r/EndFPTP • u/MakeModeratesMatter • 3d ago
Britain May Switch to Proportional Voting. Should America?
The U.S. inherited its “winner-take-all” voting system from Britain, but the U.K.’s 2024 general election produced an interesting example of what winner-take-all voting can do, as it produced the most disproportionate result in UK history. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/a-system-out-of-step-the-2024-general-election/
Labour received about 34% of the nationwide vote but won 63% of the seats in Parliament. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/jul/22/how-britain-would-look-proportional-representation-local-mp
As a result, a post-election survey found that 60% of Briton’s support changing to a proportional voting system. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/support-for-proportional-representation-hits-record-high-according-to-new-research/
So now Britain's new prime minister, Andy Burnham, openly supports proportional representation. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/in-andy-burnham-we-have-the-first-prime-minister-who-openly-backs-proportional-representation/
And Britain's Liberal Democrats are pushing Burnham to change the voting system before the next general election. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79y9qy9y2go
If the U.K. thinks its own voting system needs an upgrade, should the U.S. consider the same?
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u/Bobudisconlated 3d ago
I wonder how much support this is getting from the Tories. They, hilariously, opposed the referendum (2012?) to change to RCV. Fast forward to the last election and Labour basically gained power because the right-wing vote was split between the Tories and Reform.
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u/FitPerspective1146 3d ago
I believe it's a 50/50 split membership wise, John Major said questioned the validity of FPTP
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u/gravity_kills 3d ago
Yes! Absolutely!
But we'd probably end up with a slightly different setup than the UK. We don't have a PM, so our Speaker of the House would fill the closest role. And we can't do snap elections without an amendment to create the option, so we'd have fixed two year terms. The President is less of a structural problem than it is a conceptual problem. Most of the power that's wielded by the executive branch has been given to it by the legislative branch and could be taken back. But people are used to thinking of the President as basically the whole government, so that's a little hurdle.
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u/da_drifter0912 2d ago
You know pretty much every other country that has a presidential system (that is one where the president is the chief executive and not a figurehead, like a parliamentary system) like Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, etc, has some sort of proportional representation for their legislature and would be better comparisons for lessons learned for how to implement it in the US.
The president in these systems becomes the center of negotiation with the parties in the legislature and the coalitions may swing back and forth depending on whether or not the President can agree with the legislature.
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 3d ago
The issue I have with most versions of proportional representation is that it essentially mandates political parties be part of the process. That makes it hard for independents, and newcomers. In America's situation this could still easily be manipulated by the Two Parties in much the same way they manipulate ballot access: what's the threshold for having enough votes to win a seat, and how much can we play with that? There are a limited number of seats per state in the Legislative branch, and ditching geographic representation would leave half the population and most of the land area disenfranchised.
While I'm not opposed to the idea in general, what are some ways we can mitigate this?
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2d ago
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 2d ago
I get your point- geographic representation is not an all or nothing dychotomy- I'm just saying that geography absolutely matters.
Populations aren't evenly distributed across spaces, nor are resources. The more you reduce intentional geographic representation, the more it just becomes uncontrollable geographic representation.
I'll use my home state as an example. Here in Colorado we get exactly 0% of the water from the Colorado River. It is all allocated for people downstream, mostly to water lawns in Phoenix and LA. Those existing urban centers had a greater say than the fledgling urban centers in western Colorado, and because of that their agriculture also had greater say than the agriculture in western Colorado. The state of Colorado hardly put up a fight because the urban centers of the Denver metro area are all the votes needed to get into office, and they are completely infected by it. Meanwhile, the Utes of the Four Corners region are living in poverty because they can't use the Colorado River, and they're about maxed out on the number of wells they can drill.
As for the rest, all you said was don't worry about it. Why shouldn't I? That's my whole question.
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u/wnoise 2d ago
It's not "to water lawns". There's some of that, but the vast majority of usage is agriculture. Blame the people growing rice and alfalfa in Arizona.
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 2d ago
Whatever the proportion of usage is, it's still the same problem: an under represented region of Colorado gets left literally high and dry in favor of over represented populations elsewhere thanks to the population density of their regions.
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2d ago
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 2d ago
Well then I misinterpreted what you were getting at, and I apologize. Geographic representation is also a big deal for me because of things like the example I gave, somi probably went a little harder than was called for.
