Foreign Perspectives

Proportional representation (PR) voting is seen by some as “the” answer to all the woes of the current first past the post system used in the main UK elections.

However, there’s a bit of a problem with that… there’s no single PR voting scheme. Almost all of the time the proposals for a referendum on PR completely ignore this. For one thing, the referendum wouldn’t be a straight yes/no thing but rather a choice between anything from one to a dozen or more different systems. So many in fact that the referendum would itself need to be run on a PR basis which in turn would raise the problem that if it was PR, then doesn’t that then imply that the elections should be as well?

What is clear is that any PR style system would require the current constituencies to be grouped. Why? Well, if you ran with them as-is then in almost all cases the system would produce results exactly like that of the current system (they’d generally differ in constituencies producing a close-run outcome). Thus, in cities you’d get east, west and central amalgamated with the same three seats returned but each one representing the whole city. That amalgamation aspect is one of the problems as it lessens the representative role of each MP and ties them more to their respective parties. That’s good in some ways as you could have, say, all three main parties elected in a given city and so if you wanted to contact “your” MP you’d have a choice of all three though you’d be much less likely to know them personally.

We’re currently seeing one of the less desirable aspects of PR ie the horse-trading required after an election to establish a coalition. That there would be coalitions of necessity isn’t certain though as it’s quite possible that people would simply vote for only their preferred party. Ironically, despite PR being the preferred option for the Liberal Democrats they might not finish off any better in terms of seats than they do currently. In fact, nobody can really predict what would happen over the longer term and short-term people are quite likely to simply vote only for their first preference which would produce the same result as the system we have now.

What does seem quite clear is that people in general think that there is only one version of PR and that’s simply not the case.