Proportional Representation
Sunday, 10, Jan 2010 05:05
What is proportional representation?
Proportional Representation (PR) is the principle behind a number of electoral systems, all of which attempt to ensure that the outcome of the election reflects the proportion of support gained by each competing group.
PR contrasts to the Majoritarian principle, where whichever party or candidate obtains a plurality of votes within any given constituency wins that contest outright. Majoritarianism is the principle that underpins the First-Past-The-Post system that is used for elections to the House of Commons, along with other systems including alternative vote, bloc vote and various single member constituency systems.
Similarly, there are a number of different systems based on PR. A simple party-list PR system is used in the UK for the European Parliament. A different Additional Member System (AMS) is used to elect the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Assembly. There are several important differences and the principle of proportionality is applied quite differently between the two.
The single transferable vote system is used to elect the district councils (since 1973) and the MEPs in Northern Ireland, and the local government councils in Scotland (since 2007).
The extent to which an electoral system is PR-based depends on the number of candidates elected per constituency and the existence of any thresholds for successful election. A number of electoral systems combine elements of both, such as the single non-transferable vote and cumulative voting systems.
Background
PR is a relative novelty in British politics, although it has long been used in Europe and went through a spell of popularity in some circles in the late 19th century. There were several attempts to introduce PR voting for the UK parliament during the early 1900s and there were several more reviews of the topic. The University members of the UK parliament were elected by STV-PR until this special category of MP was abolished. More recently, support for PR has been growing since the 1970s, and its leading champions in the UK are the Liberal Democrats.
The growth in support for PR has stemmed largely from recent concerns about the First Past the Post system. In the 1970s, First Past the Post failed to produce the strong majority accountable governments that was said to be one of the key points in favour of the system. And throughout the 1980s, the growth of the third party share of the vote increasingly showed the handicaps of the First Past the Post system on parties other than the Conservatives and Labour.
For example, in Labour's 1997 election landslide, the Liberal Democrats secured 16.8 per cent of the total national vote, but won fewer than 10 per cent of the seats.
Labour promised a referendum on PR on coming to power in 1997, ostensibly as a result of an agreement with the Liberal Democrats, but nothing has since come about. However, a combination of PR and First Past The Post (the Additional Member System) was used for the elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly, and the electoral system for the European Parliament was changed to a closed party list PR system.
In the Scottish elections of 1999 and 2003, and the Welsh elections of 1999, the electoral system failed to return an absolute majority for any one party, requiring coalition administrations to be formed.
I'm told it was Prescott & Brown who stopped Blair from honouring his commitment to Paddy Ashdown
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