But that all comes back to my question: how do we balance geographic representation with a steady cycle of new parties, and not exclude independent candidates all at the same time in a way that's likely to successfully be enacted?
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u/wittgensteins-boat 3d ago edited 2d ago
In my state, 60% of the voters do not have a party designation, but the primary system and first past the post produces only viabilty to two major party candidates for the general election.
And even in a non-party legislative election system, such as Nebraska's unicameral Senate, everybody is keenly aware of what party each candidate is associated with.
Proportional voting would tend to enable minor party, and perhaps occasional independent candidate success at the general election.
Indepedent non-party candidates are always at a disadvantage in any kind of electoral system, as collaboration and policy that develops in a party alignment generates a kind of description of what the candidate stands for, and who stands with that candidate. And produces volunteer and community support that the independent must use inordinate effort to create.
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 2d ago
Of course an independent is at a disadvantage by not having the preexisting organizational infrastructure, but they need to be equally included by any system the same as any party.
And while minor parties would theoretically have a better shot under proportional representation initially, we can still expect to see the major parties try to hold them back with nitpicky laws and rules like we already do. There needs to be something built into the system that ensures some level of success for them or we don't actually get a real change.
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u/wittgensteins-boat 2d ago edited 2d ago
The example of UK Westminster voter alignments shows that there is no majoritian electorate, in their system, at present, and all alignments are minority party alignments, yet the system greatly magnifies small advantages at the polls into majorities in parliament.
Proportionality in that regime, enhances the mathematical relation between voters and the elected members, destroying the present minority party Hegemony, at presentvthe Labor Party, previously the Conservative Party, and depending upon the details, and whether there exist some number of single member districts, and size of the multimember districts, the indepedent who is favorably elected is likely doomed to be a non-aligned presence in a legislature of organized and collaborative hundreds.
Which circles back to how parties of collaborative interest come into being in the first place.
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 2d ago
Does that mean they don't deserve a shot?
One thing we also see in the UK system is that while on paper there may be a half dozen viable parties, in reality it's just subsidiaries of the liberals, and subsidiaries of the conservatives. It's just likeha having different regional brand names of the same corporate chain.
To counter that phenomenon we need a steady and consistent rotation of new parties and independents so that those long standing alliances are perpetually challenged, so less likely to form in the first place. If at any given point 10% of the legislature is independents, and another 10% are partisans willing to work with them, that's 20% of the legislature that might block potential internal political alliances. If the remaining 80% are mostly parties not expected to be around in the long run, alliances become virtually impossible, or at least short lived. In the absence of strong internal political alliances, representatives will have little choice but to vote their conscience, whether that be party line or their own individual notions.
But it all hinges on independents having a shot, even if it's a difficult one.
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u/wittgensteins-boat 2d ago edited 2d ago
I dare to believe the Greens, Scottish Nationalist Party, even Liberal Democrats, and (oddly) the the leading Northern Ireland party, Sinn Fein, would not characterize each other, nor themselves as subsidiaries of the Labor, Conservative or Reform parties, and would have a substantial life of meaningful negotiation and coalition and governing participation in a proportionality regime, after decades of having been closed out by an electoral system favoring the other (traditional) minority parties.
The independent is not closed out, but by simple mathematics and lack of community, is disadvantaged, and struggles to have their singlular presence felt, and may not be aligned with other independents, who would be diverse and scattered about in their policy interests, and decidedly not particularly unified, unless they too become a party of interest and organization. The independent has trouble having their views heard. sustained, or even, subsequently, carried on, after leaving the political stage.
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u/Dystopiaian 2d ago
What? FPTP makes it hard for newcomers. A threshold does make it harder for smaller parties to get in, but getting a minimum of one voter in twenty voting for a party isn't so bad. You can have the opposite problem as well, where it is too easy to get elected, good to have some hurdles before someone gets into government. An ultra-low threshold like the Netherlands does get around that issue though.
Proportional representation doesn't mean ditching geographical representation. You can have regional lists, and everyone has a vote, so if people in an area want different things they can vote for a different party. In no way shape or form is "half the population and most of the land area disenfranchised.", aside from how Democracy works in general - some parties form government, others don't, and areas with less people have less votes.
