Representative democracy?

Geography and the British electoral system

Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie, David Rossiter

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526139900
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom are elected to represent geographic constituencies; but how are these defined and what are the consequences for democracy?Tracing the UK's system of parliamentary representation from its origins in the thirteenth century right through to the present, this comprehensive new survey reveals how a system initially designed to restrain the power of monarchs gradually evolved to serve their interests, then those of political parties before the twentieth century 'settlement' of an independent process for revising the constituency map.That settlement is now under pressure, with the traditional pattern of constituencies representing communities about to be replaced by one which elevates numbers above community. Advanced under the slogan of 'making votes equal', this new regime promises fairness yet, as the authors show, is destined to fail to address the disproportional and biased election results that have long been a feature of UK politics.Concluding with a detailed consideration of the ways in which various parts of the UK have embraced alternatives to first-past-the-post over the last two decades, this book serves as a timely reminder that the needs of political parties do not always coincide with those of us, the electors.

1

Introduction

Two party leaders were happy on the morning after the United Kingdom’s 12 December 2019 general election; another resigned immediately, one vowed to establish a new party, and the Leader of the Opposition acknowledged that his days as leader were numbered. Their responses reflected not only how successful their parties had been in winning votes but also how the electoral system had translated those votes into seats, in large part because of geography.¹ Geography matters in so many aspects of life; the creation of a representative legislature – in this case the UK House of Commons – is a clear example of that.

Of the contented party leaders, none was more so than the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. His Conservative Party’s share of the vote had only increased by a modest 1.1 percentage points (to 43.6) but this was sufficient to take the number of Conservative MPs to 365, an increase of 5.7 percentage points compared with 2017 and delivering in his words ‘a stonking majority’. The disproportionate return was a reflection in part of the demise of his main opposition, but also of the shift in the party’s geographical support. The UK’s electoral system typically bestows a winner’s bonus on the most popular party and a further bonus on those whose supporters are in the right places.

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), was the other happy leader, and for similar reasons. The SNP won 45 per cent of the vote in Scotland, well ahead of the Conservatives (25 per cent), Labour (19 per cent) and the Liberal Democrats (10 per cent). This translated to seat shares of 48, 6, 1 and 4 respectively, demonstrating not only how well the largest party is treated but also how capricious first-past-the-post (FPTP) can be (twice as many Labour as Liberal Democrat votes, a quarter as many MPs).

The failure of the Labour Party overall, however, could not reasonably be laid at the door of the electoral system. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership it had increased its support at the 2017 election, but in 2019 it went backwards in terms of both votes and seats. As one of the two main parties it consistently gets a higher level of representation than most European parties of the left, who operate under systems of proportional representation, but with just three victories in the last eleven general elections it is difficult to argue that it has benefited from FPTP.

Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats, resigned immediately. She was not one of those Scottish Liberal Democrats who kept the SNP at bay and paid for that with her seat and her job. Across the UK the party had increased its share of the vote from 7.4 per cent to 11.6 per cent, but it actually went backwards in terms of MPs – from twelve to eleven. Even with targeted campaigning and appeals to tactical voting, the combination of underwhelming levels of support and the lack of a spatially concentrated core vote proved insuperable.

In the wake of the election the leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, confirmed that he intended to change his party’s name to the Reform Party and campaign to change the UK’s voting system. Previously leader of yet another party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), he had good cause to want change. When leading that party in 2015 he secured the support of one in eight voters across the UK (3.88 m), achieved one MP, 120 runners-up, and the knowledge that at the same election to the same Parliament the SNP’s 1.45 m votes had returned 56 MPs!

It seems that there is only a weak relationship between a party’s share of the votes and seats at a UK general election, therefore. Furthermore, that relationship is far from consistent, as illustrated by the Conservative Party’s experience at recent contests. In 2010 it won 36.1 per cent of the votes, which delivered it 307 seats – substantially short of the number needed for a majority over all other parties (326). Five years later, its vote share increased slightly to 36.9 per cent – and this time it achieved a majority of seats (331). At four earlier elections its vote share was close to its 2017 and 2019 totals, but its seat share varied: in 1979, 43.9 per cent of the votes delivered 339 MPs; in 1983 42.4 per cent (a decline in support) resulted in 397 Conservative MPs being elected; in 1987 it won 42.3 per cent – virtually the same again, but 21 fewer MPs (376); and then in 1992 its share in the number of seats (336) fell significantly more than its vote share (41.9 per cent).

