The Alternative Vote, why bother?

The campaign for and the outcome of the General Election has put electoral reform firmly on the political agenda. Somewhat surprisingly the alternative vote (AV) has become the most discussed option for replacing the current first-past-the-post system (FPTP), embraced by Labour, and even allowed by the Conservatives to be voted upon in a referendum. This potential acceptance by the two major parties is understandable, as AV is for them the safest option, and least likely to break their joint hegemony over British politics.

When thinking about the different ways in which elections can be organised, the first question to be answered is whether one wants each constituency electing only a single MP, or multi-member constituencies.

Elections for single member constituencies can be organised in three fashions: first-past-the-post, alternative vote, and approval voting. But irrespective of which of these is used, all single member constituency systems are prone to disproportional outcomes, which means that the shares of votes and shares of seats can diverge widely.

AV thus does not solve the problem of dis-proportionality that lays at the root of many demands for electoral reform. It may even turn out less proportional than FPTP. In other words, it is also likely to yield parliaments where a vote share of only 35% yields 55% of the seats (as was the case for Labour in the previous parliament). because Labour and the Conservatives are most likely to be in a position to benefit from this, it is quite understandable that they favour AV if the call for electoral reform cannot be stifled any more.

What is ‘solved’ by AV is a ‘problem’ that hardly anyone cared about, namely that an individual MP be elected with fewer than 50% of the votes in his/her constituency. AV changes this by asking voters to rank their preferences for the candidates. If no candidate has an absolute majority of first preferences, then the one with the fewest first preference votes is eliminated, and his/her votes are allocated to the other candidates on the basis of the 2nd preferences on those ballots. Applying this, if necessary repeatedly, will guarantee that the eventual winner will have been supported by a majority in the constituency (a ‘majority’ that then consists of a mixture of 1st preferences, plus added 2nd preferences, possibly 3rd preferences, and so on). But this does not do anything to diminish the discrepancy between vote shares and seat shares across the country as a whole, and which motivates much of the support for electoral reform.

AV may even prevent a party that is more preferred than any of its competitors from winning in a constituency. Take, for example, a constituency with three candidates on the ballot, let’s call them Harriet, Chris and William. Voters are asked to rank their preferences for these on their ballot papers. A possible outcome would be the following:

40 % of the voters give 1st preference to Harriet, 2nd preference to Chris, and 3rd to William.;

35 % give 1st preference to William, 2nd preference to Chris, and 3rd to Harriet;

25 % give 1st preference to Chris, 2nd preference to William, and 3rd to Harriet.

Because none of the candidates has more than 50% of the 1st preferences, Chris is eliminated because he got the smallest number of 1st preferences. The 25% of the ballots which ranked Chris first are now allocated to William and Harriet, depending on the second preferences. In the example above, everyone who ranked Chris first ranked William second, so all these votes are transferred to William, who thus obtains a comfortable majority of 60% (35% + 25%) and wins the seat.

But actually, Chris, who was eliminated, was more preferred than either Harriet or William! 65 % of the voters prefer Chris over William (40% + 25%), while 60% prefer Chris over Harriet (35% + 25%). All that this shows is that the ‘majority’ with which William would be elected under the AV system, is an artificial one.

All in all, AV does not solve the biggest problem that leads to the call for electoral reform. It does not yield more proportional outcomes than the current FPTP system, which is exactly why both Labour and Conservatives can conceivably live with it without giving up their dreams of an absolute majority of the seats. And finally, AV can easily lead to the elimination of a candidates who is more preferred than any of his or her competitors.

In a next contribution to this blog more about other alternatives to FPTP.

Professor Cees van der Eijk

Electoral chaos and surprises aplenty

The most significant outcome of this election campaign is - undoubtedly - the
 Conservatives' inability to win an outright majority in the House of Commons. This in spite of the first-past-the post electoral system, which consistently boosts the proportion of seats of the largest party on the basis of votes won (with some 36 % of the votes, the Conservatives stand to get about 46% of the seats). If this was the most significant outcome, it is then one of the least surprising, given the dynamics of the 2010 campaign.

Some of the more surprising outcomes of election night have been:

• the failure of the SNP and Plaid Cymru to make significant gains

• the large local variations around a general swing

• the Greens winning their first MP

• Peter Robinson’s defeat in Belfast East.

• And last, but not least, the failure of the BNP to gain any seats (in spite of them getting more than twice as many votes as the Greens)

Perhaps the most surprising – and worrying – discovery has been how badly organized the electoral process has been in some parts of the country. The queues of people waiting – and some times failing – to vote tell their own story.

The rise in turnout compared to 2005 was modest: what would have
happened if it had reached even 1990s levels of more than 70%? Bearing in mind problems with an outdated registration system in much of the country and well-established postal vote fraud, Britain’s elections must now rank as 
amongst the worst run of the world’s developed democracies.

Professor Cees van der Eijk

Does the level of turnout matter?

"...does it matter for the prospects of the parties how many people will flock to the polls? "

It is generally expected that turnout in the general election will be somewhat higher than in 2005, when it reached 61%. It is unlikely, though, to reach levels in excess of 70% which were common in the 1990s and earlier.