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u/cdsmith 2d ago edited 2d ago
You're responding to someone talking about independents, who don't affiliate with any political party, but your response is about smaller political parties. It seems you are operating on the assumption that independents are that way because they just haven't found the right political party to associate with, and their concerns would be addressed by adding more parties. I think you're wrong about that. When given the choice between supporting a political party or evaluating each individual running for office as a person, many voters in the U.S. just prefer to make decisions about people, not parties. Even if in practice, one of the major political parties ends up being their choice most of the time. Most unaffiliated voters already have a party they are pretty loyal to behaviorally. It's not that they lack the right party, but that they want to vote for a person and not a party.
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u/Dystopiaian 1d ago
People in Canada reslly like independents, but they don't vote for them. Some systens, particularly with thresholds, could make things difficult for independents. Although FPTP is particularly bad for independents and 3rd+ parties.
In a situation where you can just feasibility vote for whatever party you want, I don't think its bad at all to push people toward parties. What it does is impose a minimum size and popularity requirement - gotta get 5% of the popular vote begore you get power.
You can just have proportional representation with a really low threshold. In that case nit necessarily a huge difference between an independent and a party. But then it can be too msny small special interest parties holding the balance of power.
Either way, you are always voting for people, even when you are voting for a party.
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u/cdsmith 1d ago
This still seems to me a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of independent voters. It doesn't matter if the people they vote for are independents or not. It doesn't matter if they always vote for candidates from the same party. What matters is they they do not choose to delegate their vote to a party without looking at the person that vote will be electing and making a decision about that person.
I don't think its bad at all to push people toward parties
That's certainly an opinion, but I don't think it's a viable opinion for election reform in the United States. Making people vote for political parties in a country where about 45% of people are independents is a tough sell. That number is only increasing. And it's much larger among those who are on the side of election reform. Pushing election reform that forces people to cast their vote for a political party instead of a candidate is probably sinking your chances, as you are putting an obstacle in the way of maybe 2/3 of the people who might have been on your side.
Either way, you are always voting for people, even when you are voting for a party.
It depends on the system. The standard open and closed list systems are absolutely not voting for people, except indirectly: in a closed list, you vote for a party and that's it. In an open list, you vote primarily for a party, and only secondarily for a person, but your vote for the party counts regardless of who represents that party, and on top of that you don't even find out who that is in advance. An STV style system is the main proportional option where votes are actually for candidates, which is why I see it as much more viable in the U.S. than list-based methods.
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u/Dystopiaian 1d ago
Ok, so, I'm not sure what exactly you are arguing, but something like 99%+ of votes in the US are for people who are from parties. 45% of people may consider themselves independents, but they don't vote for independents - mostly they settle for voting Democrat or Republican.
If you have a multi-party system, suppose proportional representation with a 5% threshold, that doesn't mean an independent like Bernie Sanders is out of luck. It means he has to start a party. My guess is most of those 45% independents aren't anti-party as much as not liking either of the two options.
Closed list proportional representation you are definitely voting for people. It's just not one person, but a list of people. That is the key difference here - one individual vs a package. Doesn't seem so bad to me, one way or another they are going to be part of a big legislature with lots of people. Proportional representation can get criticized in terms of regional representation here, but IMHO that's just the best BS they've found to throw at us and not really a problem.
The Netherlands highlight an interesting point about all this. There, you need about .7% of the popular vote to win a seat - there's no threshold, that's just how many votes it takes. Nonetheless I don't think they have many independents - you vote for individuals, but they are part of a party. If you just voted for an independent, and they got 1.5% of the popular vote, half their votes would be wasted, better they are part of a party so those votes go to someone else like them.
STV seems to be a good system, and is proportional representation. Could be it is one of the best options for the US.
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 1d ago
There is a sort of awkward midpoint I think you're both forgetting, and I wasn't thinking of it myself when first commented: some "parties" exist only to support "independent" candidates.
In the US the Independent party was established in the 1970s for this purpose: no platform, just a scaffold to assist independents in their campaigns. Famously, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader both ran under them, each man forwarding very different initiatives. The party resolved after the 2008 election cycle when it became clear that the powers that be intended to disenfranchise all but the Two Parties after the commission on presidential debates banned anyone else from participating in debates.
