are you going to vote yes or no in the referendum on voting systems?

It's not exactly deeply analytical of me, but I'm in the 'voting no just to piss of the LibDems' camp.

Liked RavenAK's post way up-thread
"Currently I would vote against free beer & in favour of setting fire to fluffy kittens if I thought it would piss off the Lib Dems.

Not a terribly mature attitude I know, but bollocks to them. Grrrr."

I want the Lib Dems and the right of the Labour party to join together as an opposition.

What I never want to see is another Gordon Brown style tax and spend Govt that leaves the country in such a dire financial state and a bloated client state of public sector and benefit dependents. That outcome has happened after every single Labour Govt that has ever been in office.

Why? Why would you want to live in a country with no real Opposition? How odd.

I only have one criteria. If it keeps Labour out of power for ever I will vote for it.

I want to see a return to the old Whig (Liberal) and Tory two party system in England of the 19th and Early 20 century before Labour was created.

Hey edam, I like your post BUT to be fair, if someone makes donations, and then years later is convicted of a crime, how can you say those particular £s were crime £s?

However I dont like our laws being made by someone who claims not to even live in this country. Cant believe it took the conservative over 10 years to hush it up 'find out'.

I will vote yes....I happen to quite like the coalition and think it is about time the parties have to work together a bit.
I don't think AV is perfect but the current system is rubbish!!!
I can't believe so many people are against it actually

I live in Canada now and we also have FPTP. The last two elections have resulted in minority governments, with very strong government doing really fairly bad things (and really out of character from what I have observed from Canadian attitudes) and very weak oppositions. It's not very democratic and people's interest and apathy towards government is very very high. I'd not like the UK to move that way.

I don't think that AV is the right approach to choose, but it's a step in the right direction, an my feeling is that if it gets rejected any possibility of getting something better in the future pretty much disappears.

But I won't be voting because I think it is wrong that as an ex-pat I can vote on something that won't actually affect me.

Ireland has had a very stable political system with PR, no limits on the number of votes cast (except you can't vote for more candidates than there are on the ballot in your constituency), and governments that have tended to be centre right or centre left for decades.

A strong majority is actually a rarity in Irish politics, and I believe when there is a strong majority in the UK, government has more of a tendency to fracture, fiddle around and achieve little, or fall apart due to scandals, etc. Having the electorate and the other parties breathing down your neck is a very strong motivating factor for the average political party in government. Keeps them on their toes.

The nuances of Irish tactical voting are fascinating and much studied -- should be very informative to British voters trying to decide on this. Despite the existence of a few small parties and even individuals from time to time holding a disproportionate amount of power on paper, the possibility of calling another election always exists.

Small party or individual representatives get elected when the larger parties fail to respond to the issues in any given constituency, as in the case of the economically disadvantaged one represented by Tony Gregory, TD, which had been effectively ignored by the major parties until he suddenly found himself in the position of kingmaker at one point in the 80s.

Yup, fair enough. I certainly felt the same for a long time (even before the party I support started winning...) I will look at the referendum pretty closely.

I agree that third and minor parties have a harder time under FPTP - that is pretty obvious.

But I regard that as an acceptable price to pay for generally electing strong majority governments.

Every electoral system has benefits and drawbacks.

Ok, I lied about starting a new thread.

This article is quite interesting I think - it says some of the same things as the ukpolling paper linked to further up, but crucially puts the same issues into IMO a broader perspective. Such as, the timespan between Boundary Commission reviews was reduced 50 years ago because of the instability factor of frequent reviews; such as, there has always been an electoral bias, but it has shifted from favouring Conservatives to favouring Labour in recent years; such as, the differential turnout issue has been increased because of the parties' logical (under FPTP) policy of concentrating effort on getting out the vote in marginal constituencies.

I do think that the ukpolling article that you linked to has a bias of its own, longfingernails (I would, since I disagree with the bias! - anyway, everything has a bias, so it's unfair of me to say that like it's unusual.) Firstly, it stated at the top as undisputed fact that the current system favoured Labour, and then gave several headings, only 1 or at most 2 of which actually did favour Labour. Secondly, it stated that bias as though it had always existed, which is not the case. Thirdly, it used biased examples, e.g. in the differential turnout paragraph it gave an example turnout of 90% for the Conservative constituency versus 10% for the Labour constituency. In this EXTREMELY pro-labour biased site, the respective turnout is given as 68.3% in seats won by the Conservatives, 61.2% in seats won by Labour.

