repeatedly leave voters with representatives who do not live in their area and consequently are unfamiliar its concerns. Foe example...
If in a federal election I were to vote for a party that received ten per cent of the national vote, there is no assurance than any of the representatives receiving ten per cent of the seats in the House of Representative knew anything about my community or region. That too would have its disadvantages. I think that the moral of the story remains that there is no perfect system of representation to be found.
There is a tacit understanding on this forum that people are encouraged to express their opinions freely, and the tone of discussion is always polite and non-confrontational. There is no shortage of discussion forums out there where one can vent one’s spleen to one’s heart content.
@Quiet Waiting Ah, but they would reflect the outcome the New York Times wants, so pls shut up and recognize how lucky you are with a representative who LOST your district!
How is it that this article casts the Liberal Democrats as the main opposing force against the Conservative Party, when Labour won nearly 20 times the seats Liberal Democrats did? To the point that Labour didn't even appear into the article until half way through?
This is a grossly misleading take on the election results.
7
@ALS in addition, theseat lost by the Lib Dem leader was lost to the Scottish National Party, not the Conservatives. The
1
This is an overly-simplistic analysis, that totally ignores a number of factors that historically have proven to be very significant in outcomes in actual elections using Proportional Representation (PR): the number of new small parties that run; the platforms adopted by all the parties, which are generally different from those used in First Past the Post (FPTP) elections, as parties will target niche voter groups within the electorate, rather than adopting policies the might attract wider consensus support; the success, or lack thereof, in the post-election efforts to negotiate a coalition, and the frequency with which weak coalitions break down and new elections are required. The latter two factors are particularly important during a crisis (think, the Great Depression, or a concerted separatist movement), and can lead to widespread frustration with democracy among the electorate, giving authoritarian parties justification for dismantling the democratic process. That is what happened in 15 PR democracies in interwar Europe, and that is what we are seeing once again; Spain, with its 4 elections in the last 4 years, is a case in point.
5
@Peter Love Not to mention proportional representation allows into government marginal parties with extremist views. Look at Germany for a good example of that - Afd and Die Link would never make it into any FPTP system and that's nothing to mourn either.
4
@Shane
In FPTP system many important AfD members like Mr. Gauland, former CDU, and Die Linke members, Mr. Lafontaine, even former chairman of SPD, would have stayed in their former big parties and would have tried to paralyze them from within by establishing powerful obstruction factions like "European Research Group" and "Remainers" did in UK or like "Tea Party" did in US.
1
The author is dead wrong on one crucial point. First Past the Post does not "work well" in a two-party system. FPtP works to trap support within two parties and closes out other voices or viewpoints from ever having a chance of being represented.
7
Following the election results of last week, the United Kingdom is dead.
Johnson's victory is also the death knell of hundreds of years of the Isles working more or less towards common goals. It may also be the end of Johnson's political career, unless the monarch decides NOT to dismiss him...which would be a surprise, since Johnson would have lost Scotland, Northern Ireland, and possibly Wales to leave just England under the crown. What ruler would allow such a man to continue running the government in their name?
Both the United States and the United Kingdom are in death spirals. We are seeing Great Britain's throes after roughly twenty years of stagnation, just as we're seeing the United States begin to sink after fifty years of being stuck in a holding pattern.
6
@JOHN
I think you're wrong. Most Americans may have a job but they're not doing ok. Security has vanished. Thanks reagan!
1
@Ethan Henderson The only "death spirals" seem to be, like visions of sugar plums, in the Left's heads. Most of the rest of Americans think we're doing OK.
Britain held a referendum on moving to a system of proportional representation in 2011 and it failed, it wasn't close either, the vote was 67% against. Some people cannot seem to grasp that when you submit an idea via referendum and it is rejected that the idea should not be brought back, again and again, until the voters accept it. That was the fatal thinking behind the Lib Dem's campaign against Brexit and that's the same thinking behind those constantly pushing proportional representation too.
9
@Shane
It wasn’t proportional representation , it was AV, a system that wasn’t the first choice of any voting reform group, isn’t used by any other country, and which the governing tories agreed to a referendum on instead of proportional representation for precisely those reasons.
By the way, we already had a referendum on staying in the EU, in 1975. So by your logic the 2016 one should never have happened as ‘the idea should not be brought back’.
3
@Alan Griffith
The SNP agreed that there could not be another referendum on Scottish independence for at least a generation, which is defined as 25 years, yet here they are again, less than five years after the last. I was opposed to Brexit and still think it's a bad idea for the UK, but democracy means respecting the outcome of a democratic vote as part of the system. When it's subverted through repeated referenda, then big problems lie ahead.
