Britain
The British general elections are archetypal of what occurs in a majoritarian election. Minority parties are considerably less able to be influential in parliament - the analysis that will be done through the case study of Britain will be on the disproportionate underrepresentation of minority parties in British parliament.
To understand why there is an underrepresentation of minority parties it is necessary to analyse the British electoral system, first past the post. The country is split into 650 constituencies and to win a constituency the party needs to win more votes than any other party (a relative majority) not an actual majority of votes. The winners of each constituency make up parliament and the party with the most constituencies …show more content…
The cause of this is winning a relative majority in a few constituencies but getting few to no votes in constituencies you didn’t win in gets one more seats in parliament than winning a larger minority of the country’s total votes but few relative majorities in any single constituency. This can be seen with the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and the UKIP. As mentioned above the UKIP won 12.6% of the total vote and 0.2% of the total seats while the SNP won only 4.7% of the votes but received 8.6% of the total seats as their votes were highly concentrated in Scottish …show more content…
However anyone who voted for a party who didn’t get a large amount of support is unlikely to vote for them again. This occurs because in a majoritarian election only the party with the most support is able to represent the electorate. Effectively what this means is your vote for a minority party had no influence in the election and consequently in your representation. Accordingly, with your vote being effectively wasted, it is highly unlikely that you are going to vote for that minority party in the next election. Subsequently in the next election that party has next to no support and thus disbands. This process continues with each successive smallest party being eliminated from the subsequent elections.
What the voter is doing is known as tactical voting. With the knowledge that their favourite party has little support and thus little chance of winning the election they are forced to vote for a party that has a chance in winning the election. Often what this comes down to is voting not for the party you like most (as you know they will not win) but voting for a viable opposition to the party you like
The British general elections are archetypal of what occurs in a majoritarian election. Minority parties are considerably less able to be influential in parliament - the analysis that will be done through the case study of Britain will be on the disproportionate underrepresentation of minority parties in British parliament.
To understand why there is an underrepresentation of minority parties it is necessary to analyse the British electoral system, first past the post. The country is split into 650 constituencies and to win a constituency the party needs to win more votes than any other party (a relative majority) not an actual majority of votes. The winners of each constituency make up parliament and the party with the most constituencies …show more content…
The cause of this is winning a relative majority in a few constituencies but getting few to no votes in constituencies you didn’t win in gets one more seats in parliament than winning a larger minority of the country’s total votes but few relative majorities in any single constituency. This can be seen with the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and the UKIP. As mentioned above the UKIP won 12.6% of the total vote and 0.2% of the total seats while the SNP won only 4.7% of the votes but received 8.6% of the total seats as their votes were highly concentrated in Scottish …show more content…
However anyone who voted for a party who didn’t get a large amount of support is unlikely to vote for them again. This occurs because in a majoritarian election only the party with the most support is able to represent the electorate. Effectively what this means is your vote for a minority party had no influence in the election and consequently in your representation. Accordingly, with your vote being effectively wasted, it is highly unlikely that you are going to vote for that minority party in the next election. Subsequently in the next election that party has next to no support and thus disbands. This process continues with each successive smallest party being eliminated from the subsequent elections.
What the voter is doing is known as tactical voting. With the knowledge that their favourite party has little support and thus little chance of winning the election they are forced to vote for a party that has a chance in winning the election. Often what this comes down to is voting not for the party you like most (as you know they will not win) but voting for a viable opposition to the party you like