* * *

That few parties get a similar percentage of the seats as the votes is a well-known feature of UK general elections. So is the general ‘rule’ that small parties are more likely to win seats in the House of Commons if they concentrate on building their support in a few constituencies. Gaining 10 (or even 20) per cent of the votes nationally is unlikely to lead to many MPs being elected to represent a party unless it wins at least 30 per cent in a few: 30 per cent is not guaranteed to win a seat, however;² 35 per cent is slightly better; 40 per cent is almost certain to ensure that your party provides the constituency’s MP.³ Once you have crossed that magic threshold, however, there is little point building up many more votes in those constituencies, since they will not deliver any more winning MPs. As a party becomes more popular it needs to win support more widely in a geographical sense: large majorities in some seats but losing fairly badly in the rest is a poor strategy. The parties realise this and construct their campaigning strategies accordingly, as reflected in their spending patterns and canvassing intensity preceding an election. They pay relatively little attention to seats they are sure to win, spend very little where they know they will lose, and focus much of their activity on an (increasingly small) number of marginal seats where victory or defeat is uncertain: at the 2019 general election only 67 seats were won with a margin of 5 percentage points of the votes cast or less, compared to 97 at the 2017 election.⁴ Parties are much more interested in their potential supporters in some places than in others.⁵

The reason for this incommensurate translation of votes into seats that characterises UK general elections is the electoral system – technically defined as single-member plurality or more colloquially as ‘first-past-the-post’; the winner in each constituency is the candidate with most votes there, irrespective of whether they constitute a majority of those cast let alone a majority of those that could be cast (i.e. if there were no abstentions). This system, of MPs being elected to represent discrete areas within the national territory, has its origins in the thirteenth century and was only marginally modified during electoral reforms linked to franchise extension in the early nineteenth century.⁶ Its present format was largely in place after reforms in 1885, when single-member constituencies became the predominant feature. Since then the rules for defining constituencies have been formalised and procedures for their implementation institutionalised, but the basic features have only been tweaked – usually by a party in government wishing either to gain an advantage over its opponents or to reduce, if not remove, an advantage one or more of its opponents already has.

That system was not designed to ensure that each party – or at least each party that gains a significant share of the votes cast nationally – gains representation in the House of Commons commensurate with its vote share. The results are invariably disproportional. But how disproportional, and why? And does that disproportionality affect each party to the same extent, or is it biased, with one gaining more from a particular share of the votes than others? The answers to those questions lie in geography, in the spatial distributions of each party’s support and the precise location of constituency boundaries. Again, as illustrated here, that argument is generally appreciated. It was formalised in a pioneering essay in spatial theory by two geographers, whose insights provide the foundations on which this book is based.⁷

British democracy is presented as representative, as one form of the general principle enunciated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address – ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. Representation has a range of meanings, however – who is to be represented, by whom, and how are the elected held accountable by the electorate? We explore these issues in Chapter 2 as an introduction to our later exposition of the United Kingdom’s means of implementing that principle.

Chapters 3 and 4 set out how the electoral system emerged and has been modified.⁸ Chapter 3 covers the period from 1832 to 1918, when the system was modified four times in an ad hoc manner. Chapter 4 turns to the period since 1930 when a legal framework was established, setting out the procedures for defining parliamentary constituencies and their non-partisan implementation – procedures considerably ‘tweaked’ during the sixty years that followed their introduction but never substantially altered to tackle the issue of disproportional treatment of political parties.

