Achieving fair representation in the new UK Parliament

Now the election is over, we have a parliament with very unequal representation of voters, with some parties getting far more and some far less than their share of the vote would suggest. Rather than just banking the advantage, the new government should recognize the unfairness of the current system and apply a short term fix so that people are represented fairly. Call it handicaps, weightings, scaled votes, block votes, or some other name. But a fairer democracy would smell sweeter.

This chart should be self-explanatory, voting could be scaled according to the number of votes for that party and the number of MPs seated:

Some cut and paste from a recent blog about longer term fixes:

We have a new problem, well new for the UK, which is that we’ve gone from a 2 party system to having numerous significant parties. The number of seats each will get in parliament will bear little correlation to the proportion of the national vote they win. That’s because some parties are thinly spread across the whole country so will get very few seats indeed, whereas others are heavily concentrated in particular areas, so will get far more than their fair share. With each seat decided by whichever gets the largest vote in that area, it’s obvious why having widespread support is a disadvantage compared to representing purely local interests.

Option 1: block or scaled voting

I recently suggested a block vote mechanism to fix it:

Better representational democracy

to save you reading it, it allows continuation of the existing system, with greatly unrepresentative number of MPs, but then adjusts the weighting of the vote of each according to their party’s proportion of the national vote. So if a party gets 1% of the seats but won 15% of the vote, each of those MP’s votes would be worth 15 times as much as the vote of a party that received a fair number. If the party gets 5% of the seats with 1% of the vote, each of their’s would be scaled down to 0.2 x normal.

Option 2: split house

In a country with 650 seats, that is far more than is needed to provide both local representation and national. Suppose 250 seats were allocated to larger local constituencies, leaving 400 to be filled according to party support. 250 is easily enough to make sure that local issues can be raised. On the other hand, most people have no idea who their local MP is and don’t care anyway (I have never felt any need or desire to contact my local MP). All most people care about is which party is in control. This split system would fill 250 seats in the normal way and the voting mechanism would be unaffected. That would over-represent some parties and under-represent others. The 400 seats left would be divided up between all the parties to make the total proportions correct. Each party would simply fill their extra seats with the candidates they want. I think that balance would solve the problem nicely while retaining the advantage of the current system.

A variant of this would be to have two separate houses, one to debate regional issues and one for national. A dual vote would allow someone to pick a local candidate to represent their local area and a second vote for a party to represent them on national issues.

Option 3: various PR systems

There are hundreds of proportional representation systems and they all have particular merits and weaknesses. I don’t need to write on these since they are well covered elsewhere and I don’t favor any of the conventional solutions. The best that can be said for PR is that it isn’t quite as bad as the status quo.

Option 4: Administrative and Values houses

Pretty much everyone wants a health service that works, good defence, good infrastructure, sensible business regulation, clean water supply, healthy environment and so on. People disagree profoundly on many other issues, such as how much to spend and how to spend it in areas such as welfare, pensions, even education. So why not have 2 sets of MPs, one selected for competence in particular administrative areas and the other chosen to represent people’s value differences? I often feel that an MP from a party whose values I don’t support does a better job in a specific role than an alternative from the party I voted for.

I am out of ideas for further significant options, but there must be many other workable possibilities that would give us a better system than what we have now. UK democracy is broken, but not beyond repair and we really ought to fix it before serious trouble results from poor maintenance.