An explanation for the surprise Conservative victory in the U.K.

originally published on May 8, 2015

All the media is expressing surprise at the Conservative Party's winning of a majority of the seats in Parliament in yesterday's election, leaving the Labour Party in the dust, even though the polling just before the election showed an extremely close race. The final polls showed the Conservatives and Labour each at 33% or thereabouts, and in no case having more than one point separating them, with the rest of the parties splitting the balance.

So far, I have seen no reporting on the actual percentage of the votes, nationwide, secured by the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UK Independence, Green, and Scottish National parties. Might it be that the pre-election polling was accurate, but that it was only of small relevance with respect to the final outcome? We should remember that in 1983, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party won a solid majority of the seats in Parliament, even though it only got 42% of the vote. “Two parties were more liberal than hers; they split their supporters and thus gave the Tories a plurality in most districts. Thatcher's policies did not please the majority of voters, yet they were powerless to stop her.” (AccurateDemocracy.com)

How can this be? Let’s remember that both the United States and the United Kingdom elect their national legislators from single-member districts. Whoever wins a plurality (however small) wins the seat.

In the United States, where generally there are only two candidates with serious electoral support, this rarely creates a problem. (Gerrymandering is a whole other problem eating at the legitimacy of the electoral process, but that is another matter).

But in the United Kingdom, there are nearly always at least three – and, now in Scotland, four – viable party candidates for each seat. Which means that the winner of the plurality of votes, however small, wins the seat. (This may mean that there is no inconsistency between the recent referendum in Scotland in which a majority voted to stay in the United Kingdom and yesterday’s Parliamentary results in which the Scottish National Party won nearly all the districts (I guess the Brits call them “constituencies”) in Scotland.)

If Cameron’s smashing victory in the Parliamentary elections is more the product of the multi-party structure laid over a single-member district plurality system – as was Thatcher’s in 1983 – then the United Kingdom continues to have a serious problem of democratic legitimacy. The media has a responsibility to note the disconnect between the popular will (did 2/3 of the voters oppose Cameron in yesterday’s voting?) and the Parliamentary results.