May elections will show voting systems matter
This May’s local and devolved elections will be read in many ways. A referendum on the Westminster government. A cry for change. A challenge to the Union. These are big issues. They deal with the who, what, and why of politics.
Less prominent, but no less consequential, will be the matter of how. How voters express their choices. These elections will be a live experiment in voting systems.
Across Britain, voters will head to the polls under three different sets of rules. In Wales, seats will be allocated proportionally in multi-member regions. In Scotland, a mixed system will combine winner-takes-all constituencies with proportional top-up seats. In England, local councillors will be elected under First Past the Post.
The results will show, side by side, what those differences mean in practice. Simply put, proportional systems try to match seats to votes. Majoritarian systems do not.
In Wales, a new proportional system - however flawed - will ensure voters broadly get what they voted for.
Polling suggests a toss-up between Plaid and Reform for top spot. Either scenario will be politically seismic (Labour has dominated Welsh politics for a century). But in neither case will it mean a single party majority. Why? Because topping the poll is not the same as taking all the power.
Under proportional systems, parties win representation in line with the support they receive. Voters decide the balance of the chamber. If support, as looks likely, is split across several parties, the Senedd will reflect that.
The message to politicians is clear: recognise and work with the mandate voters have actually given you.
Scotland’s hybrid system - part majoritarian, part proportional - will present a mixed picture. The SNP look well placed to sweep the single-member constituency contests. Under a pure First Past the Post system, Holyrood would be a sea of SNP yellow.
The multi-member regional seats will act as a counterweight to this sort of disproportionality. While not eliminating the SNP’s winner’s bonus, they will pull the final result back towards the balance of opinion expressed by Scotland’s voters.
Contrast this with the picture in England. Here, First Past the Post will run unchecked.
The record for the council candidate elected with the lowest ever share of the vote is likely to be broken. Parties may win commanding majorities on as little as a quarter of the vote. Others may secure substantial support and end up with next to nothing.
In an era of two-party politics, winner-takes-all elections made a degree of sense. But that is not the era we live in. In today’s fragmented political system, England’s local councils could bear little resemblance to how residents actually voted.
Defenders of the status quo may cling to hope that this is a passing phase. All the evidence suggests that is false hope. Multi-party competition, in the words of Professor Rob Ford, “is here to stay.”
In the last four months, YouGov’s regular voting intention polling has seen, on average, five parties within 11 points of each other. Voters show no interest in a return to two-party voting.
Wales and Scotland offer constructive ways of dealing with that political reality. England - and Westminster - do not. They should take their heads out of the sand.
Among the many lessons politics watchers and practitioners will take from these May elections, this should not be overlooked. We’re about to see which electoral systems still make sense for the politics Britain actually has.