What if the UK used PR?
The United Kingdom’s current electoral system of First-Past-the-Post, which works, has been the subject of much criticism lately, for not providing representative Parliaments. Of course, there are a great number of issues to be taken with this statement. However, what if Parliament was representative? Would you actually want this to happen? Here, I’ve tried to calculate, as best as possible, what would happen if the UK decided to use various forms of proportional representation for the 2017 general election.
A plethora of issues would come out of using most of these PR forms. However, just giving people the raw numbers and asking them: “Do you really want these people running your country?” works well enough as an argument instead. Perhaps this is an utterly morally corrupt way of arguing against proportional representation, yes, but it’s also highly effective.
Notes: National vote shares for parties are assumed to be the same under Proportional Representation as they were under First-Past-the-Post, and the number of seats in Parliament is 650 for all. All calculations are done somewhat arbitrarily, may not follow the correct process, and will be changed if anyone else can be bothered to work them out. This is just for a bit of fun, not as serious research. Please don’t ever try to put any of this into practice just to check.
Germany


Germany uses First-Past-the-Post to elect 299 seats to the Bundestag (here turned into 325 constituencies). It also has a top-up list to each state — totalling another 299 seats overall — as well as a national list for overhang seats, which occur to correct the overall political balance of the Bundestag, when parties win more constituency seats than they would be entitled to under pure proportionality in certain states.
For this example, I’ve not bothered with overhang seats and assigning seats to individual regions of the UK, as this gets the point across well enough. Here, I’ve assumed that parties win constituencies in roughly the same proportion as they did in the 2017 election; in reality, the Lib Dems would probably have lost out more. However, it doesn’t really matter for most parties. Germany does have a threshold to enter the proportional representation seat distribution of 5% — which is reasonably high by most country’s standards — unless a party wins three or more seats. The only party this threshold applies to is Plaid Cymru, who are left with their two seats. The size of a Parliament can vary under the German system; it would likely be a lot larger here as there are plenty of cases in which a party won more seats in a nation or region than its share of the vote would entitle it to under pure proportional representation, but that would require more calculations than I’m prepared to do.
The government formed here would be interesting; a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition would have a majority of 32, while virtually any other coalition would be far too broad to really function, so that would be the likely outcome of the election.
Coalition of Chaos rating: 3/10
Greece


Many critics of Proportional Representation point to the unstable governments that it forms, with loads of small parties having to help make up the majority. However, Greece manages to make PR compatible with stable government. How, you may ask? Simply by giving an extra 50 seats to the winning party. As the House of Commons is just over twice the size of the Hellenic Parliament, I’ve given an extra 100 seats to the Conservatives, as the largest party; however, it wouldn’t take much of a swing at all for Labour to get that bonus. Few parties are represented here as Greek elections purely depend on national vote shares; even with a 3% threshold, only four parties managed to get above it. The Conservatives would each a majority here, but Labour aren’t as far behind as they seem.
Coalition of Chaos rating: 4/10
The Netherlands


“God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland”, as the saying goes; it can be said, at the very least, that the demonic electoral system put to use in the Netherlands was most certainly not designed by God. The system is about as purely proportional as you could get; the quota per seat is calculated as the number of votes cast divided by the number of seats in Parliament, giving an absurdly low (by PR standards) 49,288 votes to win a seat. Just as long as a party has reached that number, they are entitled to seats in the legislature.
How are governments formed under the Dutch system? The answer is that they’re not, really; there still isn’t a Dutch government five months after the 2017 election, and parliamentary sessions can often last for two years or less. The Conservatives and the Lib Dems would have a majority of 4, so it would probably have to be some sort of coalition between them, but a Labour-Lib Dem-SNP alliance would also be possible, with a majority of 12.
Coalition of Chaos rating: 10/10
Japan


Japan uses a form of proportional representation that is less open to abuse than most, but — in my view — utterly horrifying in terms of its setup. To adapt it to the House of Commons, 400 seats are First-Past-the-Post, and 250 are elected from a proportional list. However, to make forming a majority government easier, the proportional system isn’t tied to the constituency seats; the elections are run in parallel, effectively meaning that a party could win a majority on the constituency seats alone and still be entitled to, say, 40% of the proportional seats.
However, the main issue with this system is that there’s not really much between a majority government and the Parliament being hopelessly hung. It also allows for candidates standing in a single region to have much more influence than they regularly would. In other words: smaller parties probably have more influence than middle-sized ones. Take the SNP, for example; despite getting less than half of the Liberal Democrat’s vote share, they end up with more seats — in a proportional system.
The Conservatives and the Lib Dems would have a slight majority of 12, but Labour would need at least three other parties to form a majority government. The parliamentary composition in itself, though, is horror enough to behold.
Coalition of Chaos rating: 7/10
Turkey


In a welcome break from all of these horrendously divided Parliaments, Turkey offers something refreshing. It’s proportional representation, yes, but there ain’t no proportional representation like proportional representation with a 10% entry threshold. As voting third-party is no longer a thing most people do, only the Conservatives and Labour would be able to cross the threshold, leading to a majority government under a form of proportional representation even more unrepresentative than First-Past-the-Post. Yay!
Coalition of Chaos rating: 0/10
It’s a valid enough criticism that PR can produce unworkable governments, which I think this does — at least to a degree — demonstrate. I wouldn’t be opposed to PR for upper house elections, but when a country is deciding its government, having a reasonable system in place to ensure that the government isn’t a random assortment of vaguely like-minded parties and that a government can be formed in the first place doesn’t sound like a bad idea. This is partially a bit of fun (if your idea of ‘fun’ is, too, staring at spreadsheets for a few hours), but also partially to show that PR might be somewhat worse when applied in the UK than it seems on paper.
Parliament composition images created here, thanks to this Wikipedia tool.
Feel free to ask for more details on how these results were calculated; some figures used are entirely arbitrary, and are probably not totally correct, but close enough for the purposes of this.
