Article #
Democracy as we know it #
Explainer #
Democracy, it’s an inspiring word, a word that stands for a system where people are empowered to decide for themselves rather than being ruled by unaccountable elites like dictators, despots or monarchs, it’s something we’re encouraged to be proud of as a sign of progress and freedom, one of the greatest innovations of politics.
As you can probably tell if you read the other things I’ve written in the past I’m someone quite passionate about politics, but my interest has usually been on big things like world relations and political ideologies, I didn’t usually put much thought into political systems, the machines that make all of these ideas and decisions reality, there were inklings of what I know now bobbing around in my head for years, but they weren’t properly developed then.
Recently I started looking more in depth at this topic and I came across something very disturbing: Of the governments formed under the systems we call “representative democracies”, “liberal democracies”, or simply “democracies” today, very few of them are actually supported by their people.
Click here to read the full dataset from this analysis
To be fair in this analysis I decided to exclude any election results before the achievement of universal suffrage (equal voting rights).
I started by looking at the UK since that’s my home country, I looked at a few recent British general election results and found that most recent governments haven’t even managed to get a third of the electorate to vote for them.
This finding surprised me enough that I wanted to know more, so I looked at every UK general election since universal suffrage in 1928 and found that only one government has ever gotten half of the electorate or more to vote for them, that was back in 1931 and it never happened again, since then they’ve been hovering between 40% to 20% of the vote.
Then I decided to have a look at other countries to compare, I started with the US, focusing on Presidential elections for simplicity (since the US legislature has elections every 2 years, leading to way more results to track if I wanted to include it), I looked at every Presidential election since universal suffrage in 1965, the results were even worse, no President has managed to get half of the electorate on board, usually they get around a third or under.
Then I tried Germany for two reasons, it’s the home country of my friend Massi and it’s also a country I know that has a lot of coalitions (alliances between multiple political parties, rather than rule by a single party). I looked at the results of all of Germany’s federal elections since Germany reunified in 1990, they were a little better on average but like the UK the Germans have only managed the 50% mark once, they usually sit around 40%.
Lastly I looked at India since that country is the world’s largest democracy, the results were even worse still, India’s government has only gotten a third of the electorate to support them in an election once, in every other election their level of support has been lower.
How the hell is that possible? Democracy is supposed to be government of the people, by the people, for the people, how is it then that governments we call “democratic” are supported by so few of the people?
Well, the truth is, these democratic processes as we know them are far more flawed than most of us realise, it’s a mix of systemic injustice and cultural framing, and I want to talk you through it.
To start, we need to get some terminology out of the way, I’m going to be using a bunch of different political terms here that depending on your level of interest in politics you may or may not know, so here’s an explainer.
The Electorate - The part of a country’s population that is legally able and registered to vote
The State - The ruling political institutions of a country, in most countries it’s split into main 3 branches: Legislative, Executive and Judiciary*
The Legislature - This is the branch of the state that makes the laws, it’s often called a Parliament but in other countries it can go by other names, the US calls it “Congress”, Germany calls it the “Bundestag” (Federal Assembly), members of this branch are often called MPs (Members of Parliament) but some countries use other titles, for simplicity I will usually call them “representatives”
General Election - An election held to elect the members of the legislature, also known as a Federal Election in Germany
Constituency - A region of a country that a member/members of the legislature are elected to represent, also called a “seat”
The Executive - This is the branch of the state that decides its overall political approach, usually led by a senior figure such as a President or Prime Minister, this branch is usually called the “government”
(although not relevant to this article, if you’re curious, the Judiciary is the branch of the state that enforces the laws, it includes court systems and judges)
*some countries like the US, Germany or Australia also use the term “state” for their regions, this is different to a political state
Proportionality #
So now we know our key institutions, what is it they’re getting wrong?
The first main problem is proportionality, meaning how close the result of an election reflects how people voted.
In most of the case studies (the UK, US and India) an electoral system called “First Past the Post” or “FPTP” is used, in this system the country is split into dozens of different constituencies and the election is held separately in each with a “winner takes all” approach, if you get the most votes in a constituency, you win it.
Creator: DankJae Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0
For general elections these separate elections have different candidates for each constituency, the candidate with the most votes becomes the constituency’s representative and enters the legislature, if a party gets enough representatives to outvote all the others then they have a majority and can form a government, if no party has enough representatives then some of the different parties will have to form a government together, that’s called a “coalition”, or a looser deal can be held if one party is very close to a majority, where other parties support them on key votes, that’s called “confidence and supply”.
For example, in the 2017 UK election to get a majority a party needed to win 326 constituencies, the results of the election were that the Conservative Party got 317 seats, 262 went to the Labour Party, 35 went to the Scottish National Party, 12 to the Liberal Democrat Party, 10 to the Democratic Unionist Party and 7 to the Sinn Féin party.
To get a majority, the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May did a confidence and supply deal with the DUP to bump her numbers up to 327, a majority of 1.
In the next election in 2019, the Conservatives got 365 seats, a majority of 80, this was called a “landslide” win because it effectively gave the party absolute power.
In the case of the US Presidentials you’re not voting for a representative in your local area, you’re voting for who will become the leader of the entire country, but the election is still held separately with each state acting as its own constituency, 48 of the 50 states act as a single constituency while 2 states, Maine and Nebraska, are split up into several constituencies, the District of Columbia where the capital Washington DC can be found is also its own constituency.
Each constituency has a certain number of electoral votes based on its size and if a candidate wins that constituency, they win its electoral votes, this system is called the “Electoral College”.
For example in 2020 Donald Trump won 26 constituencies and Joe Biden won 27, this meant that Trump got 232 electoral votes and Biden got 306, making Joe Biden the winner and the next President of the United States.
2020 US Presidential Election Results - Votes and Electoral College
So, what’s the problem with a system like First Past the Post? Well, it doesn’t reflect the will of the people at all, if we take the US election as an example, in Texas 5,890,347 people voted for Trump while 5,259,126 voted for Biden, Trump got 52% of the vote while Biden got 46%, but because Trump got the majority of the vote it’s winner takes all, all 38 of Texas’ electoral votes were given to Trump, meaning that those 5 million votes for Biden don’t count towards anything.
2020 US Presidential Election Results (State of Texas) - Votes and Electoral College
Because of this it’s possible to lose the popular vote and still win the election, this happened in 2016, Trump got 46% of the vote while his rival Hillary Clinton got 48%, but Trump won because he won 31 constituencies while she won 21 and Trump’s constituencies were worth more electoral votes.
2016 US Presidential Election Results - Votes and Electoral College
The Electoral College votes for candidates other than Hillary and Trump are “Faithless Electors”, this is when a member of the electoral college (an “elector”) votes for a candidate that didn’t win their state, this is against the rules but some states punish it while others don’t.
In UK general elections each constituency is only worth one seat but the same problem still exists, in the FPTP system it doesn’t matter if you win a constituency with a majority of 1 or 10,000, you won it and the votes that went to the losers don’t go anywhere.
In Theresa May’s 2017 result in the UK, where the Conservatives failed to get a majority, they got 42.4% of the vote, that’s nearly identical to the figure they got in 1983, in 1983 the result was a landslide that gave the party absolute power but in 2017 they were left having to fight for every vote, this is because in 2017 the party got 317 seats while in 1983 they got 397, 80 more seats with over 62,000 fewer votes.
1983 and 2017 UK General Election Results - Seats won and Votes (1983), - Seats won and Votes (2017)
And this sort of thing happens every single time, sometimes it’s worse than others, but every election the results don’t represent how people actually voted.
