Some of this is necessary because policies can be interdependent, especially when it comes to financing. If I were to choose the policies I’d like personally, like most people I’d probably opt for high-spending ones with no taxation to support them. That, of course, however desirable, is not practical. It would bankrupt the country very quickly.

The bundling of policies is therefore not necessarily a bad thing in itself, though it obviously limits choice. The best way to facilitate more choice might therefore be to have more bundles with a greater range of diversity between them. That would translate to more parties, and here we come to an obvious challenge. The current electoral system is not designed for a large number of parties. It is only really ideal for handling a choice between two candidates per constituency. With a third party it starts to become less suitable, and with multiple parties it shows an inadequacy which almost negates the most basic principles of democracy: the choice of the people.

The Electoral System

If we are to have a multitude of parties and the electorate is to choose fairly between them, we need an electoral system capable of resolving the choice of the majority when votes are divided between five or six candidates, or even more. First-past-the-post fails miserably. With six candidates, an equal vote for each candidate would yield just 16.7% of the vote each. That means it would be possible to win the seat with just 16.8% if the other candidates all got the same. That might be extreme, but even if one candidate lost the deposit with 4%, another got 12%, a third 18%, the fourth got 19%, and the fifth 22%, the winner would still need only 25% to be elected. Winning the election when only a quarter of the electorate voted for that candidate is clearly unfair and can hardly be considered democracy in action. First-past-the-post delivers MPs with the largest minority of votes which, beside being far short of a majority, can also be influenced by how similar or different candidates are. If candidates three and four were similar so voters found difficulty choosing between them, the 37% of the electorate who wanted one of those would be beaten by the 25% who wanted someone radically different. Tactical voting could easily change the outcome, but only if it mostly went one way. The process starts to look less like a rational decision by the majority and more like a game of chance in which what mattered was whether the gambles various voters played paid off!

Proportional Representation

Proportional Representation is often suggested as an alternative to the current system, but this term is difficult to define and achieve, and is also not without its problems. No system can be perfect because achieving an exact proportion of the population in a fixed number of representatives cannot be done; rounding errors must occur. However, representation has other purposes than mere proportionality. It also needs to achieve good governance, stability, wise policy choices which broadly reflect the will of the majority while protecting minorities from oppression. One advantage often claimed for the present system is that, however unrepresentative parliament might be of the population, it usually has a clear majority which ensures the government can get its business through the House. Others would see that as a distinct disadvantage if policies being implemented are not wanted by most people on the receiving end. They might argue a little more difficulty would be welcome. In its most extreme forms, Proportional Representation can deliver coalitions dependent entirely on the consent of a tiny or extremist minority, forcing their policies through against the will of the rest of the government, because it needs their support to make up the numbers. It was such a coalition arrangement which brought the Nazis to power in pre-war Germany, since they refused to join unless they had two key jobs in the cabinet including the chancellery. Those key jobs enabled them to seize power when a national emergency arose, which it soon did when Hitler decided the Reichstag fire was such an emergency. By increasing the need for such coalitions, Proportional Representation can therefore be less a guarantor of democracy than its undoing if poorly implemented.

Proportional Representation is a term covering a wide variety of systems. A simple form might be to abolish constituencies and allow parties to nominate a list of candidates in order of preference. Seats would then be allocated according to the proportion of the national votes. In a 650-member parliament a party with 10% of the vote would get 65 members. One with 40% would get 260, and so on. However, this has the problem discussed above, that if numbers are close, a party with only 10 members, representing just 1.54% of the vote, might be able to dictate its terms for giving support. We would then have the same shortcoming as first-past-the-post amplified over tenfold and applied after the election when the public would have no mechanism for providing input.

Another idea might be to have larger constituencies with more than one member. However, unless the constituencies were very large, perhaps representing whole regions, they would have insufficient resolution to capture proportions of votes with any accuracy. If the regions were very big they would raise the same problem as the whole-country constituency, and if they are only perhaps four or five members constituencies they would only be able to produce a very rough approximation. That might still amount to an improvement although it could be negated if people have, as they do at Council elections, as many votes as there are seats. This would favour larger parties with more members available to stand, making for a very long ballot paper with several candidates for each party. Although voters could choose how to distribute their votes it's likely they would vote consistently for candidates from the same party.

An alternative to multiple votes would be a single transferable vote, in which once candidates gain their quota of votes the remaining proportion of their votes is allocated to the voters’ second choice. If no candidate gains the quota on the first count, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated and those votes are allocated instead to the voters’ second-choice candidates.

Single Transferable Vote has advantages in that it eliminates both the need and the effect of tactical voting. People can vote for their real first choice knowing that if that person is eliminated their vote will automatically go to their second choice, and so on, until all seats are filled. The main disadvantage of STV is the complexity of the count if there is more than one seat in the poll. It is very difficult to count manually because of the complex arithmetic involved, so ballot papers would need to be in a machine-readable form for processing by computer.

