In recent decades, Britain has evolved into a multi-party system, but it still has an electoral system designed for only two parties. From an American perspective, David Schleicher argues that if the UK decides not to reform its electoral system, it should enact laws to encourage US-style party primaries and pass rules that discourage the development of multiple parties.
At first glance, the United States and Britain have largely similar electoral systems. Like the United States, Britain uses single-member districts and the ‘first-past-the-post’ (FPTP) or ‘plurality’ system for counting votes – the party with the largest vote in each locality wins. This means that third- or fourth-party votes are ‘wasted’ – they don’t go towards determining the winner between the top two candidates in any given district. This punishing of third parties is not a glitch, it’s a feature. The goals of Britain’s voting system (and ours) are to produce clear choices for voters, to create majority winners, and to force coalition-building among voters inside parties, rather than in Parliament between parties. That is, in order for a FPTP system to work, it needs to punish third parties.
However, British politics has become completely maladapted to its voting system. It now has multi-party politics with a two-party electoral system. This produces all of the harms of having FPTP with none of the benefits, and none of the benefits of a proportional representation (PR) system either. Unless it chooses to adopt a PR or some PR variant, Britain should pass election laws that go beyond merely keeping FPTP in place, and instead will actively help iron out its multi-party system into a simpler two-party one.
Put another way for the political scientists out there, Duverger’s Law is normative, and not merely positive. The Law is named after the famous French political scientist Maurice Duverger, and it claims that political systems with single-member districts and FPTP vote counting systems will develop two party systems. In countries with such systems in the 1950s – the USA, Britain, Canada, etc, – Duverger argued that voters do not want to waste their votes supporting small parties that cannot win. Perhaps more importantly, candidates, donors and activists do not want to cast in their lot with parties that do not have a chance of winning power.
Duverger’s Law is more of a tendency than a ‘law.’ The USA still has a two-party system, and Britain did for most of the 19th century and from 1945 to 1970, but does not today. Canada has a four party system. It now seems clear that adopting first-past-the-post voting alone does not guarantee anything about the shape of a country’s politics. Recently this blog noted that all of the main ‘Westminster model’ countries in the UK mould now have hung Parliaments.
However, reducing Duverger’s Law to a weakly predictive observation ignores what should be its most important aspect, that it should also be considered a normative argument — and a good one at that. If a country uses FPTP, the electoral system should discourage voters from wasting their votes, and should channel competition and talent into the two major parties. Further, the normative aspects of Duverger’s Law will become highly relevant for the UK if voters reject reform at the May 2011 referendum. If Britain is going to stick with first-past-the-post vote counting, it is should recognize that it is costly to have third, fourth or smaller parties, either at the district level or nationally.
What makes Duverger’s law a compelling normative argument is that it allows FPTP to work. A two-party system will produce certain democratic goods. Centrally, it makes it easier for voters to assign responsibility for things they like and don’t like, and so it accordingly generates increased accountability for politicians. Further, it provides the population with the ability to choose between two possible majority coalitions, giving the electorate the ability to make the final crucial decision about who will govern.
Voters often have little direct information about the policy stances of individual politicians and have little ability to assess them, following politics in a haphazard way. They notice things here and there about how the country is doing or what politicians have recently done. In Morris Fiorina’s famous term, voters develop ‘running tallies’ of party performance and then use these to determine their vote. As long as parties are relatively consistent over time, and voters can tie specific observations about what they see in the world to a party, then these tallies can provide a pretty good guide to whether a governing party has done well or poorly.
A two-party system makes the development of running tallies substantially easier. Voters face a clear choice. And having only a single party in power at any time makes assigning responsibility easier. Further, it promotes accountability. Politicians in power know that they will be held accountable for what happens – not their coalition partners or anyone else.
Finally, FPTP gives voters the ability to make the final decision about who will govern. In a two-party system, governing coalitions still have to be formed but they are formed before the vote, inside each of the two major parties. Unlike in multiparty systems, voters choose between already-formed coalitions inside each main party, rather than choosing among parties that then go to Parliament to form coalitions (as the UK parties did in the aftermath of the 2010 general election). This is the central difference between PR systems and FPTP systems – whether coalition building is done before or after the election. If it works, a two-party system produces a majority winner, whereas PR systems produce a representative legislature than then produces a majority coalition.