In India this system reaches some of its worst extremes, in an analysis comparing the 2014 and 2019 Indian elections Indian news outlet The Hindu found that one party (the Trinamool Congress) gained votes but lost seats, another party (the BJD) got the same share of the vote but still lost seats, 2 parties (the BSP and YSR) lost votes but gained seats, and 2 other parties, Samajwadi and Shiv Sena, experienced a change in their share of the vote but no change in their number of seats
| Political Party | % of votes (2014) | Number of seats (2014 ) | % of votes (2019) | Number of seats (2019) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) | 31% | 282 | 37.3% | 303 |
| India National Congress (INC) | 19.3% | 44 | 19.5% | 52 |
| Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) | 4.1% | 0 | 3.6% | 10 |
| Samajwadi Party | 3.4% | 5 | 2.6% | 5 |
| Trinamool Congress | 3.8% | 34 | 4.1% | 22 |
| All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) | 3.3% | 37 | 1.4% | 1 |
| Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) | 1.7% | 0 | 2.3% | 24 |
| Telugu Desam Party | 2.6% | 16 | 2% | 3 |
| YSR Congress Party | 2.6% | 9 | 2.5% | 22 |
| Shiv Sena | 1.9% | 18 | 2.1% | 18 |
| Biju Janata Dal (BJD) | 1.7% | 20 | 1.7% | 12 |
| Other parties/independents | 24.6% | 78 | 20.9% | 71 |
Based on “Table 1” from Is it time for proportional representation? | Explained - The Hindu, with disproportionate results highlighted in bold
Then in the 2024 Indian election 58 seats were won with just a 2.5% majority, in 23 of those the majority was 1%, the slimmest majority was the constituency of Mumbai North West, population 1,735,088, it was won with a majority of 48, 0.01%, the 452,596 votes for the opposing party went nowhere, thanks to “winner takes all” the slimmer the majority the more votes are wasted.
It also means constituencies where the vote is divided can be especially vulnerable to disproportionate results, an example from the UK elections is the Northern Irish constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone.
Northern Irish politics is basically split into 3 camps, Unionists who want Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, Nationalists who want it to join with the rest of Ireland, and Cross-Community groups that don’t really give a shit either way.
In 2015 Fermanagh and South Tyrone had 5 parties running for it in the election, the Nationalist parties Sinn Fein and the SDLP, the Unionist Party the UUP and the Cross Community parties Alliance and the Greens, the UUP won the seat with 46.4% of the vote while Sinn Fein got 45.4%, the SDLP got 5.4%, Greens 1.5% and Alliance 1.3%.
If we combine the parties in the same camps that’s Nationalists on 50.7%, Unionists on 46.4% and Cross-Community on 2.8%, the Nationalists had a very slim majority but because their vote was divided while the Unionist vote was united the Unionists won, leading the constituency to be entirely represented by 1 Unionist MP in parliament.
2015 UK General Election Results (Fermanagh and South Tyrone Constituency) - Votes, Votes by community and Seats won (result)
These sorts of systematic defects turn politics into a bizarre tactics game rather than a reflection of the electorate, constituencies matter more than the popular vote, which means in the UK parties will go for “marginal constituencies”, constituencies where the current MP has a slim majority and is easier to overthrow, while “safe seats” with a strong majority are often ignored, in the US Presidential candidates will focus on “Swing States” and bypass others.
And it’s not just the parties that play tricks, voters will too in what’s called “tactical voting”, where to stop a candidate they really hate from winning a person will vote for the candidate most likely to beat them, rather than the candidate they actually agree with, like or actually would want to win.
Source: GetVoting.org - Tactical Voting - Aldershot constituency
But even this attempt at fighting back is exploited by the parties, who often try to encourage voters to vote for them tactically based on the argument that the party they might actually like has no chance of winning, leading to ridiculous “bar chart wars” and repetitive warnings of “can’t win here!”.
Sources: Politics UK, Who Targets Me, Tomorrow’s MPs, Rupert Lowe, Labour Party - Northwest Essex Branch, LibDemBarChart, Callum C Mason (via Twitter) and the Daily Mail
The result is an endless cycle of self fulfilling prophecies: People vote for the lesser of two evils rather than the smaller parties they actually like or agree with and this further shrinks the chances those smaller parties have at actually winning. People don’t vote for them because they don’t have a chance and they don’t have a chance because people don’t vote for them, resulting in a political class that further and further fails to represent people’s actual wishes.
This has reached its worst extreme in the USA where the entire political scene is dominated by just 2 parties, Democrat and Republican, these are the only parties in the US Congress, they’re the only 2 parties who’ve won states in the US elections for the last 56 years, they’re the only 2 parties who’ve won the Presidency for the last 168 years and since 1992 they’ve been the only parties to get more than 5% of the vote.
And it’s not because the people of the US actually like the Democrats and Republicans, most are indifferent to them at best and hateful towards them at worst, but they go along with them anyway because there’s a feeling that if you don’t vote for the lesser evil you get the greater evil, and given how the system is set up its hard to argue that they’re wrong.
This political hostage situation has massively escalated with the rise of Donald Trump, who has pushed the Republicans and the right to greater and greater extremes since he won the Republican nomination in 2016, anyone to the left of his right wing base has faced pressure to vote “Blue No Matter Who”: To support the Democrats no matter how much they might dislike the Democratic candidate, just for the sake of stopping Trump.
Establishment Democrats have gained an intense level of bargaining power as a result as they can resist pressure from critics by simply warning “if you don’t vote for me, you get Trump”, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were widely regarded as untrustworthy and unlikeable candidates but millions of people who didn’t like them or even outright hated them still voted for them anyway, with many lashing out at those who refused to do the same.
This was a situation the Democratic Party leadership deliberately engineered in 2016, using their influence to elevate Republicans they thought were the most extreme and unacceptable to voters, Trump included, to the leadership of the Republican Party, in the hopes that it would force moderates and progressives to back Hillary, they called it the “Pied Piper Strategy”, it ultimately blew up in their faces as even though Hillary won the popular vote Trump won the election.
Despite this they kept doing it, arguably these scare tactics were a strong influence in the 2020 election result, which Biden won.
After voters saw what Trump would do as Commander-in-Chief they got back into line, and the Democrats have continued the strategy since then in an attempt to keep it that way, supporting far-right Republican candidates including those who accuse the 2020 election of being a rigged conspiracy and want to totally ban abortions, trying to make the Republican Party as extreme and unelectable as possible. The result is a seemingly never ending crisis politics that demands any values be sacrificed to stave off the immediate crisis.
The problem is it’s a short term fix that creates bigger longer term problems, because “Blue No Matter Who” means those who would normally be the most confrontational about the problems with the Democrats are instead enabling them the Democrat candidates get more complacent and arrogant, they themselves become extreme and unelectable as a result.
And the more unpalatable the candidates become the less “Blue No Matter Who” works as a strategy, as voters decide to tap out rather than support candidates they find completely unacceptable.
The “lesser of two evils” becomes harder and harder to sell to the electorate if they keep getting more evil, in 2020 it successfully staved off Trump but it led to an emboldened Joe Biden in 2024, who is now destroying public confidence by continuing to run despite struggling to even form coherent sentences in public appearances, especially his recent debate with Trump, making Trump look good by comparison even as he lies through his teeth at every turn and plots to use every lever at his disposal to rig the system in his favour if he slips back into office. Recent polling from the Associated Press suggests that 70% of US adults want Biden to quit while 57% want Trump to do the same while polling aggregate site 538 from the ABC News network has labelled Biden as having a 56% disapproval rating from the public on average, with Trump stuck in roughly the same place.
This “lesser evil” is even harder of a sell when we remember that, again, the Dems are the ones who engineered this in the first place, is it really “harm reduction” to support the figures responsible for the harm in the first place? The lesser of two evils to sponsor those who created the cycle of evil? Short term harm reduction seems to become long term harm expansion, the Dems will not be motivated to end this crisis politics if they think it will keep them in power and force voters to endorse them when they otherwise never would.
“Blue No Matter Who” has no answer to this problem because the logic doesn’t seem to have an off ramp, it looks to be setting US politics up for a death spiral of cynicism and a relationship between voters and the political class that reaches peak toxicity.
I can’t argue against the fact that voting tactically is more effective than voting with your conscience most of the time in a FPTP system but it also helps entrench that system in the first place if you play inside its twisted rules. Maybe if I was living in the US, knowing what was at stake, I would vote Biden this time around, but at some point you have to stop rewarding that cycle of abuse otherwise things just get more abusive.
This is the kind of madness that FPTP produces, at a glance it seems like such a good idea, one vote per person, whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, it sounds simple and fair, but the results are anything but.
“What about Germany?” I hear you ask.
I’ve left Germany to last because it’s a special case, it doesn’t use FPTP, at least not entirely, that means its dynamics are a little different.
Germany’s Bundestag uses a system known as the “Mixed Member Proportional” system (MMP) or sometimes the “Additional Member System” (AMS) for elections, AMS is mix of the First Past the Post system and what’s called “Proportional Representation”, a system where the outcome is designed to actually represent how the people voted.
Party List systems use much larger constituencies, in some countries there’s a single constituency covering the entire country while in others there are a small number of large consistencies based on the country’s regions, the second version is the approach used in Germany.
