Party List versus the Single Transferrable Vote

Party List Proportional Representation and the Single Transferable Vote are both the most commonly suggested forms of voting for the UK in the event of electoral reform. Both are great and do alot for making the electorate feel like they actually have a say and have had an impact in the end results of an election.

But there are differences between the two, and this article hopes to highlight them, and hopefully when we come to implementing such reforms, we know what we want and why.

For full disclosure, I do have a bias towards STV as it is the system I’d prefer to be implemented into the UK. I do think both are very good however, and STV just has a small few things I personally like over PR.

For this, we will be assuming that Party-List is the nationwide variety. Personally, I believe if we get Proportional Representation, it should break up the UK in some way to provide more of a local attachment, similar to how Spain handles it. But the more local you get, the more you should just use STV, because STV is just Party-List but with a stronger focus of locality and voter choice (at the cost of slightly less proportionality)

Individuals vs Parties

In Proportional Representation, you vote for a party, which contrasts most other systems, which has a focus on individual candidates. This is because many democracies didn’t explicitly plan for political parties, they’re just a natural consequence of people having similar ideas and working together. PR turns this natural consequence into a hard defined rule of the system, acknowledging that this is what politics typically trends towards already.

However, this does come with some interesting issues, for example, independent candidates are much harder to get elected, as they need to represent themselves as a “party” with a list of themselves. Previously a plurality of the vote might be enough to crown them an MP, which could be less than 35k total votes. (Remember that constituencies have roughly 70k eligible voters). In this system, they would need 70k votes, or even more if a threshold needs to be reached in order for a party to be considered “big enough” for parliament (this is done in Israel, where a party needs 3 seats worth of votes to enter their elected house!). This threshold also has problems where many votes can go unrepresented which conflict with the name of the system but that’s a discussion for another time.

This essentially eliminates independents from the system without some explicit rules put aside for them.

This does have some advantages, like in a closed list system, where most voters can’t decide the priority of candidates on the list, parties can ensure that their message is unified and makes the system work a bit more smoothly by ensuring a party is always conforming to the current platform. And it also conforms with how many people vote already, which is voting for the party they currently like, or the leader of a party, and they do so by voting for the individual that represents that party, not for the individual themselves. But this doesn’t feel like a strong point to me, because a lot of the current voting behaviour in our system happens purely because the system acts upon us, and we do not act upon it, we don’t really know how drastic of a change in voting behaviour will occur in the UK if we transition to a different voting system. We could very well, under STV, like to vote for individuals much more than we used to, simply because it's more viable to do so.

And it also does so at the cost of electing individuals. This is somewhat fixed in an open list system, where all voters have the right to decide the priority of people on the party list, as opposed to closed list where it’s up to the party on how that is decided, so if we do adopt PR, we do need to think about how we alleviate these issues. STV on the other hand, simply does what we already have, which is voting for a person, and not a party. (But some uses of STV let you vote for parties because the ballot paper can get very big).

Local vs National

When politicians campaign in First Past the Post, they campaign in marginal seats. If we retire FPTP and implement STV and PR, then they’ll need to campaign all over the country, but how they accomplish this would be different in each system. In a local system, its bottom up, every candidate attempts to win the sway of the locals and gets to the heart of their issues. In a national system, it's from the top, instead of breaking it up by localities, we break it up by groups that are nationwide. Campaigns win the attention of groups, not constituencies. So Labour would campaign primarily towards working class people, and Conservatives would campaign towards middle class people.

This is again, a matter of preference. Both systems would require the parties to focus on appealing to ideologies, but STV facilitates local issues more, and PR pushes the parties towards demographics more.

Voter Expression

In PR, you still only get to vote for a specific party. Most people do not agree with only one party, they agree with a few, but have a favourite. In STV, you get to express your exact opinion on every candidate, which PR simply doesn’t allow you to do. I feel like this is important, because should a voter be able to express every nuance of their political worldview, or should they simply choose their favourite and move on? STV prevents people from feeling like they wasted their vote, but nationwide PR explicitly makes it easier that your favourite will get some representation.

I feel like it’s a very tight race, and your opinion will probably come down to which point you feel strongest about, and what side of it that you prefer. If you prefer local elections vs spread out ones, or if you like ranking choices vs single favourite, or if you’d like to vote for an individual, or vote for the coalition that is a party.