Political scientists have engaged in an endless debate about whether FPTP or PR is better. However, having a multi-party system with FPTP voting provides neither the benefits of a two-party system nor the benefits of proportional representation. Although there are many parties, they do not receive seats in Parliament equal to their support in the population, thus providing decidedly unproportional representation. But the goals of FPTP aren’t achieved either. Voters do not face a clear choice, because they have to decide between rival opposition parties and will have difficulty figuring out who in a coalition government is responsible for government policy. And multi-party elections in a FPTP system do not produce majority winners, so we don’t know which coalition is favoured nationally. Even at the local level, most MPs can also no longer draw on the legitimacy of having majority local backing.
In fact, it is such a bad state of affairs that you wonder how it came to this. Why do voters continue to support the Liberal Democrats? I suspect the reason has to do with weak internal party democracy in the two major UK parties, the Conservatives and Labour. The Liberal Democrats were formed in 1988 from a merger of the Liberal party and the Social Democrats, a moderate off-shoot from the Labour Party. If Labour had been able to hold one-person-one-vote primary elections, there might never have been this split.
Britain just began experimenting with holding primary elections in 2009, but the change has made little headway yet. The absence of the ability to do this has led to groups who were sufficiently unhappy with both parties that they would chance their preferred party losing power in order to make a point (or have a chance of creating a hung parliament.) This doesn’t happen in the United States, outside of Presidential campaigns (where in 3 of the last 8 elections we have seen strong third party candidates). For instance, in this election cycle, the ability of Tea Party supporters to contest and win Republican primaries has quelled talk of a third-party consisting of Tea Partiers.
Elsewhere I have been skeptical of the degree to which primaries express voter policy preferences. There are no parties internal to the Democrats and Republicans and so voters can’t use party labels when voting in primaries. This leaves voters relatively uninformed, without the ability to translate their haphazard observations into a retrospective policy-based vote. And so policy preferences don’t play much of a role in most American primaries. But primaries do still have benefits. Particularly, they draw the energies of interest groups, donors and candidates into the two-party system and away from third parties. And this allows America’s FPTP system to work well.
The discussion in Britain is currently whether to abandon first-past-the-post for proportional representation, or more immediately whether to opt for the half-way house of the Alternative Vote at the May 2011 referendum. But there is another option, and a key one if voters say ‘No’ to change. Labour and the Conservatives could agree to pass rules that would make FPTP work much better – rules requiring main parties to hold primary elections in each district, giving dissident groups the ability to contest elections within parties rather than through third parties. And they could pass other rules that discourage third party development. For instance, the US Supreme Court has permitted all sorts of state government limitations on third parties – such as bans on fusion, or keeping small third parties out of public television debates – that funnel political energies into the two party system. And as I argued here, it is a good thing they do.
For the United States the implications are also clear. If we persist in having FPTP elections, then our election laws should ensure that citizens get the real benefits of using that system. They should encourage a healthy competitive atmosphere inside the top two parties, so that interest groups and lobbies try to succeed inside the two-party system. And we should keep the oft-criticized rules that discourage the development of national third parties. Abandoning these rules, or closing up our primaries, would lead us Americans to where Britain is today.
This blog is an updated version of David Schleicher, ‘Why Britain likes to party too much’, http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-britain-loves-to-party-too-much.html
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But Mr. Schleicher is correct, the US could never change their election system. The US is such a diverse society, imagine a party catering to hispanics, or afro americans, people like Schleicher would never want that to happen. Its good for well off white americans to have two mainly identical parties.