The white boundary lines represent the boundaries of the 299 local constituencies (used for the First Vote, based on FPTP). The black boundary lines represent the boundaries of the regional consistutencies, based on Germany’s 16 states (used for the Second Vote, based on the Party List system).
This is an improvement but it still means a lot of the seats are elected through an unfair system with many wasted votes, a proportional system is much better but there are still dirty tricks you can use to produce unrepresentative results with a proportional voting system.
In Germany’s case that trick is something called the “electoral threshold”, for a party’s list votes to count they have to get at least 5% of the list vote or 3 constituencies from the constituency votes, this means that votes can still be wasted even in a “proportional” model, say a party gets 4% of the list vote, if they get those 3 or more constituency seats that 4% counts, if they don’t get those seats that 4% goes nowhere.
This actually happened multiple times in the 1990s, where a leftist party called the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) found their number of seats wildly fluctuating over the years, in 1994 they got 4.4% of the list vote and 4 constituencies, giving them 30 seats in the Bundestag, in 2002 they got 4% of the vote and 2 constituencies, meaning they failed the threshold and lost all their list seats, leaving them with just 2 seats overall, many years later in 2021 the party (now called Die Linke or “The Left”) got 4.9% of the vote but won 3 constituencies, allowing them to bypass the threshold and gain 39 seats.
So if they had failed to get just 2 of those constituencies in 1994, or 1 of them in 2021, all of those list seats and their votes would’ve gone with them, it’s proportionality but with the asterisk of being tied to a bizarre numbers game.
That’s German maths for you:
30 - 2 = 2
39 - 1, also 2
Euronews describes this as “a threshold that is meant to prevent smaller parties from entering parliament and causing political gridlock” while the BBC says it “was designed to prevent small, often radical, parties from gaining power”.
Is that so bad? Well, systematically not too much, only parties with a rather small vote share are being screwed over by this system, but think about it this way, small parties don’t usually have the benefits of easy media attention and an established voter base that the big parties have, they need to grow those, if an electoral threshold doesn’t exist they can get into parliament with a modest but still noteworthy amount of seats, that means they’re making speeches in parliament, they have voting records that tell you what they’re really about, if they deliver for their voters attention can spread around, public confidence can grow and they can build that community, potentially being able to take on the larger parties and maybe even replace them!
If you do have a threshold, it’s much harder for that process to start, those small parties can’t get their foot in the door, which means they can’t get the exposure, which means they don’t grow, dooming small parties to irrelevance.
Now maybe some of those parties might be extremists, the kind of organisations you don’t want to get off the ground, but others might be totally reasonable or positive parties that never get to have their ideas tested, the threshold doesn’t discriminate between extremist and reasonable, just small and large, and the large parties tend to be the establishment ones.
But thanks to vote splitting the large and already established parties can also get shafted by a threshold, in Russia’s 1995 elections almost half of the votes were wasted since they went to parties that failed to cross the country’s 5% threshold, in Turkey’s 2002 elections (which used a 10% threshold) vote splitting caused all of the parties that were previously in parliament to lose their seats, with just one party (the AKP) receiving over ⅔ of the seats despite getting just over a third of the vote, these are extreme examples but they show how an electoral threshold can essentially reintroduce the problems a proportional system should solve.
Obviously there does need to be some kind of limit on how many votes can be translated into seats, there’s only so many seats a legislature can have and not everyone can win, that does mean some votes will be “lost”, eventually if you keep dividing a number of seats by smaller and smaller percentages you’re going to get numbers lower than 1 and you can’t give a party a third of a seat or half a seat, that’s a natural limitation built into the formula, when the Monster Raving Loony Party runs and gets less than 0.1% of the vote across the entire country they’re not going to get a seat and that’s fair enough, but there’s a difference between a natural limitation like that and a purposeful one designed to exclude certain kinds of unwanted parties by an arbitrary number.
These problems are all symptoms of the same disease, a broken election system.
Turnout #
The second big problem, or disease, is turnout.
Turnout is the amount of people who actually show up to vote in an election, you can have the best designed, fairest voting system in the world but if people don’t use it there’s a massive credibility problem.
And this is what really kills all of our case studies, why these “democratic” governments are so unpopular, a lot of people voted against them but more people still just didn’t vote at all. These non-voters are often not factored into the conversation, and that massively warps our perspective, let me show you how.
Election results are usually shown like this:
But they’re actually more like this:
These graphs are from a website called “Vote or Vote NONE” and they highlight just how different the stats look when you include non-voters, they have even more examples from individual constituencies across the UK:
Suddenly we can see that the winning parties and candidates in elections don’t have popular support at all, they almost always fail to get even half of the electorate on board and often struggle to even get a third, obscuring non voters hides this fact.
Let’s take Vince Cable’s 2010 result in Twickenham as an example, he got 54.4% of the vote, but that’s 54.4% of the people who voted, 54.4% of 100%.
It’s not 100% of the electorate that voted in that area, it’s 74.1%, according to the UK Parliament website the area has an electorate of 80,569, if we take the 59,721 voters away from that number we’re left with 20,848 people, these are our non-voters, if we add them to our result Cable’s support drops from 54.4% to 40.3%.
He goes from being someone endorsed by the majority of his constituents to someone that isn’t. Sure, 40.3% of the people voted for him, but 59.7% of them didn’t, yet he was their representative, their sole voice in parliament.
2010 UK General Election Results (Twickenham Constituency) - Votes, Voters + Non-Voters, Seats won (Result) and Result - Voted for vs didn’t vote for
And he got quite a good result compared to some of the others in this election, look at Louise Ellman in Liverpool Riverside, if we run the numbers again it gets far worse.
She got 59.3% of the vote, a strong majority, but that’s out of a 52.1% turnout, 59.3% of 52.1 is 30.9%, 69.1% of her electorate didn’t vote for her.
2010 UK General Election Results (Liverpool Riverside Constituency) - Votes, Voters + Non-Voters, Seats won (Result) and Result - Voted for vs didn’t vote for
We went from almost 60% supporting her to over 60% not supporting her simply by counting the non-voters in the calculation.
This is a widespread problem across the country, according to the BBC in the 2015 election non-voters outnumbered the voters for the winner in 340 seats of 650, meaning that if they had voted for any other party, that party could have won, while in 602 seats non-voters could’ve changed the result if they voted for the second place candidate, that leaves just 48 seats or just over 7% of constituencies where the winner had an actual majority of the electorate vote for them, 93% where they didn’t.
In 2017 the figures were a little better, in 99 seats or just over 15% the winner had an actual majority, but that still leaves 551 seats, 85%, where they didn’t.
And believe it or not this is actually still being generous, because we have to remember that the turnout is counted as a percentage of the electorate, the electorate only includes those who are registered to vote, there are also those who choose not to register, a second invisible layer.
I can’t add them to the calculations because we don’t know exactly how many people are eligible to vote but don’t register to, but going off of estimates the numbers aren’t reassuring, the BBC reported on the election results in 2010 by writing:
If we were to add the unregistered to our non-voter count it would go up by around half, if we add that 16 million and 7.5 million together we get around 23.5 million non-voters compared to 29.7 million voters (29,687,604 exactly), the turnout rate becomes 55.8%.
2010 UK General Election Results - Seats won (Result), Votes, Voters + Non-Voters and Voters + Non-Voters + Unregistered
Another example, in February this year the UK constituency of Rochdale had an early election (technically known as a by-election) after its previous MP died, the result of that election was that George Galloway, leader of a new party called the Workers Party of Britain, was elected, beating Labour which had held the constituency before.
Galloway is a far-left radical but with cultural views that he calls “social conservative”, meaning he alienated more or less everyone else on the political spectrum with his campaign, his victory was treated as a shock result, an upset and a sign of rising extremism, Galloway himself promised the result would spark a “landslide” and that it was proof Labour had lost the confidence of millions of voters.
However, not many people, both from Galloway’s supporters and his critics, acknowledged the actual reason he had won, low turnout.
For example, the Guardian reported on his victory by saying he had won almost 40% of the vote. That was true, he won 39.7% of the vote, but 39.7% was also the turnout rate, a drop of 20.4% compared to the last election in the constituency, this was because Labour had suspended their candidate just days before the election and weren’t able to replace him, the suspension was widely discussed in the media but the massive drop in turnout it caused wasn’t so much.
