Four late 2019 General Elections

UK: the incomprehensible murk that is British politics grew darker a few weeks back when the opposition parties meekly gave way to Prime Minister Johnson’s desperate demands for an election. His bill went through parliament with no amendments such as voting for 16-17 year olds and for EU citizens living in the UK. It was a cheap surrender of the control they had over Johnson’s minority government and at a time the opinion polls were favourable to Johnson’s Tory party. How so after him having reneged on his core, do-or-die commitment to leave the EU on 31 October? There simply is no real sense to be made of the British political dynamic at the moment.

Something of a mockery of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, 2011 showed up when it was easily circumvented with a bill which the House can decide on a simple majority vote. Whatever the principle of the Act was, it must have been a highly tradeable one because after the parliament that introduced it, Westminster has got nowhere near another full term.

Logic is broken too. Massive objections have been raised all along at the prospect of a second referendum on the basis it could return the same tight, indecisive result as the first one. This election could with equal likelihood return us to a hung, indecisive parliament but no murmur or comment of objection has been uttered. Our recent hung parliament has been abused scathingly by the Tories as blocked, paralysed and dead.

One can only grit one’s teeth and wonder if we will one day rise above the neurosis and schizophrenia and the country return to some version of relative sanity. Maybe there is a sense to be made of it, perhaps the only one that stands any scrutiny. Does any party want to win this election? The grim 2020 prospect for the one that does is taking on the burden of the next phases of Brexit. That agonising drawn out affair is far more likely to make villains than heroes.

Perhaps the only person who is sincere about wanting power is Jeremy Corbyn. But it is widely agreed that his Labour party would have stood a better chance with another leader. One with less dire personal poll ratings; one with a more straightforward position on remaining in the EU. His own parliamentary party hasn’t made a visible effort to replace him. Doesn’t that send a signal they too aren’t keen to take a turn carrying the poison chalice? Brexit has already killed off countless ministers, let alone two Prime Ministers.

Three other elections: they have already taken place in Spain, Portugal and Poland. They will be of little more interest to the British public at the moment than this website’s raison d’être, electoral reform. Nonetheless, they are each worth a quick mention for different reasons.

Spain: it’s a frequent event updating Spanish elections but our revised table will continue to show the April 2019 result for now. This is because the returns from the November event don’t compute with the number of registered voters. Whatever, though, it looks like voter tedium has set in. Turnout has fallen from a very healthy 76% down to either 69% or 65%, depending on which is the verified figure. We hope to be in a position to clarify in due course.

Poland: this election showed a massive increase in turnout, up from 51% to 62%. Such an increase repesents over three million new voters and challenges the level of credibility we can give the official returns from the 2015 election – or this one.

Portugal: turnout was already at a very low level in the 2015 election but has plummeted further to 49%. This is at the same time as a very large increase in voter registration of one million – in other words a 10% increase in the electorate! Without further information it would be guesswork trying to explain the glaring contradiction between voter intention and actual participation.

We hope you will find our update of the EU participation table here of interest:

 

For a full explanation of the table and its uses CLICK HERE.

We wanted to test whether first past the post (FPP) voting systems have an influence on the rate of voter participation in general elections around the world.

Here is a table to summarise our findings:

Very few nations with populations comparable to the UK’s still use FPP. A list of all those who do would show them to be mostly small states and island territories.

We found seventeen candidate nations with published statistics for recent general elections and discounted four of them. These latter were associated with both observations and allegations of irregularities, street violence and repression of opponents in the lead ups to and during voting.  Indonesia used FPP back in 2014 but by its 2019 election it had switched to a French style presidential election with a PR system for its legislature.

We have included India with some serious reservations. It has been reported that over 1,500 people involved in the 2019 count died of exhaustion from overwork and that hundreds more were taken ill. In such distressingly stressful circumstances, it must be difficult to vouch for the reliability of the official returns.

USA, UK and Canada are the three remaining developed world economies who use FPP.

We first show the official turnout statistics reported by the authorities (Columns 7 and 8). Malaysia ranked top with 82.3%. The Philippines were just behind and Brazil third. No other country recorded a turnout of 70% or more. The lowest was Nigeria at 34.8%.