@Shane
Circumstances have changed. The last referendum was held with a UK firmly in the EU. Now that the UK is no longer in the EU, Scotland should have the right to re-evaluate whether they wish to remain in a Union isolated unto itself or to reunite with a larger European Union.
5
A "first pass the post" system, like the Electoral College, disenfranchises voters. Ms. Swinson's supporters, or more accurately, voters for Liberal Democrats, have as much of a say in their political system as a Democrat in Oklahoma or a Republican in California has in a presidential election.
9
How do you get a person that represents you as a person living in a spot on the planet with other than the current system? You want a human being to rep for you, not some party office that allocates out seats based on a ratio. Geographically based reps, based on the current voting methods, are the core of connecting people to their government. It worked in 1215 and 1789. It works just fine in 2019.
1
@Michael Blazin Just make sure that each geographical spot represented contains the same number of voters - there, I fixed it for you!
4
I don’t think you understand how the proportional system works. If you have 100 equal districts where one party wins 52 per cent of the vote in each district, it gets the 100 seats in First Past. In a proportional system, the losing party gets something close to the 48 per cent. That is how the EU parliament works.
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@Michael Blazin So, I take it you are against the electoral college? Has much changed in the past 804 and 230 years respectively?
This is another of those “If only the system were different...” lament pieces that have been so common since Trump won the Electoral College in ‘16. I’m a solid Democrat, but this way of thinking is loser thinking.
The rules of the game are clear in advance.
Those are the rules you play by.
Deal with it. Get over it. Move on.
(Sure, change them if you can, but don’t use their existence as an excuse for recent failures).
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@In The Ville
I don’t hold the rules as an excuse for recent failures, but they are a reason. That a candidate can win three million more votes nationwide and still not be elected President should be of concern. Dealing with it it and moving on should look something like subverting the electoral college system. And I will never get over it.
3
@In The Ville Absolutely! Sometimes that means that the Democratic candidate will have to visit states that are not on the coastline or parts of states that they have never been to. It also means that the candidate will have to talk to people they may think, or at least their Twitter followers think, are "deplorable", and try to convince them to vote for their party. It's called democracy.
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@In The Ville
Doubtful you're a solid Dem. Dems don't use phrases such as "deal with it" or "get over it". They reek of unilateralism.
3
Here is my prediction: England will do great under Boris J. and with Brexit. It is parochial, dysfunctional and socialist Europe we should worry about. One more thought for the triggered NYT readership: Elizabeth W. and Bernie S. will go the way of Jeremy C. because there are no majorities for socialism, other than in Cuba and Venezuela.
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@FPG
Good luck living in Lesser Britain, your new rather irrelevant partial island nation of 2025 and after.
5
A simple and powerful lesson for the Democrats of the US. If we do not unite, we will lose in 2020.
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@TonyD 2020 is already lost my friend.
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@TonyD
A different simple and powerful lesson for the Democrats: we will not win in the electoral college in 2020. Unless a few hundred thousand progressives from solidly blue states move to key districts in PA, MI, OH, and WI (and maybe even TX!) in time to vote in 2020.
@Dan That is not going to happen and neither will the Constitution be amended before next November. The Democrats need to do it the way they have done so before by FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, and Obama. Go out and talk to people in those districts, many of whom voted for Obama twice, and show them why it is in their interest to vote for the Democrat.
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First-past-the-post is simply the fairest system of representation when a representative is supposed to represent the will of the people in the district that elected them. Since the UK has at least 6 parties, that means that voters in most constituencies have a choice between a variety of political parties. So if the candidate who gains the most votes wins, I don't see what the problem is: they were the choice of the majority in that constituency to act in Parliament on behalf of their local needs and problems.
I'm a liberal, but it angers me that the NYTimes always finds it problematic when conservatives win in a first-past-the-post system or as a result of our own Electoral College system. There was so much liberal wailing when Trump won the Electoral College but not the popular vote, and very little sympathy for how the Electoral College benefits our ever-shrinking rural populations who are marginalized in our heavily urbanized society and (in the eyes of liberals) tend to hold conservative views.
And as for Brexit in the UK, the problem was that a slight majority of UK voters voted to leave in 2016, but the vast majority of their MPs didn't. So Parliament obstructed, debated, defied, and delayed while governments that were basically the coalitions this article praises did their best to find a good Brexit deal, but were defeated by Parliament. At least now the system of first-past-the-post will get the will of the people done, like it or not.