Talking about his 39.7% of the vote without mentioning turnout, acting as if this was 39.7% of 100%, emboldened the “shock result” narrative, but if we take his 39.7% vote share as a percentage of the 39.7% turnout, we get just 15.7%, 84.3% of Rochdale’s electorate didn’t vote for Galloway.
2024 Rochdale By-Election Results - Votes, Voters + Non-Voters, Seats won (Result), Result - Voted for vs did not vote for
It wasn’t some sort of shocking rise of extremism or an oncoming political wave that swept the Workers Party to victory, it was people staying home, a solid chunk of them did so because they always had, another solid chunk did so because the party they were planning to vote for had dropped out of the election.
As we can see, who doesn’t vote can decide the results just as much as who does, another example I recently heard about from a friend was the Vale of Glamorgan, a constituency in Wales, since 2010 the Vale has always elected a Conservative MP to the UK parliament but to the local Welsh parliament, the Senedd, it has always elected a Labour MP: It’s the same constituency with the same boundaries using the same voting system but the result is always different. Why? Because of turnout, the Senedd elections have ranged from 40-53% turnout while the UK Parliament elections have ranged from 68-72%, what would the result be if 80, 90 or 100% of the electorate showed up?
Let’s revisit the US election results as well just for good measure, I’m going to put the results of the election (the Electoral College vote) side by side with how the people themselves voted, then show what the data looks like when you include everyone who didn’t vote, lastly I’ll show how many voted for the result of the election vs how many didn’t, 4 graphs for each election.
Here’s the 2020 Presidential election across the USA.
2020 US Presidential Election Results - Electoral College, Votes, Voters + Non-Voters and Result - Voted for vs did not vote for
Here’s 2020 in Texas…
2020 US Presidential Election Results (State of Texas) - Votes, Voters + Non-Voters, Electoral College and Result - Voted for vs did not vote for
And here’s the nationwide result in 2016.
2016 US Presidential Election Results - Electoral College, Votes, Voters + Non-Voters and Result - Voted for vs did not vote for
Due to “winner takes all” many of the results already change dramatically compared to how people voted, but when we add in the non-voters to all these examples the result for the most part looks completely different, majorities turn into minorities and the huge support bases of the big parties suddenly look much smaller, it raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the results.
This is how the realities of elections are obscured, results are calculated as a percentage of those who voted rather than the whole electorate, non-voters are hidden from graphics and turnout is taken as its own separate statistic (usually shunted to the bottom so it’s something you might not notice or think about), the unregistered are excluded from the results entirely.
Mainstream culture almost always fails to recognise this, election results are treated as a reflection of public opinion, the losers are deemed to have lost the argument and their views are often discredited, winners are said to have a “mandate” from the public to carry out their policies, even though that’s simply not how the system works.
Now there are plenty of excuses for this, that non-voters just don’t matter, that they’ve forfeited their right to a say by not voting, and one that comes up often: That by not voting they effectively endorsed the final result.
While from a systematic point of view this might be true, if you could’ve changed the result and chose not to you do have a part to play in that result, it’s just not true at all that everyone who doesn’t vote is endorsing the winner, people choose not to vote for plenty of reasons.
Yes, one of them is that they might expect their preferred candidate to win and so they think they don’t need to vote, but there are plenty of others, some people feel like their preferred candidate has no chance of winning and would rather not vote at all than waste their vote or vote tactically, some don’t support any of the candidates on offer, some just don’t care.
None of these reasons equal endorsing the winner, to act like they do is a rapist’s mentality, “you didn’t say no, so that means yes”.
Consent should be a positive thing, actively choosing to say “yes”, especially when we’re talking about the highest structures of power, people who get to choose what rules we have to live by, the punishments if we don’t follow them, who gets support and who gets left in the dust, how much money stays in our pockets and how much gets taxed, whether we go to war or preserve peace and at what costs.
Remember what the word “democracy” means, the rule of the people, we can debate exactly what that looks like in practice but I think it’s impossible to say this system is it, how can we say the people rule if their “representatives” don’t even get over the halfway mark of public endorsement and often struggle to get over a third? This is textbook tyranny of the minority.
It’s partly a tyranny of our own making, those who don’t vote are making a choice not to, choosing to deprive themselves of influence, but like the tactical voting problem it’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
The system is disproportionate, so people don’t believe it will lead to meaningful change, and many of them don’t turn out to vote, because they don’t turn out the chances of changing it get even worse, people don’t vote because nothing changes and because nothing changes people don’t vote, the two problems feed into each other.
The day after #
But that’s not the end of it, a lot of people when they think of democracy think of elections and that’s wrong, looking past the fact that voting systems are often broken and many people don’t use them the other big problem is people thinking that democracy is just voting once every 4 or 5 years and that being the end of it, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Again, democracy means “rule of the people” not “rule of the people for one day every 5 years”.
Why are we supposed to vote? Because the people we’re voting for are supposed to represent us, but often they don’t do that at all, there are countless instances of representatives who don’t follow through on their promises, don’t listen to their constituents or end up supporting completely different agendas to the ones they were originally elected on.
When the 2019 election came around later in the year, 10 of them lost their seats while 3 of them stood down before the vote, preferring to jump rather than be pushed, Change UK was dissolved shortly after.
In 2024 Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, defected from the Conservatives to Labour after spending years as a passionate Conservative right winger, the very day she defected her newsletter was being sent out claiming Labour had “no plan” while the Conservatives were offering “long term progress”, the Dover branch of Labour had previously branded her the region’s worst MP.
Even when the party memberships stay the same the policies can change dramatically. Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to an election victory in 2019 but 3 years later he resigned after a series of corruption scandals, he was replaced as Prime Minister and Conservative leader by Liz Truss but after just 50 days she also quit and yet another leader came in, Rishi Sunak. Truss and Sunak implemented completely different policies and agendas to Boris with absolutely no public endorsement whatsoever and there was nothing the people could do to stop them.
The same thing has happened before in the US, in 1972 President Richard Nixon was re-elected together with his Vice President Spiro Agnew, then Agnew resigned a year later because of a corruption scandal, Nixon appointed Gerald Ford to replace Agnew.
Then the next year Nixon himself was caught in a scandal and he resigned as well, so Ford became the President and appointed Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President, they continued the rest of Nixon and Agnew’s terms until the 1976 election, which they lost, 2 years of a 4 year Presidential term controlled by leaders absolutely no one voted to be in those jobs.
In these scenarios all the British and American people could do was sit and wait for 2 years to get rid of these leaders they had never chosen, all while those leaders had the keys to power, there was no mechanism to get them out early.
Germany offers an example of the worst extremes this can lead to, as a point against democracy or just a “food for thought” point you might hear that “the Germans elected Hitler”, but they actually never voted to give Hitler absolute power, they never even gave him a majority.
In Germany’s last multi party election of the 1930s, in March 1933, Hitler got 43.9% of the vote, earning the Nazi Party 288 seats, 324 seats were needed for a majority in the German legislature, the Reichstag, he got over the line by partnering with the DNVP, the German National People’s Party, which had 52 seats.
That was enough to form a government, but to achieve absolute power he needed a two thirds majority of the Reichstag to support the passing of the “Enabling Act”, the law which would allow Hitler to bypass the constitution and the other checks on his power, he got that by convincing the German Centre Party to vote for it as well, allowing him to sweep the other parties away and create the one party Nazi state.
The last checks on Hitler’s power were eroded in 1934 when the Nazis conducted the Night of The Long Knives, purging old rivals inside and outside their movement and then Germany’s President, Paul Hindenburg, died, allowing Hitler to merge the office of the Presidency with his old job as Germany’s Chancellor (Prime Minister) and become Germany’s “Führer”.
After that it was too late, Germany did have more elections and referendums after that but they were obvious show elections where Germans were overwhelmingly pressured to pick the “right” answer and political dissidents were persecuted by the Nazi security forces, this allowed Hitler to persecute millions, avoid any legal accountability for his actions, and start his campaign of expansion that would explode into a World War.
The turnout for the 1933 election by the way, was 88.7%, meaning 38.9% of the German electorate voted for Hitler, 61.1% did not.
March 1933 German Federal Election Results - Seats won (Result), Votes, Voters + Non-Voters and Nazis - Voted vs did not vote for
So while trying to earn votes was part of Hitler’s strategy it was only one tool he used, the others were threats, blackmail and violence and they were what ultimately sealed Germany’s fate.