But official returns overstate the level of real participation. That is because in all countries the register of voters never matches the voting age population. In the UK, for example, who rank fifth, unregistered voters are estimated to number around three million. The absolute number is less important though than the width of the discrepancy in percentage terms. Let us first look at how taking this factor into account affects the rankings in the table.

Columns 9 and 10 now place Brazil at the top with an implied turnout of 73.4%. Voting is compulsory in Brazil for those aged 18-70.

Malaysia goes down to third place due to its implied turnout rate being nearly 16% lower than official returns. The Philippines also shows a large difference of 10%. Neither of these countries have automatic voter registration. Nor do most states in the USA where the aggregated national statistics do not appear to account for an estimated 20 to 40 million unregistered voters. Even so its turnout at 55.5% is already below the 57.8% average for all the countries in the table.

The findings compare very unfavourably with the analysis in our table that details European rates of participation. Excluding France and the UK, who do not use proportional representation, the average for the European countries is 73.6%, a higher figure than any one country in the FPP table.

This has been a simple snapshot. We have found a statistically significant difference that suggests turnout is suppressed under FPP systems. This data may not be entirely accurate but we have found no evidence to suggest that FPP voting is a neutral influence on turnout nor that it has a beneficial effect.

All the same this site will in due course research discrepancies between voting registers and voter age populations in European countries. We may also look into proportional representation systems in large non-European states in search of a fuller overall picture.

We will shortly be making available further details via a link to our Statistics section when you will be able to find the above table reproduced with notes, qualifications and a list of potential reasons for the discrepancies in people numbers we have referred to here.

We hope you find our analysis to date informative and of interest.

European General Elections: vote shares of largest parties.

The table shows the vote shares gained by the four best supported parties in the most recent European elections in sixteen countries including the UK.

The table places countries in order of highest to lowest turnout. The French legislative parliament attracts low turnout in comparison to presidential elections and thus places France at the foot of the table. Much in the way of local and European elections in the UK many voters treat it as a bit of a sideshow. The largest party fell just short of an overall majority but gained consent of the assembly to lead. In Poland the voting constitution is complex and in 2015 for the first time a party achieved the necessary level of support to take government by itself.

Germany is being governed under a Grand Coalition. For the uninitiated, it is a coalition between the two largest parties. We were unable to clearly identify from available sources the exact arrangements under which Portugal is currently governed in its parliament.

At the foot of columns 5,6,7 and 8 we have shown the average support for the placings ranging from 30.2% for the largest to 9.2% for the fourth largest parties.

Beneath that we show by how much the UK varies from average and it can be seen that the variance at each placing is statistically huge. The second place variance is not far off the value of the average itself. If we remove France from the averages, the UK variances increase a little more.

Our data may help readers in terms of the following lines of investigation:

• • Referring to Column 9, under proportional representation systems, is there a common pattern in the arrangements made for government? The small ‘s’ indicates a party that achieved fifth place support or lower. Formation talks may be under negotiation in countries with recent election dates.

• • What levels of support do the largest parties attract (Column 5) and how evenly is support divided across the four largest parties (Columns 5 to 8)?

• • If readers are interested in true levels of support in the electorate as a whole, the percentages in Columns 5 to 8 must be multiplied by the percentage turnout in Column 3. In each case actual support is a lower figure, increasingly lower until among the bottom-most rows, the figure will be approximately halved.

• • The table will inform readers as to the distinctly different pattern shown up in the figures for the UK. It would have been even more evident had we taken Poland and France out of consideration, countries where the untypical factors mentioned above apply. Unusual circumstances did prevail at the time of the UK 2017 general election. But the largest party has often gained 40% and more in recent UK elections and the second largest over 30%.

• Electoral reformers can use this table as a step to identification of a model for proper proportional system of the type they wish to advocate for the UK. At first glance our analysis indicates both quantitative and qualitative differences between the top and lower halves of the table.

We hope you have found this data useful. We encourage you to circulate it among those who wish to bring about a real improvement to the UK’s democracy by moving us as quickly as possible to a PR system.

Rates of General Election Participation in European Countries

The table here shows the rates of participation in sixteen European countries. The UK is the only nation that has continued to use the first-past-the-post election system. Except for France**, all the others use proportional representation.

