Public support for reforming the UK’s first past the post electoral system has risen markedly of late. So is there any serious chance that such reform could actually happen?
The annual British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) has been tracking public attitudes to electoral reform (and other issues) since 1983. It found consistent majorities for the status quo up to 2017, but charts a dramatic shift since then. In the latest BSA, support for reform has risen to 60%, with just 36% backing the current arrangements.
It’s true that these views are unlikely to be deeply held: most people rarely think about electoral systems. But they do reflect a profound disillusionment with the way the political system is working.
Significant electoral reforms are very rare outside times of regime change. When I wrote a book on the subject in 2010, there had been just six major reforms (from one system type to another) in national parliaments in established democracies since the second world war. That number has increased a little since then, but only because Italy has got into a pattern of endless tinkering. The basic pattern is one of stability.
The main reason for that is obvious: those who gain power through the existing system rarely want to change it.
Yet the cases where reform has happened reveal two basic routes through which such change can take place.
First, those in power can conclude that a different system would better serve their interests. In 1985, for example, France’s president François Mitterrand replaced the system for electing the National Assembly because he feared heavy losses for his Socialist party in the looming elections.
Second, leaders can cave into public demands for reform because they fear that failing to do so will add to their unpopularity. This requires a scandal that affects people in their daily lives, and campaigners who successfully pin blame for that scandal on the voting system. It typically also needs at least a few reform advocates within government.
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These conditions characterised three major reforms in the 1990s, in Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. In the first two cases, rampant corruption fed economic woes and was attributed to the voting system. In New Zealand, first past the post enabled extreme concentration of power, which allowed successive governments to unleash radical, and widely disliked, economic restructuring.
Prospects for reform in the UK
If Labour continues to lag in the polls and votes remain fragmented across multiple parties, we might imagine reform by the first route in the UK. Ministers could calculate that a more proportional system would cut Labour’s losses, clip Nigel Farage’s wings, and reduce uncertainty.
Yet majority parties facing heavy defeat almost never change the system in this way. Mitterrand’s reform of 1985 was a rare exception. Such parties always hope things will turn around. They don’t want to look like they have given up. And they are used to playing a game of alternation in power: they want to hold all the levers some of the time, and will tolerate years in the wilderness to get that.
Reform by the second route is equally improbable. Notwithstanding great public dissatisfaction with the state of politics in the UK, there is little narrative that the electoral system is the source of the problem.
But, depending on the results, the chances of reform could grow after the next general election.
Change by the first route is most likely if no party comes close to a majority and a coalition is formed from multiple fragments. Those parties might all see reform as in their interests. Perhaps more likely, the smaller parties in such a coalition might push their larger partner into conceding a referendum – much as the Liberal Democrats did with the Conservatives in 2010. If support for the two big parties is disintegrating, referendum voters might opt for change – though that is not guaranteed.
As for the second route, a majority victory for Reform UK that was generated by first past the post from a small vote share could – given the party’s marmite quality – trigger widespread public rejection of the voting system. A clear path to change might open up if Reform then lost a subsequent election, particularly if it lost to a coalition of parties, some of which backed reform already.
In short, the shifting sands of politics are making electoral reform more likely. But almost certainly not before the 2030s. And much will depend on how the party system evolves in the years to come.
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Alan Renwick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