The latest, most substantial, of those tweaks came about because of one party’s concern over the system’s operations at the 1997 and 2001 general elections. In 1997 the Conservatives suffered a landslide defeat by the Labour Party: they won 9,602,857 votes and 165 seats, giving a ratio of one seat gained for every 58,199 votes, whereas their principal opponent gained 418 seats with 13,516,632 votes – a ratio of one seat for every 32,336 votes. That disproportional treatment was repeated four years later: Labour won 412 seats at a ratio of one for every 26,031 votes, whereas the Conservatives’ ratio for their 166 seats was 50,347. The latter party decided that something needed to be done to remove that unequal treatment and prepared legislation for when it next gained power. That happened in May 2010 and by February 2011 a new set of procedures was in place. Chapter 5 documents the passage of that legislation and its implementation in two boundary-redrawing exercises (the UK technical term is redistribution; Americans call it redistricting). The first was halted before completion following a political disagreement within the 2010–15 coalition; the second was completed and its recommendations for a new set of 600 constituencies delivered to Parliament in September 2018, but having lost its overall majority and facing significant backbench unease at the prospect of reducing the number of MPs, the government did not proceed to implementation. Instead they were rescued by the 2019 general election, the result of which delivered them the majority they needed to introduce fresh legislation to maintain 650 MPs as at present.⁹ Indeed, as a consequence the 2019 general election, like the election before it, was fought in the constituencies defined using electoral data for the early 2000s.

The changes – mainly up to and including the 1944 legislation – and then the tweaks and their implementation by those given the task of defining constituency boundaries, all illustrate a basic tension within this part of the UK’s electoral practice between an organic conception of representation which sees MPs as the representatives of distinct communities and an arithmetic conception which requires each MP to represent the same number of people. That tension underpins all of the changes to the system since 1944 as parties, basically those in power and able to use their parliamentary majorities to achieve their desired change, wrestle with the electoral consequences of giving one of those conceptions – organic or arithmetic – precedence over the other.

The UK’s electoral system regularly produces both disproportional and biased outcomes, it seems – but how disproportional and how biased? Chapter 6 explores their measurement, illustrating the key role of geography in the unequal translation of votes into seats. But if that system is so likely to produce disproportional outcomes, favouring some parties and disadvantaging others, why has it not been replaced, with something that is more proportional, as in many European and other states?¹⁰ Electoral reform has been discussed in the UK for almost two centuries but only rarely has it gained a prominent place on the public agenda.¹¹ The Liberal Democrats have long been committed to reform, believing that only a shift to a proportional system would deliver them representation in the Commons commensurate with their popular support – indeed, that support might increase if voters thought this would bring the party increased representation. It wanted to achieve that when it joined the coalition with the Conservatives in 2010 but its putative partner was adamantly against such a change; as a concession, the Conservatives agreed to hold a referendum on switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) system, which retains single-member constituencies and is unlikely to deliver a proportional outcome,¹² if the Liberal Democrats would support the proposed changes to the redistribution procedures. The AV system had been rejected by politicians in 1918, 1929 and again in 1944 but the Liberal Democrats accepted the concession as a small step towards their nirvana, despite their leader having previously described it as a ‘miserable little compromise’.¹³ The referendum was held in May 2011 and the proposed change was decisively rejected, by a ratio of 68:32 on a turnout of only 42 per cent.

But a wide range of other electoral systems is available; indeed, the UK has introduced a number of them for elections at the sub-national level in recent decades. Do they produce better outcomes in terms of disproportionality? We explore answers to that question in Chapter 7, looking not only at those systems deployed from 1999 to 2019 for elections to the European Parliament from the UK, but also elections to the Scottish Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the National Assembly for Wales, to the Greater London Assembly and local government elections in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Representational democracy is at the heart of the UK’s unwritten political constitution. But, as we ask in this book’s title, is it truly representative? The answer depends on your definition of representative. The country’s electoral system was not designed to ensure proportional representation for parties, even though by 1885 they dominated political life. Since then it has been modified in a variety of ways while retaining its basic features – unlike in some countries, such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to which it was exported but has now been replaced; it remains in place in Canada and the United States, where recent elections have seen outcomes in which the winning candidate failed to obtain most votes – Donald Trump lost by some 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election and in Canada’s 2019 federal election the Liberal Party won 33.1 per cent of the votes and 15...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Representation: of whom, what and where?
• 3 Creating an electoral system: 1832–1918
• 4 Consolidating the system: 1930–2010
• 5 The 2011 legislation: major changes?
• 6 How representative is our democracy?
• 7 Does it have to be this way?
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index