In praise of first-past-the-post

BRITONS had good reason to celebrate earlier this month, as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party put an end to 14 years of Conservative Party rule. But after saying good riddance to the Tories, many within the British establishment had a nagging feeling of guilt: perhaps Labour owed its whopping majority not to disgust with the Tories, but to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system.

Compared with the last election, Labour’s vote share went up by less than two percentage points (from 32.2 per cent to 33.8 per cent); yet it won 412 seats in the House of Commons, up from 203 the previous time. The Liberal Democrats also benefited mightily from FPTP, rising from 11 to 72 seats, even though their vote share was roughly constant. Contrast that with the fate of the far-right Reform UK party: it received nearly 600,000 more votes than the Lib Dems nationwide; yet it garnered only five seats.

With many labelling this as Britain’s least representative election result ever, calls for electoral reform are ringing loudly. But changing the system would be a big mistake. While critics claim that FPTP is a bad electoral system, the conventional alternative, proportional representation (PR), can be far worse.

If the PR system used in Scotland had been in force throughout the United Kingdom, Labour would have won 236 seats, not 411. Under FPTP, a party’s share of seats is not even roughly proportional to its share of the vote, because it is not meant to be. If you want near-perfect proportionality, you would need to have all 48 million registered voters elect all 650 members of the House of Commons in one gigantic national constituency. Just imagine what that would look like in practice: if six parties contested the election, the ballot would contain the names of 3,900 individual candidates.

Alternatively, the ballot could contain the names of just the six parties, and voters would have to choose one of them. The selection of individual MPs would be delegated to party bureaucracies (this is known as the “closed list” system), and the link between individual voters and their MPs – a crucial element of the British democratic tradition – would be severed.

The point is not that such an extreme PR system is the only alternative to FPTP. Rather, it is that proportionality is not the only desirable feature of an electoral system. Practicality is another, and so too is a process that allows for effective governing thereafter. FPTP is known as a “majoritarian” system because it allows parties with a small majority of the votes, or often just a plurality, to assemble the type of sizeable majority that enables them to pass legislation.

This kind of benefit can accrue to parties of all ideological stripes. In the previous British parliament, the Tories had 56 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons even though they had received less than 44 per cent of the popular vote. Since World War II, FPTP has yielded a single-party majority in all but three British elections. While a majoritarian electoral system cannot guarantee such an outcome, it does make it highly likely.

In PR systems, by contrast, keeping a stable working majority can be problematic. One possible result is a minority government that could come crashing down any day, as Spain experienced recently. Or it could produce a succession of short-lived governments, as we saw in Italy until it reformed its PR system in 2017. Alternatively, it can lead to long periods without a proper government, with the country looked after by weak caretaker administrations, as in Belgium. Then there are countries such as Israel, where an extreme form of PR puts disproportionate power in the hands of tiny groups of parliamentarians with extreme views.

The current case against FPTP in the UK amounts to this: Britain has become a multi-party system, and elections increasingly under-represent smaller parties, leading some voters to feel disenfranchised. Since this could undercut the legitimacy of British democracy, the electoral system must be reformed.

But as the Lib Dems just showed, it is simply false to say that smaller parties are condemned to being under-represented. They won 12 per cent of the overall vote and almost 12 per cent of seats by campaigning strategically and focusing their efforts on constituencies they could win (typically well-educated and well-off).

Moreover, legitimacy does not follow only from proportionality in voting outcomes. There are plenty of other ways that political systems can become illegitimate in the eyes of voters. One is the inability of parliaments and governments to get on with the business of governing. After my native Chile moved from a majoritarian to a PR system in 2015, we went from seven to 22 parties represented in parliament, and governments elected since then have not been able to assemble a working majority. The major reforms that candidates promised during election campaigns have come to naught, leaving voters feeling cheated and increasingly dissatisfied with the political system.

Another source of illegitimacy is the perception that money plays an outsize role in politics. In Britain, constituencies are small, and so campaigning is cheap. Add a ban on television advertising and limits on campaign funding, and the result is that parties cannot spend more than a paltry £54,010 (S$93,125) for each constituency they contest.

Imagine, by contrast, the humongous expense of running in a near-perfect PR constituency that encompassed all of Britain. Or imagine, more realistically, the expense of a campaign in a large PR district with a million or more voters, compared with the tens of thousands in the typical British constituency today. The incentives to spend would rise massively, and so would the difficulty of enforcing any mandated spending caps. Maybe money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you elections – or, at least, that is what many voters would plausibly come to think.

Finally, consider the illegitimacy that follows from not knowing who your representative in parliament is. In Brazil, a country with a PR system, even the smallest districts elect eight representatives to Congress, and the largest as many as 70, for an average of 19. What kind of allegiance, if any, can an individual voter have to a group of eight, 19, 35, or 70 MPs? What are the chances that a voter will know who the tens or even hundreds of candidates on the ballot happen to be?

The answers to these questions point in the same direction: towards a widening gap between voters and their elected representatives, and disenchantment with democracy.

Britain’s electoral system is perfectly Churchillian: the worst of systems except for all the plausible alternatives. Starmer should stick to his promises and focus on getting the economy going again, not on changing a system that does not need reform.

The writer, a former finance minister of Chile, is dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science