uk politics just makes no sense to me no matter how many times i get it explained by teachers. i know that first past the post leads to disproportionate votes but have never understood the system of winning seats
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In the UK, the discrepancy between the number of seats won by a political party and the proportion of the popular vote they receive can occur due to the country’s electoral system, the “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) method.
Under the FPTP system, the country is divided into constituencies, each of which elects one Member of Parliament (MP). Voters in each constituency cast a single vote for their preferred candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the seat, regardless of whether they achieve an absolute majority (i.e., more than 50%) of the votes cast.
Imagine an election with five parties which each have a candidate standing for election in every electoral district in a country with FPTP voting, and by some miracle, the results are identical in every district with:
Party 1: 30%
Party 2: 25%
Party 3: 20%
Party 4: 15%
Party 5: 10%
of the cast votes. Party 1 wins every district and sends its representatives to the national parliament, controlling 100% of the seats, despite a 30% vote share.
I recommend a video series by CGPgray about this topic. Basically each seat is elected by a district. It does not matter how popular a political party is in the entire country, as long as they get the majority votes in that district they get that seat. Some districts are heavily for one party, typically you have lots of union workers living in an area and they all vote labor. But half the votes does not matter as labor would have won anyway. They only need half the votes. Other districts are a bit more divided with half the population favoring labor and half favoring the torries. If the torries wins these district then the votes for labor in this district did not matter. They could have voted torries and the election result would have been the same. So now you have just under half the votes in a labor district not making any difference and just under half the votes in a divided district who all votes for labor not making a difference to the result of the election.
And then you have the spoiler effect. Say for example a district is mostly voting labor but with a sizable torry voter base. And then a candidate from SNP, UKIP, the greens, etc. gets very popular among the labor voters in that district. The problem is that if a lot of voters go for this third party they may still not get more voters then the torries, but also labor would not get as many votes and also lose out to the torries. So a third party can actually spoil the election for the most popular major party.
Effectively, instead of one national election, you have several hundred local contests to elect one MP. In each constituency, the candidate with the largest number of votes wins the seat, regardless of how much they won by, what the turnout was, or even what the population of the constituency is (the boundaries are drawn up so they have roughly the same population, but there is substantial variation, and there are some outliers like the Western Isles with very small populations).
Consider a hypothetical election with 2 constituencies. In constituency 1, the Apple Party gets 3001 votes, the Banana Party gets 3000 votes, and the Coconut Party gets 100 votes. In constituency 2, the Coconut Party gets 8001 votes, the Banana Party gets 8000 votes, and the Apple Party doesn’t have a candidate. So the Apple Party wins constituency 1 and the Coconut Party wins constituency 2, even though the Banana Party got the most votes overall.
Now, the way it tends to work in practice is that the most popular party nationally gets heavily overrepresented. Parties that have strong support in certain regions, and no or little support elsewhere (like the SNP and the DUP) can also get heavily overrepresented. Parties whose support is spread thinly (like the Lib Dems, the Greens, and whichever far-right party is currently in vogue) tend to get heavily underrepresented.
But it’s worth remembering that, ultimately, a party’s political power is not determined by their number of seats. It’s determined by their ability to use those seats to get what they want. For example, the DUP have had a pretty consistent number of seats over the last couple of decades, but they were especially powerful in the 2017–19 Parliament because the Tories were just short of a majority and the DUP were able to help them win votes on various matters.
Let’s imagine there are two parties, and three seats up for grabs. The party who wins two seats, wins the election.
Seat1: Party A gets 1000 votes, party B gets 900 votes. Party A wins the seat.
Seat2: Party A gets 1000 votes, party B gets 900 votes. PartyA wins the seat.
Seat3. PartyA gets 0 votes, PartyB gets 2000 votes. PartyB wins the seat.
Result: PartyA has 2 seats, PartyB has 1 seat. PartyA wins the election.
But notice: PartyA got 2000 votes overall, whereas PartyB got 3800 votes overall.
But as this is a contest where the party with most seats wins, the number of individual votes is irrelevant.
Now, scale this up to hundreds of seats and numerous parties, and that is how you win an election without winning most votes.
Simple: **individual seats are decided by the number of votes a party receives *locally*, *not* by the number of votes a party receives *nationally*.**
In the UK you have 650 “constituencies”, geographic districts each containing around 70-80 thousand citizens and each represented by exactly one member of parliament (MP).
But every constituency is different. In one constituency, there are two candidates for MP, but in another one there are six. In one constituency, voter turnout is ridiculously high, but in another one voter turnout is low.
Those differences are irrelevant to the individual outcomes though. All that matters is what happens *within* the individual constituency.
In a constituency with a high number of candidates and a low voter turnout, an MP from Party X might win the seat with just 15,000 votes. But in a constituency with a low number of candidates and a high voter turnout, the MP might need 37,000 votes to win.
So when you add up the votes *nationally*, one party might wind up with fewer votes *nationally*, but more seats. But **totalling up the number of votes a party receives nationally is *entirely irrelevant* to how MPs are selected**, because MPs are determined based what happens in *each individual cosntituency*.
The missing information here is that the party that ends up winning can learn how it won that seat. Example, let’s say party A wins, but only 30% of the district put them down as their first choice, but then they get another 15% because they were the second choice for those people behind party E. Knowing they were essentially elected by people supporting Party A and Party E helps them for a coalition with Party E and diversified their policies somewhat since they don’t want to get elected with the help of people who support Party E only to alienate them.
Alternatively, you know how in the US “splitting the vote” is a bad thing? With FPTP it’s totally fine because it helps to blend party policy together rather than encouraging increasingly more extreme views and in theory makes it easier for representatives from different parties to work together. In theory anyway.
Two big impacts are seats only having one winner, and some parties having limited, targeted appeal.
Let’s briefly compare the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats. The SNP got just 3.88% of the votes, while the LDs got 11.55% of the votes. So you’d expect the LDs to have more seats, right? Well, no. The SNP got 7.4% of MPs, while the LDs got 1.7%. The SNP outperformed their votes, while the LDs *under*performed their votes.
In the SNP’s case, it comes down to being a *Scottish* party. They only fielded candidates in 59 seats (aka “all the Scottish ones). This limits their total votes, but *within* those 59 seats, they’re really popular! They get a lot of votes in those seats, and win a lot of them. This is just how (successful) regional parties go – all the zeroes in the rest of the country drag down the average percentage of votes, but the big wins in specific areas win plenty of seats.
In the LDs’ case, it’s the opposite issue. Where the SNP’s 3.88% was heavily concentrated in a particular area, the LDs’ support is spread across the entire country. Rather than a bunch of zeroes and some big wins, the LDs get a bunch of 10%s all over the country… Putting them decently behind Labour and the Conservatives. All those 10%s fail to get converted into seats but they still contribute to the average. Because of how the system works, all those 10%s in third mean that whoever wins needed less votes – and that’s what we saw this time, a decent bump for the Conservatives who won plenty of seats.
> have never understood the system of winning seats
Each seat is its own independent little election. In that seat, whoever gets the most votes wins.
If you get 52% of the votes in the riding, you win the seat. If you get 40% of the riding’s votes, but that’s more than anyone else got, you win the seat.
Lets say you’ve got 9 voters who will vote for the parties A or B. 4 want to vote for A and 5 for B, so you’d think B would win.
But everyone doesn’t vote together they are grouped.
Adjusting the way voters are grouped can change the result of the election.
eg A are in power and see that B would win the next election so they arrange the voters groups, usually by moving the constituency boundaries: AAB, AAB, BBB.
So grouped like this A wins 2 groups and B only wins 1. A wins 2:1.
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