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@ Neil - The presidency is the only office in the US that is not determined by the American people. That means the majority of them. One person, one vote no matter where they live, That is democracy. Senators used to be appointed by the legislatures until the Constitution was amended to allow direct election of Senators.
We need to abandon the Electoral College to enable the majority of Americans, liberal or conservative, to determine the presidency.
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@Nell As rural populations increasingly shrink, like you said, the vote of those in cities will be counted less and less. It is ridiculous that city dwellers are beholden to the wishes and desires of a smaller part of the population. City dwellers aren't some evil behemoth, they are working people too with a desire to see their political persuasions represented, that whether by choice or chance, they ended up living in an area that has a higher human density.
If at some point in the future 90% of the population lives in urban dwelling that takes up 30% of the land mass, should the 10% that live spread across the other 70% of the geography dictate politics for everyone?
I understand that rural America has different needs than those of the cities-- but there must be better ways of advocating for those than systemically diminishing the needs and political will of the majority of the country.
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@Anon - I don't disagree. But, specifically HOW do you suggest we go,about "abandoning" the Electoral College?? It would require a constitutional amendment, which is extremely difficult: 2/3 of both the House and the Senate need to approve, and then 3/4 of the states need to approve by a vote of their legislatures, or by statewide conventions. Given the current political atmosphere, what are the odds??
4
Blame Corbyn's tap dancing around the second referendum, which would have been squarely on a national vote and squarely focused on Brexit, instead of premised on calculated campaigns of decision by avoidance . FPTP has its pros and cons relative to proprep (which are well rehearsed and here in Canada have generally resulted in sustained public endorsement of the former). Regardless, the UK's current party leadership never offered a sane answer to the Brexit problem that a superabundance of phony "democracy" produced.
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@J111111
I think Brexit is a true democracy. The people voted, and will have their leave. That they do so by taking the lies and ambiguity Of Farage and Raab hook line and sinker means that the coming disaster is their own fault.
Jeremy Corbyn was an absolute disaster leading the opposition ticket. That's why Conservatives swept to power. He waffled on Brexit, and tried to put forward a social agenda that was not what this election was about. Had he made this election about Brexit and forcefully announced his intention to reverse it, Labor might have won.
Jo Swenson and the Liberal Democrats were and are but an asterisk. As they have been for 50 years.
Beware America. This election is a harbinger of 2020 if we put a Jeremy Corbyn at the top of our ticket.
13
To call the German Green party far left is just showing utter ignorance.
The Green party finds its voters largely in the educated urban middle class (not that Germany has much rural spaces). This has been the case for more than 3 decades.
Otherwise, what can I say?
Any democratic system should strive to represent the voters' intentions through parliamentary seats, even if it is complicated. That is why it is called representative democracy.
Britain utterly fails this test. And that is not even taking into account that seats in the upper chamber can be inherited within aristocratic families.
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Excuse me, but I daresay I am one of a majority of people in Britain who wish to remain in the European Union. We just got elbowed out of the way by a mob in the grips of a massive case of Stockholm Syndrome, and I'm not going quietly.
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@Angstrom Unit
I recommend that you petition for Belgian citizenship, or at least a permanent visa, post haste.
2
@Angstrom Unit Since you apparently think the minority should rule and legitimate elections should be reversed, I suggest Venezuela, Russia, Brazil or some 3rd world fiefdom would be a better home for you than Britain where they have rule of law.
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@Angstrom Unit You got voted out, by the British people, who want their country back before its gone.
1
For a variety of reasons both historical and cultural, the Liberal Democrats in Britain have consistently failed to provide a viable alternative to either the Conservatives or Labour.
The LD's are mostly a "thinking person's" party of the well-educated, liberal-minded upper middle class. The kind of folk who would feel quite at home living in Manhattan's Upper West Side or across the East River in Brooklyn Heights.
The real political question in what will soon be post-Brexit Britain is whether Labour will even survive and whether the Tories will begin to fracture.
Labour has no base any longer. Much like the older industrial areas of the US, the unions in Britain are declining and in any event, no longer speak with a single ideological voice.
Meanwhile, even while enjoying current political triumph, the Conservatives are comprised of such a broad array of divergent domestic policies that factionalism is bound to arise not long after the Brexit terms of Boris Johnson are adopted.
Ordinarily, this would seem to provide an opening for the Liberal Democrats to grow a political base. But just as rational thought and analysis has lost political sway in the US -- so it appears to be in the UK.
Instead, expect battles over Scottish independence and other centrifugal movements (eg. Northern Ireland) to create an unpredictable political fluidity within the UK.