The problem with what happened in Germany back then wasn’t democracy, if anything it was the other way around, the German people didn’t have the means to keep their “representatives” accountable themselves and the system had too many loopholes to do it for them.
And this is a rather uniform problem across supposed democracies today, a 2018 study found only 25 countries that allowed for direct recall of elected leaders, but most of these countries had all sorts of exceptions: Only certain leaders could be recalled, or it was only on the regional rather than the national level.
The number of countries where all elected leaders at the national level could be recalled was just 5, one of those countries is Cuba, a one-party state with no legal opposition, so in practice it’s more like 4.
“Recall” is the ability to remove an official from office early, usually by enough people signing a petition, if enough people sign a new election is held.
A “direct recall” means the petition can be initiated by the people themselves, other countries have an “indirect recall”, where the petition is initiated by the state.
The UK, for example, has had indirect recall since 2015, recall petitions are started automatically if an MP is convicted of a crime that comes with a prison sentence, convicted of expenses fraud, or suspended from parliament for 10 days or more. As of 2024 there have been 6 of these petitions, 1 failed, another ended early because the MP resigned and 4 of them led to new elections (in 3 of those elections the MP didn’t run again, in 1 of them they did and they lost).
This is better than nothing but it still relies on the state to correct itself and the conditions for that to happen are very narrow, 10 days or more suspensions from parliament only happen due to major “disorderly” conduct or serious fraud and the investigations can be long and drawn out, it took a year long inquiry, until 2023, for the investigation against Boris Johnson to be completed, well after he had already resigned as Prime Minister.
The same goes for criminal investigations too; In 2017 Jared O’Mara was elected as MP for Sheffield Hallam, according to his staff he almost never showed up to vote in parliament. In fairness he argued this was because of his health issues but he also almost never appeared at his office either; He also repeatedly tried to claim expenses worth £52,000 to fund his cocaine habit and pay off drug debts, using a fake charity that had the address of a McDonalds, bills for supposed “services” his Chief of Staff Gareth Arnold had provided him and a fake contract taken out in the name of a friend. Despite all this he remained in office until the next election in 2019, it took until 2021 for a parliamentary investigation against him to be completed, where he was banned from parliament for sexual harassment, then until 2023 for him and Arnold to be actually convicted of fraud.
And as long as you’re not a criminal, a financial fraudster or a serial abuser like Jared or Boris you can pretty much do what you like, you can be elected for one party then switch to another, you can promise to support all sorts of policies then do the exact opposite when you’re actually elected, you can ignore all the opinions of the people you “represent” and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Not only is this a terrible system for keeping leaders accountable, it’s also extremely undemocratic. How can the people rule if they have no tools to punish those who break their promises to them? The answer is they can’t, without accountability you don’t have democracy.
The People’s Choice #
There’s one last big point I have to make about what democracy isn’t, democracy isn’t representation and representation isn’t democracy.
Beyond the problems of struggling for accountability, how much can a “representative” truly represent you? You, personally.
Think about it, a representative has to “represent”, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or maybe even millions of constituents, even if they’re accountable, not corrupt and genuinely interested in the views of their people, how well can they represent them? Even likeminded people have different ideas, there’s no way a representative can actually be your mirror image, they have to make compromises.
And so do you as a voter, when choosing who to vote for odds are you’ll be picking between candidates from different parties, parties have long manifestos that can run for hundreds of pages of proposed policies, it’s highly unlikely you’ll find one you read and agree with every single proposal on the list, but in a representative model you don’t get to pick some and dump the rest, elections are “take it or leave it”.
But is this the only way of doing things? No! There are democratic tools that exist for people to directly decide what they want, the big 2 are “referendums” and “popular initiatives”.
A referendum […] is a direct vote by the electorate on a proposal, law, or political issue.
Our case studies don’t have a good track record with referendums, for the sake of clarity I’m going to focus on nationwide referendums rather than referendums confined to select regions.
The UK has only had 3, a referendum on changing the voting system from FPTP to a system called the Alternative Vote (where 67.90% voted no on a 42.2% turnout) and 2 referendums on membership in the European Economic Community, later known as the European Union.
The EEC referendum in 1975 asked if we wanted to stay in, 67.23% said yes with a 64.62% turnout, the EU referendum in 2016 asked if we wanted to leave, 51.89% said yes on a 72.21% turnout.
These were all “advisory” referendums, meaning the government wasn’t required to accept the result, although in all 3 referendums they did.
Germany has had a grand total of 0 referendums since reunification in 1990, before that Weimar Germany had several referendums that failed due to low turnout, Nazi Germany and East Germany had several successful referendums, but like Cuba’s recall powers these were paper tigers from one-party dictatorships, the results were already pre planned.
India and the US have had no national referendums since independence.
Just think about that, the UK has existed for 317 years, the US for 235 years, independent India has existed for 76, reunified Germany for 34, and in all that time only one of them has ever directly asked their people what they think, and it only happened 3 times.
All 3 of these were not only “advisory” they were indirect as well, meaning they were initiated by the state itself, the state chose what the question would be, how it would be worded and what the rules would be, the people didn’t have any ability to decide these things for themselves.
In terms of popular initiatives, in the UK it is possible to send petitions to parliament and if they get at least 10,000 signatures the government has to respond, if they get 100,000 signatures they will be debated in parliament, petitions are available online and it’s very easy to sign and see the responses.
However, nothing in this system compels the government or parliament to actually do anything, if you look at many of the government responses they tend to be the sentence “no, we’re not going to do this” stretched out into a few sentences or paragraphs and the debates that happen tend to go nowhere.
Germany’s Bundestag also accepts petitions and unlike the UK there’s no signature requirement for a response, they’ll read anything that they’re sent, that’s an improvement, however in another way it’s much worse, according to German news outlet DW the petitions committee isn’t required to actually do anything with these petitions other than read them, they can accept, reject or respond at their leisure, in 2017 it was reported that only 6% of petitions were “directly successful” and “assistance of various sorts” was provided to “just under half” of them, given that anyone can send in anything they like we can assume that maybe some of those poor numbers come from petitions that were obvious jokes or timewasters, but this is still a very bad record for getting the system to actually listen.
India’s parliament also accepts petitions but they have to be signed and presented by an MP, last year the Indian Supreme Court ruled that citizens couldn’t petition parliament directly.
And in the USA the right to petition the government is a constitutional right, it’s even included in the last line of the First Amendment and has been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court has also ruled that nothing about this right requires the government to actually listen or do anything in response.
In other words, in all our case studies the people have almost no direct power at all, everything has to go through the intermediaries, the “representatives”, and those representatives can listen to or ignore the people at their leisure, the public don’t actually have any mechanism to force the state to take a certain action, they’re completely reliant on the goodwill and agreement of these intermediaries.
Let’s again ask ourselves, is this really the people’s rule? If the people are funnelled through a narrow series of options that have no chance of ever actually representing the diversity of opinions they have, with no means to directly make their voices heard?
It’s not really a secret what I think, I think the answer is very clearly no, this isn’t democracy.
A system reliant on representatives elected through broken systems by a minority of those they claim to represent, with few means to hold these representatives to account for misconduct and no means to force them to implement the people’s will.
I know the meaning of words can change over time, but this to me is way too much of a bastardisation of the word “democracy”, the meaning of this word has absolutely nothing to do with what we call “representative democracy” today.
So rather than “representative democracy” I would instead call this “representism”, because that part at least is true, it’s a system that relies on representatives and hands most of the power to them, but the fact that the people have some influence over who these representatives will be doesn’t make things democratic by itself.
Recognising all of this is step 1, and it’s a complex process, it requires us to unravel much of what mainstream society teaches us.
Representist countries often preach about the value of democracy and how it’s the best political system, lauding all of its freedoms and for bringing government of the people, or in times where the cracks in the system are harder to plaster over we hear the Churchill argument, that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones”.
Whether praised as the best or the least worst this gives an air of superiority, especially in the West we see it in the way the world is described, there’s talk of a “free world” vs an unfree one, back in the Cold War the “slave world” was the Eastern Bloc, now it’s the alliance of rivals to Western power like Russia, China and Iran, the conflict is presented as a division between democracy on one hand and dictatorship on the other.
Western representism is definitely a step above those countries in terms of political freedoms: Russia and Iran essentially have even more bastardised versions of representism than we do, where the state simply disqualifies any candidate opposed to the establishment, or China which barely has any direct elections at all and (like Cuba) hands a constitutional monopoly on power to a single party with no legal opposition.
