An Argument for the Alternative Vote: tough on Clegg, tough on the causes of Clegg
27 April 2011
On 5th May, a referendum will be held in the UK on whether the current First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system should be replaced with the Alternative Vote (AV).
Under FPTP, each constituency seat goes to the candidate who received the most votes.
Under AV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins 50% of first choices, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and those ballot papers are redistributed according to their ordered preferences. Ballots expressing no preference among remaining candidates are eliminated. This procedure is repeated until a candidate has support of at least 50% of the votes that are still in the game.
Here is why I think that FPTP gives too much power to party leaders over the direction of their parties and that AV will reduce this significantly.
The Argument
Imagine you are an MP who is strongly opposed to the current direction of your party, but even more strongly opposed to the other parties. If you resign from the party and stand as an independent with a very similar manifesto, then you would be a near-clone of your party’s candidate.
Under FPTP, you would be very unlikely to win. By standing, you have risked reducing your original party’s vote enough to hand the seat to an opposing party that you consider to be much worse. Supporters of your original party – even ones sympathetic to your view – are unlikely to vote for you, since doing so would increase that risk.
But under AV, your supporters can vote for you and give their second preference vote to the party. What is more, people voting for the party first should put you second (so long as your manifesto is similar enough).
So under AV, a disaffected MP could stand as a near-clone with a real chance of winning and little chance of handing victory to another party.
This is how AV lessens the grip of party leaders over their parties: it makes a party rebellion at the ballot box a live possibility, one that the leaders should try to prevent from occurring; so backbenchers have a much stronger bargaining position.
An Example
If you are a Lib Dem MP strongly opposed to Nick Clegg and the coalition, then under FPTP you probably will not resign from the party and stand as a near-clone at the next election. Because if you do so, you are unlikely to win the seat, but might end up giving it to a party that you like even less.
Under AV, you could stand against your own party with a real hope of winning the seat and little fear of handing it to another party.
If you had like-minded colleagues, you could co-ordinate this rebellion across a significant number of seats.
Your party leaders, and indeed the whole party, would want to prevent this split. Which means that you would have much stronger bargaining power within your own party than you do under FPTP.
If there were enough of you, then you would have enough bargaining power to force a change of leadership.