Should the UK Change Its Electoral System?
The UK's FPTP electoral system is not meeting the challenges of the modern political era, and calls to switch to a proportional system are growing louder. What would that mean for the UK?
The Labor Government of PM Keir Starmer is rapidly losing support. Starmer’s unpopularity and low trust in Britain’s other traditional party, the conservative Tories, have given other parties room to grow, but the current electoral system in the UK may be unfit for such a moment. The debate for electoral reform is already underway.
For a while, it looked like the far-right UK Reform party was the only political party that could benefit from the decline in trust British voters have in their traditional parties. Reform overtook both the Tories and the Labor Party and is now comfortably ahead, polling at 29%. This is where the UK’s electoral system plays a crucial role. In a system with a proportional vote, where each party gets the percentage of votes it won in the election as seats in parliament, Reform would still be well short of a majority and would have to seek a coalition partner. But in the UK’s current First-past-the-post (FPTP) system, where each constituency votes for a member to send to parliament, some parties get a significantly lower share of seats than their nationwide result would grant them, just by not being concentrated in a certain geographical area. The winner of the election, on the other hand, tends to overperform its vote share. In 2024, the Labor Party won a clear and outright majority of seats, despite winning “just” 35% of the vote. This system is similar to the one used in the elections for the US House of Representatives, although it works better in the US, as there are only two major parties. For a long time, this might have been true for the UK as well, with the Conservatives and Labor dominating the political landscape, but as polls show a closer race between multiple parties, the current electoral landscape is at risk of becoming unrepresentative of the will of the people. This already rang true in 2024, an election that produced the least proportional result in British history.
The public debate on electoral reform is picking up steam. A recent poll showed that 49% of Britons support switching to a proportional system, while only 26% want to keep the current FPTP system. A majority of voters from the Greens, New Democrats, Reform, and Labor all support the switch.
Labor currently holds governing power, and while the pressure on Starmer to pass electoral reform - his own party supports it - has been building, the Prime Minister has so far not weighed in on the issue. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that the system greatly favored Labor in the 2024 election, but now Reform is leading the polls and might win a single-party majority due to FPTP.
You can switch between the pie charts below to get a grasp of how starkly different the results of a general election would look if the UK were to move to a proportional electoral system (results are based on current polls).
As you can see, Reform UK gets a comfortable majority with 54% of all seats with 30% of the vote under the current electoral system. That majority fades away when looking at the proportional distribution.
Under this system, no single party would currently reach a majority, and a coalition would have to be formed, something many Brits are wary about, as about half of them still prefer single-party rule. But the stability that this system promised voters has not materialized in recent years. While coalitions between two or more parties can create a lot of headaches, they also offer chances to compromise and find solutions that a broad majority of voters support. Under the current electoral system, a party with 30% of support can govern without having to make concessions to the other parties and their voters.
As you can see in the election chart above, there are two probable coalitions that currently fall just short of a slim majority under the proportional system. The Reform + Conservative coalition would get around 48% of the seats (27% of British voters say they support such a coalition, while 59% oppose it).
The alternative on the opposite side, with the center-left coalition of Labor, New Democrats, and the Green Party, could be the other viable option. Based on current polls, the three parties also fall short of a majority with 47% of the seats threshold. Nevertheless, British Voters have a more favorable view of this center-left coalition (38% support it, 46% oppose it). Both coalitions are probable and could have a good chance of winning a majority in a proportional election. Based on the current polls, however, both would need the Scottish National Party as a kingmaker.
These almost evenly balanced coalitions in the proportional scenario show that the UK has not drifted that far to the right, as the seat projections of the FPTP system might suggest. Britons are evenly split between parties of the right and parties of the left.
Starmer has the political power to trigger electoral reform and move the UK towards a fairer and proportional system. The “First Past The Post” system always greatly favors the party that’s ahead in the polls, which often leads to that party winning an outright majority. Then you have a party in power that doesn’t want to change the electoral system that brought them there in the first place, but Starmer’s and Labor’s electoral chances look dire, so they have no political gain in keeping the FPTP system. On the contrary, they have all the reasons to scrap it.
Local Representation
The current FPTP electoral system in the UK, while flawed, also has an important perk. The constituency-based system ensures that every local constituency has an elected member in parliament. A representative they can contact or talk to. Someone who has to face the same local voters for re-election, creating a sense of community and, by that, a more participatory political culture. So, should the British therefore forget about any proportional election systems? Not quite, because there are ways to combine the perks of both systems.
The German electoral system is proportional. Each party receives its share of seats based on the percentage it won nationwide. Yet, Germany also has electoral districts with local representatives that are elected simultaneously with a FPTP system. How does this work?
Voters can make two crosses when electing a new parliament in Germany. With the first cross, they elect a representative for their district to parliament, just like under the UK’s FPTP system. The seat allocation of that first vote would be disproportionate to the actual nationwide result of the election, which is determined by the 2nd cross voters make on their ballot. To ensure that both votes fulfill their purpose, parliament is first filled with almost all candidates who won the direct mandate in their district. Then the seats are filled up with listed members of the parties until the final seat allocation matches the proportional result of the election. I say almost all candidates who won their district get a seat, because there was a rule change. The “adding up” of seats until the seat allocation was proportional to the election results caused the German parliament to grow in size until it became the 2nd largest parliament in the world. The last SPD-led Government of Olaf Scholz passed an electoral reform that capped the maximum seats in parliament to 630 to stop this costly trend.
In Germany, parties also need to surpass the 5% threshold to gain representation in parliament. A rule that mainly exists to avoid a splintering political landscape with dozens of parties in parliament. There is, however, a rule that allows a party to secure its percentage of seats, even if it fails to meet the 5%-threshold, as long as its local candidates win three or more constituencies in the FPTP vote. Such a rule would protect regional parties in the UK, like the SNP or the PLC (Party of Wales).
In the current era, after Labor Conservatives ’ long dominance, the UK is rapidly evolving towards the multi-party landscape we know from Germany. To ensure fair elections that represent the will of the people, it might be time to move to a similar system of proportionality. One that reflects the national vote while also maintaining local representation.