It was a step above the Eastern Bloc too, where elections only had one state approved list of candidates and the results were often falsified on top of that.
But there’s an irony in laughing at these countries for their very obvious lies about democracy, like how East Germany called itself the “German Democratic Republic” or North Korea calls itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”, when we do the exact same thing, we preach democracy without practising it, in both kinds of countries the people have to hand power away to others rather than making decisions themselves, having some sway over who those others are doesn’t change that basic fact.
Again, we are a step above those systems, but by how much? Maybe not as much as we like to think, we have the freedom to speak truth to power when many others don’t, but there’s a difference between being able to speak truth to power and being able to make power actually listen.
And that’s where Step 2 comes in, thinking about how a democracy actually would work, what it could look like.
Democracy as it is #
Explainer #
The first to know when picturing this is what the role of elections and representatives would be.
We now know these things aren’t democratic in themselves, you could have a democracy without them.
A democracy with no representatives would be a “direct democracy”, where the population as a whole decides what laws or policies to adopt using referendums, an early version of this concept was actually how Ancient Athenian democracy worked, with the closest thing it had to a parliament, the “Ekklesia”, being made up of whichever eligible Athenians showed up to its meetings, rather than specifically chosen lawmakers.
You could have a democracy with unelected representatives too, if those representatives can be made to follow the people’s will and held to account if they don’t, it has been suggested by some that representatives should be picked through “sortition” rather than elections, “sortition” means being picked by random lottery, it’s the system many countries use for jury duty as well as what have been called “citizen’s assemblies” or “policy juries”, it was also the way Ancient Athens selected most of its state officials, the idea behind this is that a politician who is chosen by chance is less likely to be power hungry, corrupt or vulnerable to other dodgy influences.
But you also could have a democracy with these things as well, and personally I believe we should.
Why? Direct democracy is great but it’s also time consuming, if every single policy or law was put to the entire population the political system would grind to a halt, the UK has roughly 47.5 million registered electors, while over 200 laws were passed in the last parliamentary session, imagine having over 200 referendums in just 5 years. And the more laws you pass, the bigger the population, the worse this problem gets.
It might be workable in much smaller countries, for example some countries in the Pacific Islands only have a few thousand people in their populations, but anything larger and total direct democracy becomes a mess, the reason Athens was able to manage it in ancient times was the fact that very few people were eligible to participate, only adult male citizens could take part while most of the Athenian population at that time were slaves.
So we probably do need representatives, and if we do have representatives I do think the best and most democratic way to pick them is the people deciding themselves who they should be, the way to do that is an election; While picking lawmakers through random chance could in theory produce representative results, creating more “ordinary” politicians as opposed to an elite political class, it’s at the end of the day just that, random.
With that in mind, when describing our hypothetical democracy I’m going to work off of the assumption that we’re keeping those 2 things from representism.
What changes then?
Well, our big problems in representism are disproportionality, lacking turnout, lacking accountability and an inability for people to influence things directly.
A democracy in my mind is one that inverts all of these things, what we have would be a system where:
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The election results reflect the will of the people as closely as possible
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Turnout is as high and participation is as easy as possible (without exposing the system to fraud)
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Politicians can be removed from power early through recall
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And the public have some tools to directly influence politics rather than always needing to rely on representatives as the middlemen (even though we need representatives to handle a lot of the work, they shouldn’t have a monopoly on power)
That might all sound utopian or too idealistic to pull off, but here’s the thing, it isn’t, there are countries where these things already exist, that’s where I’m going to bring in 3 new case studies, Ireland, Australia and Switzerland.
Fixing Proportionality - Ireland #
Ireland has largely solved the proportionality problem through its electoral system called “STV”.
STV is the name of the voting system, Single Transferable Vote, it’s another form of Proportional Representation.
You don’t have to rank every candidate though, you can vote for as many candidates as you like as long as you vote for at least one, so if you dislike a candidate so much you would rather your vote go nowhere than go to them, you can make that choice.
The other big thing that makes this system stand out is that it uses “multi-member constituencies”.
What is a multi-member constituency? A multi-member constituency is a constituency represented by multiple members of parliament, so rather than every constituency only being represented by 1 MP as in the UK, in Ireland each constituency is represented by at least 3 MPs (or TDs as they’re called in Ireland) and some can be represented by up to 5, the number of TDs is based on the population.
This completely removes the problem of “winner takes all” because there are multiple winners, allowing the results to better represent the political diversity of the constituencies.
I had a look on the website of the Irish parliament, the Oireachtas, which lets you view a list of TDs by party and by constituency, I found that every single constituency had representatives from different factions, including the multiple political parties and a few independents, only 1 constituency out of 39 was represented by a single party, that was the constituency of Roscommon-Galway represented by Sinn Féin, and that wasn’t because Sinn Féin had a monopoly on the constituency, it was because its other 2 TDs were independents not aligned to any party, every other constituency had TDs from at least 2 parties represented.
The system also mostly removes the problem of wasted votes, like I wrote earlier it’s inevitable that some votes will be wasted because there’s only so many seats to be won, but the preference system combined with there being multiple winners for each contest means that even if your first choice doesn’t win your second or third probably will, your vote is far far more likely to count in the Irish system than the British one.
As a bonus this also eliminates the need for tactical voting and gets rid of the problem of vote splitting, where unpopular candidates win because like minded voters were split between multiple candidates, so we can get rid of all of those stupid bar charts.
This leads to election results that are highly representative of how people actually voted, looking at a comparison of the popular vote compared to the membership of the parliament from the last Irish election in 2020 the graphs are almost identical, it’s not perfect but it’s very very close.
Fixing Turnout - Australia #
Our next example, ease of participation and high turnout, Australia. In the UK, registering to vote is entirely the responsibility of the would-be voter, you have to go out of your way to register, either by mailing in a form or applying online, to apply you usually need to provide a National Insurance number as well which you also need to manually apply for unless your parents have claimed child benefits when you were younger, you also have to go out of your way to inform the voting authority if you move house because if you don’t tell them you’ve changed your address you won’t be able to vote. The authorities do encourage registration by doing an annual checkup and they threaten fines of up to £80 for those who refuse to register, but it’s always on the would-be voter to manually register and to make sure their details are up to date.
In Australia voter registration, known as “enrolment”, works quite differently. The Australian Electoral Commission has a program known as “Federal Direct Enrolment and Update” which takes data from other government agencies, specifically the Driver’s Licence Agency, the tax office and Centrelink, the country’s welfare system, to learn who people are and where they live, they use this data to automatically register eligible voters, they also keep records of changes of address and use this to update the register too, meaning many Australians don’t actually need to do anything to get or stay on the register at all.
When the AEC can’t register people automatically, the AEC will contact them to explain what details need to be provided to get them on the register, all they need to do is respond back with the missing info and they’ll be added. And when all else fails, there’s still the manual form filling, so it’s very unlikely that someone who is eligible to vote will be unable to do so because of not being registered or not being registered properly, making participation much easier.
On turnout, Australia has one of the highest turnout rates in the world, their latest election in 2022 had a turnout rate of 89.82%, this was actually the country’s lowest turnout result in decades, usually the turnout rate is between 90 and 95% and this has been the case for the last 99 years (since 1925), these figures are leaps and bounds ahead of the UK, especially when we consider the fact that in Australia the electoral offices make a proactive effort to register people while in a country like the UK they don’t, meaning our second “invisible layer” or the unregistered will be much smaller.
Why? Well, it’s for a reason that might be controversial, the law. It’s a legal requirement for all Australian citizens to not just enrol, but to vote as well, enrolment has been compulsory since 1911, voting has been compulsory since 1924, with limited exemptions for those who are too physically or mentally disabled to vote or who are abroad during the election.
Punishment for not voting is a fine of 20 Australian Dollars, at the time of writing that’s 13 US Dollars (and 33 cents), £10.49 or €12.41, but if you don’t pay the fine increases up to a maximum of 222 Australian Dollars which adds up to $148.01 USD, £116.44 or €137.79, if you add on legal fees it gets higher still.
I’m someone who broadly considers themselves to be a libertarian, which means I value the right of individuals to have free choice and I don’t like the state having too much power to tell its citizens what to do, so I don’t take the idea of using compulsion, coercion or force lightly, but the results speak for themselves, the threat of this relatively small fine is enough to get the vast majority to the polls, whatever methods our other case studies are using, they’re not working.