End result is, however, that since 1997 the system has definitely resulted in a bias towards Labour. Just nothing like as egregious or as deliberate a bias as I have seen mentioned in some commentariat pieces.

I'd agree with you that FPTP is apt to spin a lead into a crushing advantage over third parties. Which is why I am thinking about voting for AV.

GiddyPickle Scotland is no longer hugely overrepresented but Wales is.

The Isle of Wight is a special case. I don't think you should use it as an illustrative example really. But there are lots of huge Tory constituencies on the mainland alongside tiny Labour constituencies.

There won't be any referendum on the number of constituencies and the boundary redistribution procedure. That will happen anyway.

The referendum will only be on AV versus FPTP.

Edam, I've read it in the Guardian. Nuff said, surely!

I should add that the Lib Dems lose most of all out of the major parties. The bias against the Tories is present but relatively small - but the system really conspires against the Lib Dems.

edam

Well, it is undisputed that in 2005 Tony Blair won a very similar vote share to the one David Cameron achieved in 2010 - and got a very respectable majority with it.

Yet David Cameron gets a Hung Parliament.

Whatever the reasons behind that, whether systematic or behavioural, it is pretty clear that Labour have an advantage over the Tories.

I should add that the timeframe for immigrants to become naturalised British citizens is at least as long as the timeframe for Boundary Reviews (about 5 years) so actually I don't think that immigration directly affects the consequence of boundary review delays much.

maktaitai On the other hand I don't think most immigrants are allowed to vote in general elections until they become British citizens.

um...

but...

Ok, how much of that immigration boom is in urban centres and how much in rural centres? I know that a lot of immigrants do rural work, but my guess (which may well be wrong) would have been that quite a lot of any immigrant boom would increase urban populations. Which would mean that delays in Boundary Commission reviews would definitely not benefit Labour.

Right, I'm off to find some stats to prove myself wrong on this, because I have read in lots of places that the current structure benefits Labour, so I want to pin this down! Sorry about the thread hijack. Will start another thread if I find anything useful.

OK sorry back on track - having pondered this during the evening, I think I may vote for the AV. 25 years ago I was a passionate supporter of electoral reform, but over time I lost faith in it, having seen too many news stories in too many countries where small parties wield an excessive amount of power. However, if there are limits on the number of votes allowed, and depending on what the referendum looks like, I may decide to vote for AV because a) I often wish I could add footnotes to my ballot paper, and this is a way of doing that, and b), hey the Oscars use AV, and no-one could accuse them of making really out-there and audacious choices...

maktaitai

I agree that tactical voting isn't systemic but behavioural - the author (who is an expert in psephology and polling) acknowledges this.

The differential turnout thing basically means that typically Labour MPs are elected with fewer votes than Tory MPs because of low turnout in Labour areas. That means there vote is more "efficiently" distributed. As the author points out, this was equivalent to a 2% Labour headstart in the polls in 2005 - he hasn't updated the document to take the 2010 data into account.

I accept that population dynamics are not fixed - especially given the immigration boom over the last 10 years - but on the current trends I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that delays in boundary reviews benefit Labour.

longfingernails, that's a slightly weird document IMO, especially if it's being presented as evidence of Labour bias in the system.

It presents 5 aspects of the system that produce electoral bias, one of which is, er, the way people vote (tactical voting) which is hardly a structural bias, more a choice.

It states that UK population trends mean that boundary commission changes will ALWAYS mean a shift towards the Conservatives, due to the drop in the urban population, so that a delay in those changes means an inbuilt bias toward Labour. This may be true, but it's hardly an eternal truth - try page 14 of this certainly up until the end of the last century the proportion of the population living in urban centres was rising. This would explain why I remember discussion of the electoral bias towards Conservatives in the 1980s caused by delays in Boundary Commission changes...

It also states that the overrepresentation of Scotland has been eliminated (though not the West Lothian question of course), which should have improved things, even though the overrepresentation of Wales continues - this is not new, and at least things appear to be moving in a less biased direction.

Differential turnout - am I misreading this? It seems to suggest that if this element had been eliminated in 2005, Labour would actually have won more seats, i.e. this factor appears to be a bias against Labour. But I'm willing to believe I am misreading it.

Support distribution - they say themselves that this factor does not appear to bias very heavily to either side.

Yes I'll believe that the current system is biased towards Labour, I have read it in many places. But I don't find that particular analysis particularly convincing.