Recent polling suggests that if a UK general election were held tomorrow, no party would win more than thirty percent, but five parties would win more than ten percent of the vote. To use terms familiar to political scientists, we currently have a high effective number of vote-winning parties.
It’s hard to say how this would translate to seats given the single member district plurality (SMDP) system used in the UK.1 Many people are saying this. There are SMDP systems like India which have a high effective number of vote-winning parties, but they typically involve congeries of more predictable regional party systems.
Because such a high effective number of vote winning parties would be unprecedented, unpredictable, and very likely unwelcome for all, interest has grown in alternative electoral systems. Aided by one of the most disproportional elections ever, public support for proportional representation has reached record levels.
Unfortunately, “proportional representation” is not a single product that you can buy off-the-shelf. There are qualitative differences between systems: single transferable voting; varieties of mixed systems; and even differences between open and closed lists in the largest single family, that of of list proportional representation. There are also quantitative differences: systems of proportional representation with small districts (like Spain) work very differently to systems of proportional representation with a single nationwide district (like the Netherlands).
All of this is to say that any move to adopt proportional representation would have first to answer the question, “what kind of proportional representation”.
It’s therefore somewhat quixotic for David Klemperer to suggest that what we need is change the electoral system to another system from the majoritarian family.. David suggests that adopting the two-round system as used in France would be better than adopting proportional representation.
David describes his post as a provocation, and I consider myself provoked. I think David dismisses the benefits of PR, misunderstands French politics, and builds his reform proposal around a block politics which is a product of the present moment.
Are the benefits of PR overstated?
David writes:
“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”.
I don’t wish to defend all claims made in favour of PR. No doubt campaigning organisations present statistics on turnout in PR countries without any rigorous causal identification strategy. That’s a shame, because there is good evidence that PR boosts turnout and lowers inequality, evidence which by design rules out “contingent party system dynamics” or “historical circumstances”.
In France and Poland, researchers have used regression discontinuity designs to show that local elections held under proportional rules have higher turnout than local elections held under plurality rules. We know that this higher turnout is a consequence of the electoral rule, because the electoral rule is stipulated by a population threshold, and because local councils which just fall short of the population threshold don’t have different characteristics or histories to local councils which narrowly exceed the population threshold. PR boosts turnout by either 1.5 percentage points (France) or 4 percentage points (Poland).
This is high quality evidence. The evidence base for the positive effect of PR on turnout is, in my judgement, stronger than the evidence base for the negative effect of voter ID requirements on turnout. You can say that effects of one or four percentage points aren’t large: they are certainly small compared to the effects of David’s preferred solution of compulsory voting. But small does not mean negligible, and meaningful improvements in turnout can be achieved by many marginal gains.
Similarly, there are multiple studies which identify the effect of the adoption of PR upon inequality. Terminally online Britons may be used to the synthetic control method, since this is the method most commonly used to estimate the negative impact of Brexit on the UK economy. That same method has been used to estimate that New Zealand’s adoption of PR meaningfully increased the amount of redistribution. Other studies have used historical transitions to PR, finding that Norwegian councils which were required to use PR redistributed more and that Swiss cantons which switched to PR started spending more on public health programmes [reducing child mortality](https://docs.iza.org/dp12729.pdf.
Does this proposal match what’s happening in French politics?
David writes:
“The French system… 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)”
The two-round system is not unique to France, but France has held more democratic elections under the two-round system than any other country. According to Bormann and Golder, between 1919 and 2020 France held seventeen democratic legislative elections under the two-round system. No other country using that system held as many, and many of the remaining countries are either very small (Comoros: six elections 1992-2020; Kiribati: 12 elections 1982-2020) or have since ceased to be democracies (Mali: seven elections 1992-2020). If French politics has a strongly “decisionist” character, that would be prima facie evidence that the two-round system is conducive to “decisionism”.
Unfortunately for David’s argument, contemporary French politics doesn’t demonstrate much evidence of “decisionism”, and the description given above would cause even a Dr. Pangloss to shrink back. The most recent legislative election created a tripolar legislature where a governing “centrist” block is opposed by groupings on the far left and far right. It yielded the shortest-lived French government ever – quite an achievement for those of us required, willing or not, to study the record of the Fourth Republic – and the current Prime Minister (the same guy as the previous Prime Minister) lurches from no-confidence motion to no-confidence motion
One might be generous, and describe the current period of ongoing crisis as an anomaly resulting from Macron’s decision to call a snap election in 2024. But this generosity benefits the giver more than the receiver: if we can say that some negative effects only appeared under the two round system due to the President, then we can also say that any positive effects under a two round system might also be due to the presidency. Legislative elections held shortly after presidential elections benefit from presidential coat-tails or a honeymoon effect. French legislative elections are almost always held shortly after presidential elections. It seems at least possible that the presidential election shapes the legislative election and makes any government formation process much simpler.
In summary: the most obvious example of politics under a two-round system doesn’t display lots of decisionism, and the decisionism it does display might be a result of a directly elected president rather than the electoral system.
More generally, I have a visceral negative aesthetic reaction to the two-round system and the fragmentation it creates relative to either first-past-the-post or the alternative vote. I have spent enough time creating placeholder categories for “divers gauche” and “divers droit”: I do not need any more of it.
This block can fit so many parties
One starting point for the proposal is the claim that British electoral politics is becoming “block politics”, with greater attachment to “left” or “right” than the parties which make up those blocks. Nothing is new under the sun, and block politics has always been with us. What does seem new is the absence of a clearly dominant party within each block. It’s this feature which threatens to cause chaos in the translation of votes to seats.
Although I dislike first-past-the-post, I think it’s wrong to hold the current high effective number of vote-winning parties as an argument against it. We might be in an out-of-equilibrium position because no party is dominant within its block. But out-of-equilibrium positions can return to equilibrium if the system is allowed to continue in operation. If we have an election with a very high effective number of parties, it’s very hard for the distribution of seats within each bloc to be proportional: it would require a very particular electoral geography. Each block would likely find its dominant party through the crushing operation of the plurality rule. I’d like electoral reform to be based on the general statement that SMDP treats some voters much better than others.
The converse of this is that it’s probably not a good idea to pick an electoral system based on a pattern of vote shares found in contemporary opinion polls three years out from the most likely date of the next general election. The current distribution of vote intention is a product of the electoral system; if we were to have a different electoral system, we’d have a difference distribution of vote intention, and possibly a different set of relevant parties. If people were like sticks of Blackpool rock marked “left block” or “right block”, then a two-round system would be a good choice. But most of what people think is structured by idiosyncratic and instability, rather than ideology.
Conclusion
I don’t know what electoral system is best for the UK. If I could decide unilaterally, I’d choose closed list proportional representation with district magnitude of between three and five. I’d accept most other systems of proportional representation, up to and including mixed systems which are sometimes not so proportional. But the two round system is one of the few systems I think is worse than first-past-the-post. If anyone wants to come out in favour of multimember plurality, you could troll me worse than David has, but the game might not be worth the candle.
Footnotes
I don’t like to call this system first-past-the-post, because it implies the existence of a set finishing line.↩︎