It’s all too easy to delight at the well-deserved, overdue trouncing of the Tories in the UK, while overlooking wider and less-flattering perspectives on its electoral system and the sorry state of its democratic culture.
Two important records were broken – neither speaks well of that political culture. First, voter engagement: only just half (52 per cent) of British adults bothered to vote, the lowest turnout by share of population since universal suffrage.
Second, accurate representation of voters: it was the most disproportional election that the British first-past-the-post (FPTP) system has ever delivered.
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Reform’s roughly four million votes translated into a 14 per cent share of total votes cast, but 1 per cent of Commons seats. And winning 34 per cent of votes cast, got Labour two-thirds of the 650 seats on offer, double the representation that a fair system would have awarded.
Turnout is an expression of popular buy-in to the voting process – its decline should be a worry to all democratic politicians
Both factors had decisive effects on the final result, with Labour gaming the system to great effect – perfectly legitimately. By discouraging many disillusioned Tories, unwilling yet to throw their lot in with Labour, from voting at all, Keir Starmer’s party amplified the Reform/Tory right-wing vote split, ensuring it would take seat after seat with far less than an overall majority.
As the Guardian’s Zoe Williams points out, Labour’s imperative to drive down turnout also further diluted its less-than-radical promises to voters: “It was evidently considered more important to soothe Tories so that they would stay at home, than to put together an offer for a voter loaded with student debt, who couldn’t afford rent and whose number-one issue was climate change.” The party disappointed much of its own support base.
Like it or not, Labour in government will almost certainly have to revisit electoral reform and proportional representation, supported by 85 per cent of the party and 45 per cent of voters. Its promise to tackle falling turnout by easing voter registration and cutting the voting age to 16 will go nowhere near easing the sense of alienation from the ballot shared by so many. A fair system of voting might help – the two issues are intimately related.
Turnout is an expression of popular buy-in to the voting process – its decline should be a worry to all democratic politicians. As Laura Parker, of NGO Labour for a New Democracy, warns: “You can’t keep denying millions of people democratic legitimacy and hope they go away.”
In the absence of fair voting, British voters, like many around Europe, are also discovering the powerful potential of tactical voting.
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Nowhere was that clearer than in the French parliamentary elections where, determined at all costs to defeat far-right Rassemblement National (RN), voter turnout increased by a full quarter to the highest in 20 years. High turnout, moreover, meant increased voter options, as three or even four candidates unusually cleared the benchmark to compete in the second round in more than 300 constituencies.
Collaboration between the united left (NFP) and Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble in a crude form of tactical, preference voting saw both blocks raise their second-round vote by four and eight percentage points respectively, while the RN lost eight points and any chance of a place in government.
High turnout has also played a decisive part in other recent elections. In Iran’s presidential first round, a record low turnout of 39.8 per cent soared in the second to 50 per cent as voters became convinced of the possibility of change. Reformist Masoud Pezeshkian scored a famous victory.
Labour’s imperative to drive down turnout also further diluted its less-than-radical promises to voters
In Poland last year, a record turnout of nearly 74 per cent, the highest since 1919, saw voters chose liberal democracy and improved relations with the EU over extending the eight-year autocratic rule of right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS).
These elections seem to confound the trend of a systematic downturn in turnout since the 1990s in European elections, not least in the former communist states. “This pattern is puzzling,” according to DCU political scientist Roman Gabriel Olar. “We might expect enthusiasm for democratic transitions to boost voter turnout. Citizens who have ached to exert their democratic rights during a long period of political repression might naturally head out to the polls in their droves.”
He points to Tunisia where turnout in 2011, in the first parliamentary election to follow the fall of dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, was more than 90 per cent, declining in just a decade of “democratic disappointment” to 11 per cent.
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Boosting turnout, re-engaging voters with the democratic system, rekindling their sense of ownership of politics, is a vital challenge to all politicians and entirely possible. “The binary choice between autocracy and democracy excites voters, while the choices of regular electoral politics may increase apathy among voters,” Olar writes.
Convince voters there is more at stake than the usual Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and they will come out. As they did in France, Iran and Poland.
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