An increase is expected because the feeling that the election will be one of the closest since a long time, and that there is still everything to play for. The expectation that there is much ‘at stake’ possibly in the form of unprecedented political change will also contribute to a likely increase in turnout.

But does it matter for the prospects of the parties how many people will flock to the polls?

If the tendency to abstain is not the same for the potential supporters of the different parties, the level of turnout will affect election results, in terms of vote shares and possibly also in terms of seats. Politicians and political advisors (and journalists too) are fully aware of the possibility of turnout affecting the outcome.

In many elections we see that politicians who did poorly at the polls point to low turnout amongst their supporters to ‘explain’ the disappointing results. It almost seems as if they derive some solace from this interpretation that says that their supporters stayed home, but did not ‘defect’. But do such explanations hold water? Can the level of turnout be blamed for any particular party’s disappointing electoral showing?

Assessing the consequences of abstentions for the overall result is difficult, because it is impossible to ‘rerun’ reality with different numbers of people going to the polls. Researchers have therefore invented a number of different ways to estimate what would have happened if turnout had been lower than it actually was, or higher.

Reviewing a large number of such analyses Lutz and Marsh conclude that “The main finding ... is that turnout does not matter a great deal, no matter what method, dataset or period of time the authors apply”.

In our own research we asked non-voters what their choice had been had they voted after all. We did so in the context of last year’s European Parliament elections, which are a excellent occasion for such studies as turnout was only 34% (in the UK) as compared to 61% in the 2005 general election.

This 27% difference in turnout should give an excellent opportunity to find whatever effects exist on vote shares. If in the European elections of 2009 the same level of turnout would have been obtained as in the general election of 2005, the vote shares of the various parties would hardly have been different, for each less than half of 1 percent.

Obviously, the effects on vote shares would have been smaller yet for smaller differences in turnout. This finding replicates what had been found earlier for other elections in the UK (see, e.g., van der Eijk and van Egmond, 2007), and for other elections in the western world.

Low levels of participation may be bad for all sorts of things –bad for the development of a feeling of citizenship, bad for the inclusiveness of the political system, and bad for the development and strengthening of partisanship.

It does not mean, however, that the composition of Parliament would be different or the colour of the ensuing government, with different policy majorities, if only more citizens would have been motivated to turn out and vote.

Cees van der Eijk and Eliyahu Sapir 

What election polls do not tell us

"...in spite of the useful information that election polls offer, they are lacking in two important respects..."

We can expect a large number of election polls to be published in the next four weeks. Not all polling agencies arrive at their numbers in exactly the same way, and they need to be read with care. And in spite of the useful information that election polls offer, they are lacking in two important respects, both of which relate to the difference between ‘hard’ choices and ‘soft’ ones.

First, consider people who respond to opinion pollsters by saying that they do not (yet) know. These respondents are generally deleted from the calculation of the parties’ projected vote shares, which implies that, were they to make up their minds, they would not disproportionally go to any one party. But consider the group of people who hesitate between the Conservatives and UKIP, and who correctly state that they do not yet know for sure which party to support. When they make up their minds, they will not support Labour, or the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Therefore, omitting these ‘don’t know’ responses from the results will (in this case) underestimate the actual level of support for Conservatives and UKIP.

Similarly, when asked about the choice for a party that they intend to make, respondents may name a party and are counted towards that party’s projected share of the vote. Some of these answers come from people who have firmly made up their mind, but for others this hides the fact that they are not yet certain about their choice. The polls that are currently conducted in the UK do not take into account the certainty with which respondents’ give their answers. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of a close race. We are in the dark about the proportions of voters who may still change their stated preference because they like another party almost as much as the one that they said they would vote for.

In a survey conducted by the British Election Study team in February 2010 (file feb10spb.dta), and which contains more detailed information than most election polls, we find that of those who unequivocally state that they will vote Conservative at the next general election, 4.5% actually hesitates between Conservative and Labour, and 7.6% hesitates between Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Of those who claim that they will support Labour 2.1% might still change to Conservative, and 13.8% to the Liberal Democrats. Of the projected Lib Dem support 8.9% might still go Conservative and 26.9% Labour. In all these situations, it will not take much for these voters to still change their vote intention because they are actually quite strongly attracted to two different parties at the same time.

When looking at the “don’t know’s”, we find that 12.7% is actually strongly attracted to the Conservatives, 27% to Labour, and 22.4% to the Liberal Democrats. When prodding the “don’t know’s” to indicate which party they lean to, we find that those leaning to Labour have a much stronger preference for that party than leaning Conservatives have for theirs. In other words, if, as is usually the case during election campaigns, the number of yet undecided voters declines as polling day draws nearer, Labour in particular and the Liberal Democrats to a smaller extent stand to gain more from this than the Conservatives.

The methodology employed here is analogous to that reported in Martin Kroh, Wouter van der Brug and Cees van der Eijk ‘Prospects for electoral change’, in Wouter van der Brug and Cees van der Eijk, European Elections and Domestic Politics – Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, pp. 209-225).

If we want to gauge the possible dynamics in party support over this election campaign, we have to take into account the differences in the certainty with which respondents state their intended choices. In the current situation, doing so reveals an even closer race than most of the polls suggest.

Professor Cees van der Eijk