Multi-party politics isn’t necessarily chaotic – we could be moving towards a new local two-party-ism
4 min read
There are certainly reasons to argue for electoral reform. But pointing to the current system as a generator of chaos could be a misinterpretation of what is happening in our politics.
Advocates of proportional representation look at the growing ‘mess’ in national polls — votes splintering across a greater number of parties — and conclude that our electoral system is no longer fit for purpose.
If that fragmentation were replicated across constituencies, it would indeed produce a high degree of randomness and ‘chaos’ in local races. A seat with four competitive parties on 15 per cent, 17 per cent, 19 per cent and 20 per cent could be won by any of them, each claiming in a campaign to be capable of winning. Multiply that across the country, and you get a system of ‘knife-edge’ contests and disproportionate outcomes, with seats decided on historically low vote shares. Hence, the case for electoral reform.
However, linking first-past-the-post to chaotic or erratic local outcomes rests on a key assumption: that fragmentation at the national level will translate into chaos locally.
That assumption may still prove to be wrong. Recent constituency-level by-elections suggest that this is not, so far, how voters are responding to national fragmentation. In Caerphilly and in Gorton & Denton, the races did not resemble fragmented multi-party contests but rather competitions between two or three parties, with different combinations. Voters coalesced behind a party within their ‘bloc’ — broadly, a left-liberal-nationalist bloc or a right-conservative bloc — to oppose the other. In Caerphilly, the contest narrowed to Plaid Cymru versus Reform UK. In Gorton and Denton, it was the Greens (or Labour) against Reform UK.
Rather than constituency-level fragmentation, what we may be observing is the potential for a new structure: a fragmented national party system coexisting with relatively stable two- or three-party competition at the constituency level.
This makes sense when we consider that the fragmentation in national polls is also structured. For the most part, it reflects voters sorting within ideological blocs. While the right-wing vote was highly split in the last UK general election, voters on the right have been moving towards a single party again: Reform UK. On the left, the Labour vote has splintered towards the Liberal Democrats, the Greens or nationalist parties.
This bloc structure should mean that, rather than resulting in five-party races at the constituency level, voters will be incentivised to rally behind whichever party they think is best placed to win within their bloc, provided they can identify that party and are willing to vote for it. This leads to two- or three-way races at the constituency level, despite greater fragmentation nationally.
What may be different now is which parties compete against each other locally. We may be approaching a tipping point where voters are no longer likely to swing back behind the traditionally viable two parties in our electoral system — Labour and the Conservatives (or the Liberal Democrats or nationalist parties where those parties can concentrate their support) — instead choosing among a wider set of parties. For many, this may mean they can finally vote for the party they prefer, now also a newly viable choice.
Our reading of national fragmentation is that we may be in the middle of a reorganisation; many races coming down to a choice between blocs, with the Greens doing well in urban areas in May’s upcoming elections, the Liberal Democrats in more affluent rural areas, Reform doing well elsewhere, the SNP doing well in Scotland, and Plaid Cymru in Wales. Voters have every incentive to do this within the existing fast-past-the-post system and within the bloc structure underlying the otherwise volatile fragmentation in the polls.
There are other reasons for advocates to support proportional representation. But pointing to current polls and elections as producing ‘random’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘unpredictable’ outcomes locally could be missing the possibility that we’re in the middle of a reorganisation that can just as easily settle into more two-or three-party politics locally, but with national level fragmentation.
Jane Green and Marta Miori are political scientists at Nuffield College, University of Oxford