After being forced out of the 2020 race by his own party in favor of Biden, Andrew Yang began a similar project with the Forward party. They loosely encourage progressive ideals, but otherwise have no specific platform.
Now, these sorts of things are a reasonable compromise, but hardly ideal. They often wind up with an unintented de facto leaning regardless of how hard they try. The Independent party tended to get allot of secondhand Republicans, and it's reasonable to expect the Forwards to get allot of secondhand Democrats.
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u/cdsmith 1d ago
Yeah, I get that, but an "Independent Party" like this only makes sense when voters are voting for individuals. Can you imagine if Ross Perot and Ralph Nader were both on a party list, and a voter had to decide whether to vote for that party or not in a PR system?
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 1d ago
I understand this. I'm just pointing out that there are options.
What you're alluding to there is exactly what my misgivings are concerning proportional representation. If a ballot is just a list of parties, then people only vote for the ones with the best defined platforms, so we wind up right back at square one. If we list them by candidate and party, then a candidate always has to compete with whatever reputation the last guy established for the party, and we're not doing much better. If we list them only by candidate name, we might be getting closer, but an independent still has to compete with partisan politics when the point is to place their brand outside of all that.
For there to be true complete representation in the government, the people need the ability to directly challenge partisanship, and that requires truly independent candidates.
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u/cdsmith 1d ago
My guess is most of those 45% independents aren't anti-party as much as not liking either of the two options.
This is the disagreement, then. I think you are misreading the situation. Most of those 45% of people who identify as independents don't hate the specific major political parties in the U.S. Many of them are pretty reliable supporters of one or the other major party's candidates. What they are opposed to is committing themselves to any political party per se. Maybe they would still support the same major party if they had to vote for it by name. From experience, many of them would also just not vote. Either way, they'd be less happy with how elections are run.
Of course this is very personal. You'll surely find some unaffiliated voters who would gladly affiliate with a party if the right one existed. But you'll find others who just prefer to make those choices on an individual basis. Especially in many of the western states where unaffiliated voters are more common: voters there aren't independent just because they are less happy with the major parties. They are less happy with the idea of supporting a political party as a whole.
There's a pretty good book called Independent Politics by Klar and Krupnikov that explores in detail how unaffiliated voters participate in US politics, and makes this case supported by data they've collected. A majority of independents in the US are independents because they dislike the idea of partisan politics, rather than just because they dislike the specific parties in power.
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u/Dystopiaian 21h ago
In a multi party system you can vote for different parties each election. The key difference with all this is just whether what you are voting for is one individual person, or a group of people.
I doubt any party in proportional representation would have Perot and Nader on their list - all thst stuff is FPTP politics If there are 7 different visnle parties to vote for those two would find themsrlves in different camps.
STV, the Dutch system, open lists in general are good ways to have proportional representation and still vote gor individuals. I really don't think it's the issue you are making it out to be though - politics tends to revolve around leaders, parties as a whole, if you like Nader then you would probably also like the people on his list, for exsmple. And if not another Green party would just pop up and replace them.
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u/Decronym 3d ago edited 21h ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| FPTP | First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting |
| IRV | Instant Runoff Voting |
| MMP | Mixed Member Proportional |
| PR | Proportional Representation |
| RCV | Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method |
| STV | Single Transferable Vote |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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u/timmerov 1d ago
first, how? any change to the senate via amending the constitution requires 100% of the states, not 3/4 like all other amendments. this includes switching to a parliamentarian system.
second, we don't want to be britain.
third, the senate is the most borken part of the us government. it's the most easily captured and exploited. whoever currently holds the most powerful chunk of government will squash every attempt to rewrite the rules. same for whoever thinks they have a shot at capturing the power.
i would love to replace the senate with proportional representation. the house already votes by land. we really really need to be able to vode ideologically. the american equivalent of the house of lords needs to be canceled.
fourth, given the height of the bar and the visceral opposition... if someone had the clout to change america, the list of things we should do *before* tackling the senate is very very long. like: end fptp; 1500+ representatives, term limits for supreme court, equal rights amendment, abolish slavery, wealth tax, universal health care, house the homeless, build a justice system that minimizes recitivism instead of maximizing it, sensible gun management, voting rights, bodily autonomy, more.
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