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@George
Well said, except that the politics of Scottish independence, Ulster/Ireland confederation, and maybe even Welsh independence are not really unpredictable. Really the only question is how messy it will be getting there.
1
So what else is new? So far British voters have seen fit to regularly nourish a predatory ruling class, a parasitical monarchy, an ossified aristocracy that owns the place, a relic pantomime known as the 'House of Lords', a clearly failing education system, rampant tax evasion coupled with grinding poverty and unemployment, a manipulating offshore elite which has provided our current PM, FPTP to lock it all down and, most recently, a fraudulent referendum. And we have the gall to blame Europe? The British voter is a proven addict to self harm.
As a result we're a bastion of pretension at one end and abysmal ignorance at the other. We're widely mocked, if not loathed, wherever we go, fed on swill delivered daily by a tabloid press, whose idiocy and malevolence is clearly visible on newsstands around the planet. What made you think anything different was going to happen this time?
For a taste of what Johnson Brexitized Brits can expect, however, take note of the way the millions of innocent Brits living in Europe have been treated, not to mention innocent Europeans living in Britain and those hapless victims of the Grenfell Towers disaster: with utter disdain and complete disregard of basic rights, an endlessly complicit bureaucracy to make sure of it and a malicious intent to undermine the rule of law, such as it is.
Welcome to Post Brexit Tory Britain. Rees-Mogg said it all. You can't say you weren't warned.
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@Angstrom Unit On the other hand, we're good at self-criticism.
5
"...(Ms Swinson) promised a future that much of the country had hoped for since the 2016 referendum: If her party won power, she would stop Brexit."
It should be noted that even more than "much of the country" did vote *for* Brexit.
A reminder also that the original Brexit referendum was in the form of the supposedly "better" national vote, and Brexit won.
8
A majority of the country, but not a huge one, did vote for Brexit originally back in 2016. I fail to see how a small majority is more than “much of the country”.
3
Much is 50 per cent plus one. Anything greater than that number is an opinion, not a fact.
2
@a reader If Swinson defines 48% as "much," then 52% is clearly more than "much." Or maybe they could be "much" in which case the 52% could be a "slightly bigger much."
2
So rather than hold the Tories to account for the surrender and abandonment of Britain's industrial capability followed by the creation of offshore havens in which to bury the loot, former Labour voters in Britain's disaster areas blamed immigrants and Europe, and now look to the Tories to save them from the EU's Weapon of Mass Destruction, the Polish plumber. You couldn't make that up.
Then there were Corbyn and Swinson who couldn't figure out that agreeing to an election on Tory terms when they had a majority was a really stupid idea.
The unemployables attacking the employed, proving once and for all this is a rude, crude and unpleasant land.
The very definition of self harm all round. I'm with the plumber.
5
@Angstrom Unit When you refer to the "unemployables attacking the employed," what do you mean? It sounds harsh, and if I understand you correctly it's not accurate. A greater proportion of skilled than unskilled manual workers voted for the Tories.
1
That's true. The UK voting system is glaringly stupid and unfair but they will stick to it forever, regardless of its weaknesses. Examples like the 336k here can be found each year, more or less outrageous.
Parties like lib dems should not exist at all, as they only hurt the closest partner, which is Labour, rather than do anything useful and practical on their own. If you want to stick to winner-takes-it-all, then reduce and simplify the parliamentary life to what there is in USA, two parties forever, black or white, no third choice in anything, which in itself is yet another example of simpleton-politics.
4
Does this really work better with a two-party system? In the U.S. we're seeing that democrats are flocking to densely populated areas, which is what allowed Donald Trump to win without the popular vote. Without redistribution of votes in the electoral college, low population areas can have as much impact on an election as a densely populated area.
2
@LilyC I don't think it's that simple. The number of electoral votes a state gets is based on its population. The electoral votes are awarded based on a majority of votes in the state. If all the Democrats in state X moved to the city and all the Republicans moved to the country, the outcome, in terms of the state's electoral votes, would be the same. Movement from one state to another can dilute voting power, but there's no reason to think that Dems rather than GOPs would be. Trump won withouthe populat votes, but that had nothing to do with the Dems tendency to group in large cities (for example if 20,000 rural Ohioans had moved to big city Detroit, it Michigan might have gone Democrat).
@TonyD I wasn't talking within a single state. If you look at voting results for 2016, 8,753,788 Californians voted in the election. With 55 electoral college votes, it means that each vote represented 159,159 residents. In Montana, 279,240 folks voted. With 3 electoral college votes, each vote represented 93,080 residents. This can be seen all over the U.S. It means that each vote in rural areas is worth more than votes in densely populated areas. It's how Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than Donald Trump and still lost.
