The UK’s political landscape means the electoral system is increasingly in need of review. Dr David Klemperer, IPR Research Assistant, explains why proportional representation isn't the only option and sets out the case for a double-ballot system.
The case for electoral reform has rarely been clearer than it is today. The 2024 general election revealed a deeply fragmented political landscape, and recent opinion polls suggest that this fragmentation is only intensifying. In this environment, the UK’s current First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) electoral system can no longer be relied upon to deliver the outcomes its defenders have typically highlighted as key advantages.
Under volatile, multi-party conditions, FPTP ceases to keep out extreme parties, to guarantee that elections will produce workable majorities, or to provide voters with a clear and simple choice between alternative governments. Instead, with many different parties potentially in contention in each seat, voters will be confronted with a confusing tactical landscape, increasing the risk of perverse, extreme, and even seemingly random results at both the constituency and the national level. More than 50 leading academics warned recently that holding a general election under FPTP in the current political climate could produce ‘MPs elected with weak local mandates and ‘[n]ational results that appear random and arbitrary’.
Why proportional representation isn’t the only answer
Many argue that these problems with FPTP point to one solution: the introduction of an electoral system based on proportional representation (PR). For most electoral reformers, the problems with FPTP stem above all from its tendency to produce highly disproportionate results – a problem inherent to its nature as a majoritarian system, in which seats are allocated individually on a winner-take-all basis rather than awarded to parties in proportion to their vote shares. However, in the current political context, it is not clear that proportionality should be the main goal of electoral reform.
While proportionality is a legitimate objective, claims of PR’s downstream benefits (in terms of higher turnout, higher trust, or lower inequality) are often highly overstated, and often relate more to contingent party system dynamics or to the historical circumstances of its initial introduction to a given country than to inherent properties of proportionality itself. Moreover, there are other features of electoral systems that it would be no less legitimate to prioritise, which are often in tension with proportionality. For example, voters might value direct relationships with individual, geographically based representatives, or being able to choose clearly between alternative governments.
Most importantly, what defines the ‘best’ electoral system for any given country cannot be stated in the abstract, but rather depends on the particular nature and dynamics of its politics, including the state of its party system. The state of UK politics today not only discredits the case for maintaining FPTP, but also poses major challenges to the traditional case for PR.
From realignment to de-alignment
Historically, the case for PR in the UK has been linked to the idea of re-alignment. Since the late 1980s, the argument has been that FPTP is artificially preserving an outdated two-party system – the political superstructure of a simple, early twentieth-century form of class politics that is now out of step with a more complex sociological reality. PR is needed to allow the natural evolution of the party system towards a new multi-party system, one that would reflect a wider range of social identities and new axes of political division.
But today’s political landscape is increasingly defined by de-alignment. Old partisan loyalties are breaking down, but they are not, for the most part, being replaced by any lasting new attachments. Instead, voters take a more distant, sceptical and transactional view of parties, and are more than ever before willing to flit between them. The Irish political scientist Peter Mair described this as a ‘hollowing out’ of democracy, with citizens disconnected from political elites, and elites presiding over a socio-political ‘void’.
In the context of this de-alignment, a shift to full PR could risk accelerating a process of fragmentation, or even precipitate complete party system collapse. In the most extreme scenario, established parties could disappear entirely to be replaced not by durable successors, but by a series of hollow and transient personalist outfits. Failing to command any lasting loyalties amongst a hostile and cynical public, these start-up parties would spawn and die like mayflies over the course of single electoral cycles.
Such an outcome would pose major problems for political accountability. For a start, the inevitable coalition negotiations that would follow elections would not (as in the European countries where PR was first introduced in the early twentieth century) be bargaining processes between political representatives with enduring organic ties to distinct interest groups, but rather divisions of spoils between political entrepreneurs. Moreover, once in government, weak prospects for re-election would leave these parties with only limited incentives to act in the long-term public interest.
A case for the ‘double ballot’
Given these new risks, electoral reformers should begin exploring options for electoral system change that could address the central problems created by FPTP without inviting excessive political fragmentation. With parties no longer serving as socially embedded, representative institutions that can be trusted by their voters to represent them in coalition negotiations, it will be important to ensure that general elections conserve their ‘decisionist’ function, and that voters can use their ballots to make clear choices between alternative governments.
Some proportional electoral systems – such as those used in Ireland and Spain – have successfully supported healthy multi-party systems in which elections offer voters relatively clear choices between governments. But given the nature of the UK’s politics today, non-FPTP majoritarian systems could offer a better guarantee. In particular, there is now an especially strong case for the introduction of a French-style ‘double ballot’ system.
Under the French system, voters still elect representatives in single-member districts, but do so over two rounds. All candidates stand in the first round, but only those who pass a certain threshold of votes (typically around 15-20%) have the option of progressing to the second. Crucially, because multiple candidates often qualify, parties are encouraged to form alliances between the rounds with their preferred governing partners, agreeing on candidate withdrawals in each other’s favour.
The result of this system is that in the first round, voters are able to express a sincere preference without having to take tactical considerations into account. In the second round, with the parties having agreed their alliances, voters can then make a clear and informed choice between the alternative governing blocs now represented by the remaining candidates in their constituency. The system thus accommodates multi-partyism while letting electorates make clear and decisive choices. It allows smaller parties to use their bargaining power to secure parliamentary representation, while working against extremist forces (who are both likely to struggle to form alliances, and against whom voters for other parties can unite in the second round).
Such a system is perhaps uniquely suited to the current state of politics in the UK, where de-alignment has gone hand in hand with the emergence of ‘bloc politics’. Voters are now polarised into two values-based ‘blocs’ – one progressive, one conservative. However, within each bloc, voters are more than willing to flit between different parties – Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Greens in the case of the former, the Conservatives and Reform in the case of the latter. British politics is thus defined by two simultaneous contests: one within the blocs, and one between them.
A double ballot system in the UK would effectively give bloc politics institutional expression. At a general election, voters would be able to use the first round to vote honestly for their preferred party or candidate without fear of tactical consequences. In the second round, the necessity of making deals would force parties to be explicit about which other parties they preferred to work with, and voters would then be able to make a decisive choice between rival blocs. The system would thus accommodate the reality of multi-party politics, while preventing fragmentation from depriving general elections of their traditional ‘decisionist’ character.
Crucially, however, to properly explore such alternatives to FPTP, electoral reformers will need to abandon the monomaniacal focus on PR. Instead, they should look to encourage more substantive reflection on the potential interactions between different electoral systems and Britain’s current and future political dynamics, and on the kind of politics we want electoral reform to deliver.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
