UK Parliament representation: what can Australia and New Zealand teach us about scrapping first-past-the-post?
Labour won by a landslide in the UK elections, taking ~63% of the seats in parliament with just 34% of the vote. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party won the hearts of 14% of voters but less than 1% of the seats. Taking into account voter turn-out, just ~20% of Britons elected the Labour-majority government. Is this representation? It wouldn’t be in New Zealand or Australia.
Some have argued that Britain’s first-past-the-post system is not representational. The winner of the most votes in a geographic area gets the seat even if they do not gain a majority in their electorate. This can then lead to a national government that is not representative of the plurality of votes. This caused great consternation in the US following the Bush/Gore and Trump/Clinton elections, when both Democratic candidates lost the presidency despite winning the popular vote.
Yet Labour did not commit to electoral reform before the election, and clearly didn’t need to. They have limited incentive to reform electoral systems now that they have power and the Conservative vote is split.
Yet liberal political commentator, Ian Dunt’s words hit home:
“Farage deserves more MPs… The moment you find yourself valuing an electoral system for depriving your opponent of the representation they should legitimately possess, you have entered into perilous moral territory.”
Australia and New Zealand both have major parties that mirror the UK’s Conservatives and Labour, yet have political systems that favour broad representation. How do they do it and what are the trade-offs?
Australia: mandatory, ranked choice votes
Australians are compelled to vote by law, facing fines if they do not. This, unsurprisingly, increases turn-out, and it means that every citizen’s opinion counts. Since voting is a given, a party or candidate cannot rely on methods that increase turn-out, like sensationalism or single-issue campaigns, nor can they depend on voter apathy to decrease turn-out for their opposition.
Australia’s political system also tends to be less extreme because of “ranked choice voting”. At the Australian ballot box, instead of choosing one candidate, voters rank them by order of preference. If a candidate receives the lowest number of votes in their constituency, all their votes are allocated to the second choice of each ballot. The next lowest candidate is eliminated, and their votes again re-allocated to the next preference. This happens until one candidate wins the majority of votes.
This system still favours major parties, as they tend to pick up the second or third preference of independent or smaller party candidates. But it also ensures that your vote is not “wasted” if you choose to vote for a party that may not win. Some parties play this to their advantage by forming alliances and instructing voters to state their second preferences accordingly. Such a system would also allow parties like the Greens to attract a larger share of the vote and perhaps even win more seats, if their voters did not feel like they were wasting their vote on a party that couldn’t win a constituency.
For example, if you could rank Reform as your first choice, then Conservatives as your second, your vote would go to the Conservatives if Reform had a lower vote share. This could be done in reverse, ranking Reform as second after Conservatives. This may have led to more Conservative or Reform seats in our latest UK election if these parties had worked together under a preferencing system, given they took 38% of the national vote against Labour’s 34%.
Ranked choice rewards centrism and moderation, as an extreme party is unlikely to garner a sufficiently large number of first or second preference votes to achieve their majority in a constituency. Yet this system, like any other, of course has downsides. Moderation may not be desirable if it does not move the political agenda forward. It can also lead to coalition governments where neither major party has a majority, making it more difficult to change policies and increasing the power of minority parties to exact concessions.
While this ensures votes aren’t wasted, and can promote minority parties, this system still does not ensure proportional representation as in New Zealand.
New Zealand – Mixed Member Proportional Representation
New Zealand achieves representation with a mix of elected constituency politicians, and “party list” politicians based on a proportional vote.
Each voter chooses their preferred local candidate and national party. This even accommodates preferences like supporting the Labour party in general, but your local Conservative candidate in particular.
72 seats out of New Zealand’s 120-strong parliament are elected on a constituency basis, in a similar way to the UK’s first-past-the-post system. The remainder are pulled from a ranked list of politicians, proportional to the votes a party receives (subject to receiving at least 5% of the popular vote or at least one constituency seat).
Applying the UK election outcome to New Zealand’s parliament, Reform would win 1% of constituency seats (barely a single seat), and their ranked choice list of candidates would backfill the parliament until they reached 14% representation (~17 seats total). Labour’s disproportionate constituency wins would lead to “overhang seats”. 63% Labour seats would correspond to ~45 New Zealand constituency seats. Yet Labour received 34% of the popular vote, and would be entitled to 40 seats out of the total 120 under proportional representation. Thus, none of its “party list” politicians would be given a seat, and they would keep an additional 5 seats, expanding the parliament to 125 members. When Richard Shaw applied this math in reverse to our own parliament[1], he highlights that Reform would be the third largest party in government, and Labour left unable to form a majority even with the Liberal Democrats.
Like Australia’s system, New Zealand lends itself to the compromise of coalition governments. Jacinda Ardern won her first premiership despite gaining the second-most votes because of her ability to form a coalition.
Proportional representation also can reduce focus on local issues and limit accountability. New Zealand largely avoids this with their mixed system. Critics also say proportional voting can lead to extremism, which again New Zealand avoids with their minimum vote share requirements to gain proportional representation.
UK’s electoral reform
I share Dunt’s concerns around denying representation when it suits us. Perhaps as a result of coming of age in Australia, I favour both mandatory voting and ranked choice systems. It requires every citizen to engage in their future by voting, and forces political parties to appeal to everyone, not just their base or their swing voters. For those who want the right to express distaste with all the candidates on offer, you can always just hand in a blank ballot.
In both countries, the two-party system is still dominant, but ranked choice and proportional voting ensure that votes are not perceived as “wasted” and gives a fairer go to independent or small-party candidates.
Electoral reform is a hard decision for Labour to take given it has just won power with the existing system. With this super-majority power, however, they have the potential to do so much to create a more representative and invigorated democracy here in the UK.
[1] Given the UK’s larger parliament, the overhang seats would be even more significant, and would depend on how many of our seats are constituency versus list under this hypothetical construct. With our 650 MPs, would see parliament add a further [433] MPs based on the New Zealand government’s ratio of constituency MPs representing 60% of total MPs.
Hi Lucy
Im enjoying your articles
One observation i would suggest as a comment/supplementary view regarding nz mmp is that is neutering the rural communities who many regard as the backbone of new zealands exports.
Farmers are outnumbered by urban voters and the consequential deprioritisation of rural emphasis leads to farmers having fewer and fewer children willing to carry on their farms due to endless red tape and incessant greening that destroys their margins