5
@LilyC You are confusing areas with states. It's true that votes in densely populated states counter of less than those in rural states. That explains how a candidate can be elected without winning the popular vote.* But your claim is about "areas." As I explain above, votes in densely populated areas count the same are those in rural areas.
* It is not clear to me that the divergence in the 2016 election between popular vote and electoral vote is explained by the vote dilution you describe. It could more easily be explained based on Trump's winning narrowly in some states (like Michigan) and losing by a lot in large states like California. This has nothing to do with dense vs. rural. It's simply a result of a winner-take-all-based on-state election system. if you have data to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it.
There's a danger of the radical right or left of a party taking over, but as the UK election showed, it's more likely the winning party will turn towards the centre of their campaign message. Brexit and Corbyn created a perfect storm in British politics, and the irony is now a strong Conservative government, with an eye on the next election in 5 years, has the mandate and the need to implement both a softer Brexit, and socially and economically progressive policies across the country.
3
@Thistime
They may have the need, but they don’t have the time or the support of Pro Brits in Ulster. They are toast.
"If Britain had a proportional system, the pro-Remain parties could have formed a coalition with a majority in Parliament"
As part of the coalition government of in 2010 the Liberals (lib dems) wanted, and obtained, a referendum on proportional representation. They were hoping to become a greater power in UK politics if they won.
The result of the referendum was to reject proportional representation by a large majority (68%).
The real problem for the Liberals is that they tell the electorate one thing and do the opposite. Nick Clegg the leader of the Liberals in the 2010 election said they would not raise tuition fees for stuedents and would not cut poorer peoples benefits. Clegg (now working for Facebook) helped the coalition Govt raise tuition fees from £3000 a year to £9000/yr and helped the Tories slash benifits to the poor in UK (bedroom tax, etc).
People do not trust Lib Dems!
11
@aelstor Yet, if the Conservatives do policy u-turns, or elect a known liar as leader, that's perfectly ok. Watch the Johnson government abandon its promises pretty quickly. Johnson himself said there would never be a customs border in the Irish Sea, only to agree to exactly this.
3
@Manuel Robles Making sure there is no hard border on the island of Ireland is one of the best things that Johnson's plan would do.
Ms Taub concludes with this quote about first-past-the-post systems. "There’s a danger that the radical right wing of a party takes over.”
How does that apply to the British Tories? Brexit didn't divide people along simple left/right lines. The hard left Jeremy Corbyn, for example, has always supported Brexit. Millions of lifetime Labour voters support Brexit. Boris Johnson's instincts on most matters are liberal. It's true that Brexit is not cosmopolitan, but that doesn't tell us whether it's left or right by all relevant criteria (is a cosmopolitan CEO necessarily more interested in equality than his minimum-wage employees?). And the Tories' current election manifesto--more public funding for just about everything--pushes the party further left than it has been for years as it tries to keep its new working-class voters. Which isn't to say there aren't right-wing dangers like deregulation...
For understandable reasons, American commentators think Brexit = Trump. It's more complicated than that.
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Dear @Alexander Menzies.
Follow the money for the next few years. The Tories talk about more public spending, but what will they actually do? If you trust the likes of Boris Johnson, we Americans have a wonderful bridge to sell you.
10
The UK had a referendum on the voting system in 2011, and they voted to keep FPTP instead of the far more democratic AV (alternative vote). Both Labour and the Tories campaigned against AV - for obvious reasons (it would dilute their vote share).
This was the first nationwide referendum in the UK for 36 years. The result should have been a forewarning that the public don't vote for their best interests - perhaps the disaster known as Brexit could have been avoided had this warning been heeded.
31
The solution--for Britain and America--isn't proportional representation. It's far simpler than that.
The winner of an election should earn a majority of the vote. If no majority is gained, a second round between the top two vote-getters is in order. This way, voters would be able to vote their preferences in the first round, and still have a choice, should a plurality, not a majority, favor the leading candidate.
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@JDinTN Ranked choice voting does this more efficiently, without the need for a second election.
10
@JDinTN
No, Instant Runoff ("ranked choice") is a much better way to do this. It is working well in places around the world, including San Francisco.
6
@JDinTN
France has a two-round voting system, which works similarly to what you describe. President Macron defeated Marine Le Pen by a nearly 2 to 1 landslide. But his administration is still plagued with widespread protests like the yellow vest and trade unions.
It's easy to blame the electoral system. And surely a skewed system undermines the winner's legitimacy. But no amount of electoral reform works if the underlying problem is polarization and divisiveness within the electorate.
4