I think the results in this case justify the coercion used because I feel like tyranny of the minority is far more coercive, and that’s what you get when you have a representist or democratic system that doesn’t get people to turn out, I know this segment is meant to be about what democracy is than what it isn’t, but I just have to reiterate, democracy is rule by the people, you can’t have rule by the people if a third or even half of them don’t show up to vote.
So in this case I’ll say yes, I do think you should be forced to pay attention and participate, not doing so is against your own interests and because the lesser the turnout, the less legitimate and representative the results become, it’s against the interests of the wider community as well, with that in mind I don’t think people should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot politically by ignoring the whole process, because politics won’t ignore them.
Obviously I would prefer it if we could get those sky high turnout rates voluntarily, but if we look at the data it seems that isn’t possible in most cases, so in this case between freedom and democracy I would choose democracy.
Direct Power - Switzerland #
Switzerland, like other countries, still has a representist system, there’s an executive called the Federal Council and a legislature, the Federal Assembly, made up of 2 branches, the National Council and Council of States.
However, where Switzerland differs from most other countries is that on top of this representist backbone is a strong layer of direct democracy.
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The mandatory referendum is a referendum that has to be held if the Swiss government wants to change the constitution, join a military alliance (like, for example, NATO) or an international political group (like the United Nations or the European Union), or to introduce emergency laws, it’s automatic.
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The optional referendum is the ability for any citizen to challenge a law passed by parliament, all they have to do is launch a petition in the 100 days between the law passing and entering into force, if the petition gets enough signatures from the public the law is put to a vote, if the majority vote against the law then the law is abolished.
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The popular initiative is the ability for citizens to change the constitution directly, they do this by forming a committee that proposes the change, either adding new passages into the constitution or rewording existing passages and then getting enough signatures from the public.
- If the initiative gets enough signatures it is sent to the parliament and the government who can offer a counterproposal, if no counterproposal is made the initiative goes to a referendum, if a counterproposal is made the initiative’s creators can agree with it and withdraw their original proposal, with the counterproposal going to a referendum instead, or keep their original initiative, which will lead to the public being able to choose which version to adopt.
And these rights aren’t paper tigers either, the Swiss Federal Statistics Office keeps data on all of these votes and the data shows that the people do use these powers, according to the office as of June 2024 there have been 242 mandatory referendums held (176 of which were accepted, 66 rejected), 210 optional referendums (123 accepted, 87 rejected) and 234 popular initiatives (26 accepted, 208 rejected), for a total of 670 referendums, 325 of which have been accepted, 361 rejected, an overall success rate of 42.8%.
The outlier there is of course the popular initiatives, which mostly fail, if we took them out of the numbers you have 452 referendums and 299 successes, a success rate of 66.2%.
However, the Swiss government defends the popular initiative as a way of empowering the people:
Effects of initiatives and referendums
Even if most initiatives fail and only very few laws are stopped by a referendum, these two instruments can still have a major impact:
• They lead to public discussions on the topics they involve.
• They can influence legislation: groups that are likely to launch a referendum are taken into consideration in the drafting of new laws.
• The Federal Council and Parliament will sometimes make counter-proposals to initiatives, to address the initiative’s concerns in a different way
The People have the last word
In Switzerland, it is not Parliament that has the last word, but the electorate.
Of course, our success rate would be no doubt very different if we included all of the initiatives and referendums that failed to get enough signatures or were otherwise withdrawn before getting to a vote, but here we can see a system where the people themselves hold a healthy chunk of the power in their hands and they are willing and able to use it, which (as the government itself states) is bound to make lawmakers think more carefully and avoid dismissing public opinion or taking it for granted, because the public can make all their efforts go to waste by throwing their laws in the bin or grasping the initiative themselves where necessary.
And these are long running rights too, the referendums have existed in Switzerland since 1874, while the popular initiative has existed since 1891, 150 and 133 years respectively.
Pooling the solutions together #
Each of these countries show a core element of democracy done right, but that doesn’t make them success stories, where they each have their strong suits they also have some major failings.
Ireland and especially Switzerland have majorly botched turnout, with Irish general election turnout hovering between 60 and 70% similar to the UK, Swiss turnout is a complete disaster with turnout for federal elections being below 50% since 1975.
2020 Irish General and 2023 Swiss National Council Election Results - Seats won (Result)
- Votes and Voters + Non-Voters (Ireland), Seats won (Result), Votes and Voters + Non-Voters (Switzerland)
Ireland and Australia have bungled directness, Ireland actually had a popular initiative system in its constitution but it was deleted back in 1928, both countries have a petitions system but representatives are free to ignore it as in our other case studies, although they both have mandatory referendums for constitutional changes, so they’re still a step above our other case studies.
Switzerland and Australia have massively screwed up proportionality, the Swiss National Council is elected by party list proportional representation with constituencies based on the country’s 26 regions (known as Cantons), but while some Cantons have a large number of seats, with 7 Cantons having 10 seats or more and one Canton (Zürich) having 35 seats all to itself, there are 6 Cantons that only have 1 seat, this means that it’s far harder to get elected in some regions than others, making the elections as much a postcode lottery as a genuine political contest.
If you’re running in Canton Zürich you can get a seat even if you get just 1.5% of the vote, in Canton Obwalden (one of the 1 seat constituencies) you can get 47.7% of the vote and still end up with nothing, this is actually what happened in the last Swiss election in 2023:
Source: Swiss Federal Statistics Office, Zürich and Obwalden election results pages
This means that smaller parties have to migrate to the bigger constituencies where they actually have a chance of winning, and voters in smaller constituencies have much less voting power as their votes are more likely to be wasted.
The problem isn’t that some Cantons get more seats than others, that makes sense, because the Cantons with more seats have more voters, Zürich has a population of 1.5 million while Obwalden has only 38 thousand, it would in fact be broken to give them the same number of seats, which would unfairly diminish Zürich’s voting power instead.
The problem is that there are too few seats up for grabs, the less seats on offer the more votes will be wasted and the less the results will represent the political diversity of their regions, when you have only 1 seat up for grabs you automatically get a “winner takes all” system, even with a proportional model.
This is why Ireland gives every constituency at least 3 seats, Germany’s party list system also actually does the same thing.
Then we have the other branch of the Swiss Parliament, the Council of State. You know how I said it would cause problems if each Canton was given the same number of seats? That’s exactly what the Council of State does, with members being elected by FPTP but with the seats reduced to just 1 or 2 per Canton, suddenly the vote in the bigger cantons goes from being worth too much to worth too little, there are still too few seats up for grabs but different Cantons are losing out this time. The idea is that these 2 systems balance each other out, but 2 broken systems don’t fix a problem, most likely the reason this hasn’t been fixed is because the legislature isn’t as important as in other countries, with the people having a lot of the influence themselves, but these institutions are still responsible for implementing much of their people’s decisions and the way they’re set up is worrying to say the least.
Australia botches representation in a different way, unlike Switzerland its constituencies are designed to be as equally sized as possible and the voting system is a preference system, sounds good so far, right? It’s just like Ireland!
Well, no, not quite, take a look at the results from the last Australian election, this is for its main branch of parliament, the House of Representatives.
Remember how in the Irish election results, the seat and vote graphs were nearly identical? Here they’re very different.
That’s because the system used here is one known as AV or the “Alternative Vote” (also sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting - IRV) and it has a key difference between the Irish model, STV: Its constituencies are single-member rather than multi-member, which means each electoral contest can only have one winner.
Creators: PoliticsMaps, DrRandomFactor Licences: CC-BY-SA 4.0 (constituency map), CC-BY-SA 3.0 (results map) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australian_Federal_Electorates,_47th_Parliament.svg, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australia_general_election_2019_-_Results_by_Division.svg
This leads to the same problems of “winner takes all” and wasted votes that appear under First Past the Post, the only real improvement AV has over FPTP is that it stops vote splitting, which does make the system a lot more fair but it still doesn’t produce results that reflect the voters.
The other branch of the Australian parliament, the Senate, uses a bizarro version of STV where you have the option to either give your preferences to individual candidates (like in the Irish model) or give them to political parties instead, with the parties deciding how the votes will be distributed between their candidates (similar to the German party-list model).
But both party-list and STV systems are forms of proportional representation, so that should make the Senate results proportional, right?
Well, in theory yes, but let’s look at the last results from the Senate elections.
