The first-past-the-post represemtation - is it a fair system?

It is easy find loopholes in the British political system when it comes to ensuring democratic values. One is the fact that the House of Lords consists of peers who are appointed by the Queen as opposed to being a result of a public election. Another is the prime minister’s ability to call for a new election whenever he wants within a period of five years. A third one is the British electoral system of voting, namely the first-past-the-post representation. I have looked thoroughly at the system of voting in the UK trying to find the main negative and positive aspects to the first-past-the-post representation.

The UK is divided into 646 constituencies, each with the right to one seat in the House of Commons. Having just one seat in disposal, the representative with the most votes in his or her constituency wins the seat. This means that the total of representatives does not necessarily reflect the votes of the British people considering many votes are “wasted” in the battle of allocating the mandates. How can this be a positive thing?

Firstly, the representative who wins can perform an accurate and targeted policy. They do not need to compromise to meet the other parties’ demands as opposed to in a proportional system of allocating seats. In the UK, there are three parties, which dominate the politics: The Conservative party, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats. When there are two or three parties that are clearly the strongest, it produces single-party governments that do not have to rely on support from other parties to pass legislation. This makes the first-past-the-post representation strong-handed, especially because the representatives do not need to spend time compromising their political views. Nevertheless, this can also be viewed as a negative aspect of the UK politics when we look at the position of the smaller parties. People tend to vote for the bigger parties, which they know have a better chance of winning. The minor parties do not have a chance of winning and therefore it is hard for new parties to have a say in the British politics.

As I have explained already, this type of electoral system does not benefit the minority as well as in a proportional representation. When the first representative is past the post it does not matter how close behind the other candidates were. You could say that those votes are wasted because they count for nothing. If you look at the winning party, namely the party getting the overall biggest representation in the constituencies, they rarely represent the absolute majority, meaning that they get more than half of the votes. Considering there are several candidates fighting to win in each constituency, it does not happen often that an MP gets more than 50 % of the votes in his or her constituency. On a larger scale, this means that the majority of the British population did not vote for the winning party. The plurality of the voters would rather have another party leading the country, than the party that legitimately won the election.

This thought seems quite bizarre and completely in lack of democracy. However, there are many who view proportional representation as a betrayal. In a proportional representation the voters do not get what the majority voted for. Instead, they get a coalition between several parties. Whether you believe proportional or first-past-the-post representation is more democratic depends on how narrow your reasons behind your vote are. If you view voting for a party as agreeing with most of their policies and wanting their politic views to interfere the whole society you might feel betrayed when the winning party have to "share" the power with the minorities. After all, people who voted for them are the biggest group in Britain agreeing on the same party's policies to dominate fully. In this way, a first-past-the-post system is easy to justify.

Having small constituencies, where each of them elects one candidate to represent them, gives more political power to the interest groups. Interest groups might have a lot more to say in the UK than in the Norwegian political system. If many people in a constituency are eager to prevent the installation of windmills, an activist working against the windmill installation might have good chances of winning a seat in the House of Commons. It might be that the population in that constituency holds their wish to prevent windmills so high, they vote for him. Having single-seat constituencies might nevertheless benefit the just representation of the UK population because local issues are being taken up on a larger scale. The MPs representing their constituency is stressing the fact that they want to do what is best for their constituency. This creates a system in which the politicians are better equipped to meet the demands of their voters.

Both the proportional and the first-past-the-post representational system have flaws when it comes to ensuring democratic values. In my opinion, I support the proportional system fully because it resembles the votes of the people in the best way. The fact that everyone has a say is more important than steady and focused politics in the charge of the party that got the most votes. However, I think the British political system has some aspects to it that makes it work sufficiently, for instance having the House of Lords, which can impose area expertise before deciding on a law or a passage.