The table is kept up to date with revision made as soon as possible after new elections are held (Column 2). It is a snapshot making available data that can be used for a variety of purposes, the main ones being:

a) to evaluate and rank UK turnout against principal European countries (Column 7).

b) to allow readers to form a view on any relationship between the rate of turnout and the system of election in use (Column 6).

c) to indicate the approximate change in the number of UK voters who would turn out to vote if the rate of participation matched that of the other countries in the table (Column 8).

d) to calculate an average rate of turnout across the sixteen countries. As of November 2019 this stands at 73.6%. If we want to compare ourselves with the eleven countries above us in the table, their average is 79.3%.

**France: a two-round presidential election usually ends up in a run-off decided on a simple majority between two final candidates.  We show the second round turnout.

This chart shows the pattern of voting in the UK election general election held on June 8^th 2017.

Compared with the charts for the previous four elections this for 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015, you will see an established pattern has been broken. The numbers voting for Labour and Tory showed big increases. The other, smaller parties fared poorly, losing not far short of half their support. Much of this was explained by the decline in the votes for the Liberal-Democrats, UKIP and SNP.

Looking more closely at the vote for Labour, the number of people voting for them increased by an astonishing 37%. By reporting the change in vote share, 10%, the mainstream media tend to obscure the true extent of the change.

As for the Tories, they also increased their vote numbers impressively, by 20%. There are good reasons to believe that many of the 2.3m people this represents were made up of returning UKIP-Brexiteers and those defecting from SNP in Scotland. The following table with the statistical breakdown of the results can be compared with the tables for previous elections.

This was a strange election called for manipulative reasons and originally presented as a mandate for Brexit consolidation. In this sense a one-off, it is too early to draw the conclusion that it marks a permanent shift to new voting patterns. It suits spokespersons for Labour and Tory to insist that we have seen a massive return to two-party politics.

But what makes all the difference is seats held in parliament. To get to the true picture we have to go deeper. Between 2001 and 2015 the average hold on seats by Labour and Tory combined was 86.75%. This time the two parties have grabbed 89.1% which is admittedly an increase – but only of 2.35% above the average. That amounts to 15 seats more in a 650 seat parliament. If that signifies a ‘massive return to two-party politics’ what did we have before?

We have compared turnouts – or participation rates – at the 2017 UK general election with the most recent elections of our 15 closest counterparts in Europe. We have included only two eastern European states and no Balkan states. Looking at the following table, you will see that only five countries had lower turnouts than the UK – Spain, Eire, Czech Republic, Portugal and Poland. Please note there is a more recent table available on this website.

This is only a snapshot in time but it is worth noting that the 2017 turnout of 68.7% was the biggest of the five UK elections held since 2001, the average of which is 64.1%. But still we only rank eleventh out of sixteen. It is reasonable to conclude from this data that a new twenty-first century pattern of low voter turnout has been established in this country.

Defenders and advocates of our First-past-the-post system, the only one in use in Europe, claim low turnout has nothing to do with the type of electoral system. The data tends to indicate the opposite – that a proportional representation system of voting encourages people to get to the ballot box. There are significant factors. For example, they know that their vote is going to be counted in a meaningful way even if it’s not a winning vote. Also that if they support a smaller party, one that achieves a minimum threshold of say 5%, it will get its fair share of representation in parliament.

The election that grabs all the political attention in France, where they do things differently too, is for Head of State. Their 2017 election returned a record rate of abstentions which demoted them down the table from fourth to eighth place.

The last column in the table projects the millions of additional votes that would have been cast in the UK election had it matched the turnouts achieved by other countries. If made comparable with Belgium, Sweden and Denmark, an astonishing 8 to 10 million more votes would have been cast. In the UK, the biggest statistical grouping in elections is ‘non-voter’ – abstentions!

Very significant inroads could be made into the massive non-voter group were the UK achieving the more modest turnouts of the countries ranked fifth to ninth, when an additional number between 1.3 and 3 million might be expected to turn up at the polls.

However, the experience of a first-past-the-post system is that little can happen under it to evolve political change. Tory or Labour typically secure an unearned mandate for outright government though that was not the case in the odd circumstances of the snap election of 2017. The Tories were returned as the largest party but with no overall majority, prompting them to start talks with the DUP regarding a working arrangement for power. The Tories are visceral critics of PR and despise it in particular for encouraging stitch up deals and giving small parties too much influence. You have to look far and wide for greater hypocrisy than that.