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Politics Home | Over 50 Academics Warn That Voting System Is Not Fit For Multi-Party Politics
The UK held a referendum on the Parliamentary voting system in 2011, in which the public voted to continue the first-past-the-post system (Alamy)
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Dozens of academics have written to the government to warn that the current voting system risks producing distorted results on an “unprecedented” scale at the next general election.
The letter, coordinated with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections and campaign group Make Votes Matter, and shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, says that the first-past-the-post system will struggle to cope with the UK’s emerging multi-party politics.
It warns that it will lead to “random and arbitrary” outcomes, which will risk undermining democratic legitimacy and further damaging public trust in politics.
The group points to the 2024 general election, in which Labour and the Conservatives together secured their lowest combined vote share in a century. Since then, fragmentation has grown, not subsided, with polls regularly putting the two main parties below 40 per cent, with Reform UK and the Greens surging, and the Liberal Democrats on double digits.
Under first-past-the-post, which is used at UK general elections, the candidate with the most votes in a constituency is elected as its MP. It is regarded as best suited to a system dominated by two political parties, which has historically been the case in Britain.
However, in a contest involving multiple parties, which is increasingly common in UK politics as Labour and Conservative support has fallen away, a candidate could be elected as an MP on a low share of the constituency vote.
There are also concerns that, due to the distorting effect of multi-party politics under first-past-the-post, a political party could win a large parliamentary majority that is severely disproportionate to its share of the national vote.
The letter urges Keir Starmer’s Labour government to “engage with these risks” by looking at shifting to a more proportional electoral system.
“British politics is the most fragmented it has ever been,” the letter says, adding that the UK appears to have entered “an era of truly multi-party politics”.
The signatories warn that if a general election were held under current conditions, the distortional effects of first-past-the-post could be “amplified to an unprecedented extent”, leading to MPs elected on weak mandates and majority governments formed on low levels of popular support.
While acknowledging that such outcomes are not new, the letter says there is now a “real possibility” they could reach levels never previously seen in Britain’s democratic history.
“Ministers say the Representation of the People Bill will make our democracy fit for the future, yet there are currently no provisions in the legislation, or elsewhere in the government’s wider agenda, that make general elections of this description any less likely.
“The collision of a multi-party electorate with a voting system designed for just two parties is creating new risks for Britain. If the government wishes, as it has said, to protect and enhance the integrity of British democracy, to guard against political instability, and to stem the ongoing loss of trust in politics, it would be wise to engage with these risks.”
The signatories include leading figures from universities across the UK and internationally, as well as former senior public officials.
Among them is Bob Posner, former chief executive of the UK Electoral Commission, alongside prominent political scientists like King’s College London’s Sir Vernon Bogdanor and Harvard University’s Pippa Norris, founder of the Electoral Integrity Project. The University of Manchester’s Rob Ford and Queen Mary University’s Tim Bale, both regular writers about British politics, have also backed the letter.
MPs who support electoral reform are expected to step up public campaigning in the coming months.
Alex Sobel, Labour MP for Leeds Central and Headingley, wrote for The House in November that the current voting system “stands to make a mockery of the electorate”.
“Fragmentation of the electorate reached breaking point in May’s local elections – with winners elected on as little as 19 per cent of the vote – and since then polling has moved ever deeper into uncharted territory,” he wrote.