There is no inherent need to combine STV with multi-member constituencies. It could be used with single-member constituencies, in which its main effect would be to ensure the elected member had some support from a genuine majority of the electorate, though not necessarily as a first choice. If applied to the second sample result above, where voters found difficulty distinguishing two similar candidates, the count would have gone as follows:

1. Since no candidate got 50% of the vote +1, the one with 4% would be eliminated. Let’s assume the associated second preference votes went to the other candidates in the same proportion as the other voters. (This would not necessarily be the case but let’s keep the example simple.) The result would be as follows:

   Candidate	Original vote	Redistributed vote	Resulting vote
   2	12%	0.04×12%÷0.96	12.5%.
   3	18%	0.04×18%÷0.96	18.75%
   4	19%	0.04×19%÷0.96	19.792%
   5	22%	0.04×22%÷0.96	22.917%
   6	25%	0.04×25%÷0.96	26.042%

2. There is still no overall winner so now Candidate 2 is eliminated. If the votes are then redistributed to the remaining four candidates, again in the same proportions for this round also:

   Candidate	Original vote	Redistributed vote	Resulting vote
   3	18.75%	0.125×18.75%÷0.875	21.429%
   4	19.792%	0.125×19.792%÷0.875	22.619%
   5	22.917%	0.125×22.917%÷0.875	26.191%
   6	26.042%	0.125×26.042%÷0.875	29.762%

3. Candidates 3 and 4 had such similar policies voters had difficulty distinguishing them, so it is likely each voter who chose one of them for 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd preference chose the other for the next. For simplicity, let’s assume they all did:

   Candidate	Original vote	Redistributed vote	Resulting vote
   4	22.619%	21.429	44.048%
   5	26.191%	0	26.191%
   6	29.762%	0	29.762%

4. There is still no winner, but candidate 5 is now the one to be eliminated. If we assume, once again, votes are distributed among the other two candidates in the proportion they now hold:

   Candidate	Original vote	Redistributed vote	Resulting vote
   4	44.048%	0.26191×44.048%÷0.73809	59.678%
   6	29.762%	0.26191×29.762%÷0.73809	40.323%

   Finally, we have a winner, and it’s candidate 4. There is the usual rounding error in the last decimal place but this does not affect the outcome.

Of course, many other permutations of votes are possible and this example just demonstrates how Single Transferable Vote would distinguish between a candidate who might be the first choice of a quarter of the electorate and have some support from 40% from one who is the first choice of 19% but has some support from nearly 60%. It also demonstrates how popular causes are not weakened by multiple candidates splitting the vote, which under the current system advantages those with minority views over a broader consensus, and how the resulting need for tactical voting can be eliminated.

Some would point out that Single Transferable Vote is not true proportional representation because it gives no direct representation to those whose first-choice candidates were not elected. It still provides an element of compromise in the final selection. Others would argue that is a strength because it also reduces the risk of tiny minorities holding the majority to ransom by making government unworkable unless they get their way. I personally would side with the latter group, but there is obviously room for debate. What is clear is that it ensures an elected representative can represent more than the largest of many minorities and provide a member on which the majority can compromise. That is surely a preferable result.

Single-member v. multi-member constituencies

Those who champion the current electoral system will often point to the unique relationship it provides between MPs and their constituents. They identify other systems with multi-member constituencies where they argue that link is lost. Proponents of multi-member constituencies will counter with the increased choice it gives constituents over which member to trust with their case. It might be thought, for instance, that the constituent’s interests could conflict with those of the member or the party meaning the person seeking help doesn’t get a fair hearing. That obviously will depend how fair-minded the MP is. Some MPs might take up a cause even though it undermines their party’s policies. Others might be unwilling to do so. Multi-member constituencies give the public a choice if there are members from alternative parties available.

Against that, it could be argued that multiple members with their own concerns being approached by constituents with matching issues would lead to members not being challenged in their understanding by having to engage with the hardship their policies might cause, and a single member forced to engage with someone on the wrong side of the action might be an educative experience for parties and lead to fairer laws, greater consideration, and less partisan approaches to politics in general. In the end, laws must be made and laws with room for difficult cases might be better than simplistic ones enforcing a narrow position.

There is room for arguments from both perspectives. I personally tend toward single-member constituencies, but I can see a case being made for the alternative. I suspect this particular issue is actually less significant than the method of counting votes.

The Professionalism of Politics

As with business management, so politics has become the realm of the professional in recent decades. Gone are the days when representatives of the people were representative of people. Today’s politicians are trained and expert in being politicians. Whereas once politicians were people who had experience of life who believed they could bring that experience into the administration of public affairs, they are now people who have pursued politics as a career from before they left school. They have chosen university courses with such a career in mind and they have honed their skills all through student life. As a result, rather than thinking and caring about the issues which affect the average person struggling with everyday life, they emerge with an interest in subjects of concern to students of politics and controversies which excite the minds of those in their field of education.

This separates politicians from the electorate to whom they appeal for votes and creates a unique political class with interests of its own unrelated to the concerns of those they claim to represent. The result is an electorate feeling disenfranchised and disillusioned, asked to vote for people with whom they feel nothing in common and for whom they have little preference. All through the Western world we see a consequence of this, as the electorate becomes increasingly discontented with traditional parties and seeks representative with whom they feel more identity. At one level that could be seen as the system working, but the problem is the newer emerging parties who now attract many votes are untested, unproven, and might be driven by interests other than those of the common people, while designing their offering to appeal to the anger or prejudices of the disaffected. That latter aspect is dangerous because many will vote for such new parties not because they really want what is being offered, so much as that they register a protest toward a complacent political class which has lost touch with those it supposedly serves.

Regaining the connection between politicians and the public is vital if the public is not to seek comfort from manipulative charlatans taking advantage of their discontent. However, that is easier said than done because people who are not professional politicians need to learn the requisite skills and, even more importantly, balance, if they’re not to appear incompetent or bigoted. It is easy to flee from one extreme to the other. It is much harder to recognise a fair moderate position somewhere between the extremes which is what most people probably really want. Between the intolerant poles there is a tolerant middle which is still almost infinitely variable, if only because that tolerance provides more room for variation than any rigid intolerance. However, it can be much harder to recognise that when suffering from the actions of one of the extremes. Nonetheless, that is what is needed if democracy is to find its real direction again. There might be a professional political elite from which people feel alienated, but the answer to that is not to rally around anyone who condemns such an elite without considering whom they truly represent.