Proportional representation is a form of voting system, where the amount of votes gained by a party are proportional to the number of seats they gain in the House of Commons. There are four types of proportional systems which are: Additional member system, Single transferable vote system, party list and also supplementary vote. AMS is used for elections to the Scottish parliament, welsh assembly, northern Ireland assembly and even the greater London assembly, in fact it is the second most substantial voting system in the UK. STV has been used for local elections in Northern Ireland since 1973 and is also the system that elected the Northern Ireland Assembly ever since it was used for this purpose in 1998. There are two types of party list which are closed list and open list. Open list is where the electorate pick candidates from a list given to them by each of the parties and then an individual candidate is elected due to them having the popular vote. Closed list is where the electorate votes for a party and then the list as a whole. The candidates are then elected depending on the order they look on the list, this is done until all seats are filled. SV is where there are two columns on the ballot form, the electorate has two fill in two parts to this piece of paper – first they will have to mark their first choice and then mark their seconds choice with an ‘x’, however they are not required to make a second choice if they do not want to.
Proportional representation tends to be more representative than the first past the post voting system since candidates can be elected even after having a small proportion of the votes, which means that all the other votes given in that constituency would be wasted. An example that can be used as evidence to prove that FPTP is not representative is the 2005 general elections where the Labour government received 35% of the votes and gained 55% of the seats, whereas the liberal democrats received 22% of the votes and only 9.6% of the seats which shows the disproportionality of the number of votes and the number of seats.
Less votes would be wasted if PR was to be used since FPTP tends to waste a huge amount of votes since the votes made by the people of a constituency would be wasted on a losing candidate. The MP’s that are elected using first past the post tend to win on a minority vote rather than a majority vote. 334 candidates were elected in 1997 with a low amount of votes in their constituency – under 50% to be precise – among these candidates who won their election was the Liberal democrat David Ward who is the MP for Bradford East, he only one his election by gaining 33.71% of the votes, which could be used to show how much votes are wasted using this voting system.
Proportional representation would guarantee that the parties would have to appeal to their core supporters rather than only appealing to a small number which is called ‘swing voters’. First past the post is known to favour political parties with concentrated regional support rather than parties that have a wide spread of support throughout the country. For example, the British national party could benefit from this type of voting system since they can reduce their audience to a few constituencies and this could possibly lead to them gaining a seat since they have concentrated regional support due to their campaigns in specific areas of the country.
Proportional representation is said to offers a more representative choice for voters, since it is not bias towards particular parties unlike First past the post since this voting system is believed to be systematically bias because the disproportionality of first past the post is not unplanned. This disproportionality of FPTP is generally due to the size of party and the distribution of support. Usually the larger parties benefit more in the elections than the smaller parties, this is due to the ‘winner takes all’ system we use, and all of the representation for a constituency is gained by a single party representative. Voters tend to avoid voting for small parties since they are led to believe that the small parties are unlikely to win seats and very unlikely to win elections. They are led to believe that if they vote for these small parties, it will be classified as a wasted vote, this then leads to the majority of people voting for large parties since they would have a better chance of getting seats and winning elections.
However, proportional representation tends to produce weak coalition governments rather than producing strong governments. Whereas, First past the post is said to do the opposite – an example of this could be both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair’s reign as prime minister, their party was elected using first past the post and they both managed to stay as prime minister for over 10 years and implemented their manifesto while they were at office which shows how strong their government was.
Proportional representation could possibly allow extremists a way into the political mainstream, but this would not occur under first past the post. First past the post tends to prevent small political parties blackmailing larger parties in order to put forward their policies, whereas proportional systems does not do this and can even give the smaller parties quite a lot of power since they would be able to blackmail the larger parties; this wouldn’t occur in first past the post since there would not be a deadlocked parliament.
Another disadvantage could be that proportional representation is believed to weaken the link between the representative and his/her constituency. On the other hand, first past the post maintains a strong link between the representative and their constituency. The MP is required to represent their constituency which would mean them listening to what their people want and then proposing policies to parliament, the elected MP’s then become accountable and responsible for their constituency. This contrasts from the Proportional representation since there is not much of a close special connection between the MP and their constituency. Since First past the post is a simple voting system, the public can easily take part due to the simplicity of the voting system. First past the post allows electorates to vote straight for a clear set of policies.
To conclude, I believe that PR should not be introduced to Westminster since it can potentially give a route for extremists to get into the political mainstream and implement policies that would not benefit our society. It is possible for PR to produce weak governments which would then lead to indecision so the service the people want from their government would not be given to them due to their government needing to compromise, which shows how weak a coalition government is. And lastly PR weakens the link between the MP and their constituency which is the opposite of what FPTP does which is maintains a strong bond between the MP and constituency.