This blog shows a big ignorance of British politics! I agree with Oliver: you think the growth of people voting Lib Dem is because of a break down in Labour party democracy? The Liberals were doing well in the 70s and if anything their success in votes – due to a whole range of factors – helped put pressure on Labour that in turn contributed to the underlying pressures within Labour that caused the split. You’ve got it the wrong way around, their success did not follow the split, it was already there. And thinking British politics is just about the House of Commons places you firmly in the camp of people who think the Westminster Model still applies to the UK or that it still could. The changes to the way the British people vote are part of a bigger series of changes that fiddling the electoral system for the House of Commons will do nothing to stop. DC is right, this stinks of a one-party system: the Lab-Con party system desperate to hold onto a system that they have a vested interest in. Did you miss the part in the general election 2010 when there was a degree of shock at the idea the Liberal Democrats could get the second most votes but still come third in terms of seats? That shock helped put the need for electoral reform on the agenda and while it might not be enough to carry it through to a successful result at a referenda it should stand as a warning that changing the system to uphold support for just two parties would cause a real stink.
Great article, I’ll have to read it again when I have more time. In Canada we have had three major parties for a long time, since the 50s or so and had four parties that get many elected seats since the 80s as well as a party that never gets any seats but still wins 8-12% of the vote. So I’d say Duverger’s Law is pretty much dead. If people have enough desire for change and for multiple points of view no system will force them to pick between two choices.
I had hoped you spend more time filling in the other alternative which is to scarp FPTP altogether. There are strong arguments that even an ideal FPTP system with america’s primaries and more wouldn’t be as good as even an adequately running PR system with reasonable thresholds, public party financing and multimember ridings. It seems you analysis is that we can either entrench further with FPTP and make it as good as it can be or drop it and introduce other reforms. This is fair, I just think those two options needs to be explored more fully as well as their ramifications.
thanks
This is an interesting analysis, although I personally disagree strongly with it’s recommendations. I’d be grateful if the author could explain how the changes he proposes would fit with the other electoral systems now in play in the UK. The argument above views electoral politics in the UK through the House of Commons and nothing else. For the past decade the UK has been a laboratory for electoral systems. You make no mention of how the changes you propose would deal with the consequences of the systems setup in Scotland, Wales, London, for the European Parliament and what may happen with an elected house of lords. You also ignore how people vote in local government elections where no overall control is a very common result. I suppose we should leave N Ireland out for the sake of avoiding a real headache. Are they also to be subject to the changes you propose or do you think they don’t matter and concentrating efforts on the electoral system for the Commons will do the job?
As for the argument that people vote for other parties such as the Lib Dems or SNP because of failings in internal party democracy, did you fail to notice things such as the Iraq War (supported by both labour and conservative leaderships) or wider changes in the way the British voter now shops around with political parties? Or even that before the SDP split and Lib-SDP alliance the liberals were already getting millions of votes but few seats. Yes, the Commons is a 2.5 party system, but is this the case beyond the House of Commons? Would making the changes you propose put the cat back in the bag? I’m not sure they would and politically could be seen as nothing more than the Conservatives and Labour trying to prop up an electoral system that serves them and them alone. I would like to write more but my phones battery is running out!
Interesting perspective.
I think you’re right that if we keep FPTP we ought to look to improve it, but the picture you paint of American electoral democracy as a vibrant marketplace of ideas seems a little too rosey. Yes, primaries allows serious battles to be fought within parties, but are these fought mainly over policy/ideology or is it often just a money/personality thing?
It is important that third parties have the chance to succeed, because the electoral damage they do to major parties forces the establishment to listen to emerging viewpoints. The Eurosceptic movement in the UK has been more effective as a separate party (UKIP) than as a wing of the Conservative Party.
The lack of ‘whipping’ in American party politics perhaps makes internal factions more powerful, but I would still argue that effective, rational policy debate is more achievable in a multi-party system.
Theres nothing in this article that couldn’t be an argument for a one-party system. After all, as long as there are primaries…US ballot access laws, along with its judicially sanctioned gerrymandering, are the secular equivalent of the Iranian Guardians Council
No, we do not have a multi-party system. To have a multi-party system, each party must have a reasonable chance of gaining power; the Lib Dems have done this ONCE and as part of a coalition. And with the way polls are going, they will not be a key part in the future. We have a two-and-a-half party system at most.
As for primaries, this has been a government idea for a while, so why you’re reporting it now, I don’t know.