You can see that some smaller parties, like the “Legalise Cannabis” Party which got over half a million votes, failed to get seats, but even smaller parties like the “Lambie Network”, which got just over 30,000 votes, succeeded.
So yet again there’s another stupid quirk that’s distorting the results, this time it’s for the same reason as the Swiss, unfair seat numbers.
The Australian Senate has 12 senators per state (with 6 senators being elected in each election) and 2 senators for each of its “Mainland Territories”, the “Australian Capital Territory” and the “Northern Territory”, even though these territories and states aren’t equal in population size they still have the same numbers of senators, for example the largest state (New South Wales) has a population of 8.4 million while the smallest state (Tasmania) has a population of 570,000 but they both get 12 senators each, this means the amount of votes you need to win can vary wildly depending on the state you’re running in just like Switzerland’s cantons.
Creator: Impaulrators Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australia_Senate_election_2022.svg
It also means the Senate just has very few seats up for grabs, which is why on the graphs you see the results for the parties below the top 3 (Labor, Liberal-National and the Greens) change dramatically.
This is how easy it is to fuck up an electoral system. Ireland shows that you can have a system that reflects how people voted but so many other countries fail at this, whether it’s disproportionate voting systems, unfairly drawn constituency boundaries, electoral thresholds or not having enough seats on offer, all of these things can decide an election just as much as the voters, if not more so.
Lastly, all of these examples suck at accountability, none are in that list of 5 countries with recall powers for all elected leaders.
| Powers ➡ | Proportional Elections? | High Turnout? | Direct People Power? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Countries⬇ | |||
| Ireland | Yes | No | No |
| Australia | No | Yes | No |
| Switzerland | No | No | Yes |
My idea of democracy is a system that puts all of the solutions these case studies came up with together and gets rid of their shortcomings, you have the STV system and balanced boundaries of Ireland, plus the mandatory turnout and easy enrolment of Australia, plus the Direct Democratic elements of Switzerland and a dash of strong recall powers sprinkled on for good measure.
I’d also bolt on a few more elements of my own:
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Unlike the Swiss system where popular initiatives can only propose constitutional changes, I’d let initiatives be used to propose general laws as well
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Unlike the Australian system where if someone is abroad during an election they’re exempt from being punished for not voting, I would make it so that if someone knows they won’t be in the country during an election they’d be required to vote by post or some other means, the only exceptions would be for people who were unable to vote and had no way of seeing this problem in advance
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I’d add a “none of the above” option to elections and it wouldn’t just be cosmetic, if “none of the above” got more votes than any of the candidates in an election then the election result would be cancelled and it would have to be held again, with none of the previous candidates being allowed to stand, this would allow those who don’t want to vote because they genuinely don’t support any candidates to legally and meaningfully show it
- This is already an option that exists in India and 18 other countries, although only Indian regional elections actually re-run the election if NOTA wins, in General Elections the actual candidate with the most votes still wins, making NOTA cosmetic at best
The end result would hopefully be a system that reflects its people, empowers them and can be held to account.
Problems with Democracy #
The Questions #
Now of course this hypothetical system would come with plenty of problems and there are a number of defences that exist for the current way of doing things, for example it’s argued that a First Past the Post system is easier to understand and easier to count, and that it avoids the political deadlocks that happen when one party fails to gain a majority.
When it comes to turnout I’m sure many would argue that freedom should be placed higher than democracy, that people shouldn’t be forced to go to the polls if they don’t want to, both out of personal choice and because agreeing to vote is in some way an endorsement of the political system, some people choose not to vote because they deliberately don’t want to legitimise the contest, is it right to take that away from them just because having a say is in their interests? It’s a fair question to ask.
And as for the direct elements, referendums and initiatives definitely have their critics. The idea of repeated referendums on all sorts of issues is a horror show to some, there’s a fear of “tyranny of the majority”, that putting all sorts of issues up to a direct vote will unfairly leave the minority powerless, then there’s the argument that people don’t know what’s best for them, and so aren’t qualified to vote on policy decisions.
This particularly came up during the 2016 Brexit vote, the victory of the “Leave” camp was an intense shock, many Remain voters were extremely angry that they were going to lose the rights they had from EU citizenship because of a slim majority that voted to leave, they also argued that “Leavers” didn’t know what they were voting for, as they had voted to Leave the EU but the argument over what leaving looked like wasn’t settled: What rights would we keep with the EU and what would we scrap? How economically close would we be to the EU? What kind of border rules would we implement now that the automatic right of EU citizens to enter the UK was ending?
As the arguments over these results intensified and continued for the 2 years it took to actually arrange the Brexit deal, this argument became quite compelling.
Switzerland had a similar problem in 2014, when a popular initiative called “against mass immigration” passed, which added a requirement for immigration to be regulated by quotas into the constitution as “Article 121a”, this was complicated by the fact that Switzerland had a free movement agreement with the EU, and the EU threatened to undo dozens of international cooperation deals with Switzerland if the Swiss brought that free movement to an end, like Brexit it took 2 years of negotiations to solve this crisis, with the Swiss government ultimately compromising by adding the quotas in the form of hiring quotas, where employers would have to prioritise Swiss nationals over foreigners, without abolishing free movement.
Boiling down complex legal issues to a few sentences or paragraphs is much easier in theory than it is in practice.
There’s also the fact that in many cases referendums fail, especially when we remember the Swiss popular initiatives where very few of them pass, that’s a lot of time and money that goes into organising a vote that ultimately changes nothing.
Recall runs the same risks, some US states have elements of direct democracy including recall, one of those is California, in 2021 California’s governor faced a recall election which he won by over 50% of the vote, that election reportedly cost around 300 million dollars to run, $300,000,000 that could have been spent on social programs or really anything else instead, hell, California’s population is around 38.8 million, they could’ve given every Californian around 7 million dollars for the cost of that election!
My Answers #
I have some views about these arguments, I think some of them are more credible than others.
When it comes to counting the votes, it’s unambiguously true that FPTP is easier to count, everyone votes once and they do it by just putting a cross in a box, it’s very easy to look at the ballot, look where the cross is and count it, in an STV system like Ireland’s it takes way longer because each person can have multiple votes and you have to re-evaluate a bunch of them to pass down their preferences.
The impact of this is very clear, in the last Irish election in 2020 the election was held on the 8th of February and it took until midnight on the 11th to declare the results in all constituencies, 2 full days of counting, in the last British election in 2019 the vote was held on December 12th and all constituencies were declared by 2pm the next day, this is despite the fact that just over 3 million people voted in Ireland while around 32 million voted in the UK and that the UK House of Commons had 490 more seats to fill than the Irish Dáil Éireann.
And in a way FPTP is simpler for the voter, it’s easier to put that one cross in that one box than rank candidates numerically, but in another way it’s not, since STV prevents vote splitting you can vote how you actually want to, as opposed to FPTP where the smaller parties have no chance of winning much of the time so you have to vote in bizarre ways like tactical voting.
Ultimately I think it’s ridiculous to trade a result that actually reflects the will of the people for one that’s “simpler” and quicker to get, elections aren’t a game show even if we treat them like one sometimes, they’re the method we use to decide who should be in power for the next 5 years.
The idea that voters are just too stupid to understand something different to FPTP’s one box, one cross is not only very patronising, it’s plain wrong, countries that use different voting systems don’t have significantly higher rates of spoiled ballots (votes that don’t count because they weren’t marked properly) compared to the UK, and the UK itself even has multiple voting systems.
While general elections always use FPTP, regional elections often use different systems, the first election I ever voted in was a local election, which uses a system called block voting where you get multiple votes, Northern Irish elections use STV, Welsh and Scottish elections use AMS, and voters have managed to grasp all of these. Because guess what? There are instructions on how to vote written on the ballot and in the polling stations, it’s not a grand mystery.
As for the deadlock problem, this is a genuine concern, for example the time between 2017 and 2019 where the Conservatives lost their majority and the opposition failed to gain one was a total disaster for UK politics, it happened right as the country had to negotiate one of the biggest political hurdles in decades, Brexit.
What happened was that parliament rejected the government’s proposed Brexit deal, then they rejected all the alternative options as well, leading the country towards leaving the EU with no agreements in place, which would’ve been a disaster, with the deadline for leaving having to constantly be pushed back to avoid this and buy more time to break the deadlock. The situation was only resolved when the parliament finally agreed to early elections, the Conservatives got their majority back and they pushed the deal through.
But firstly, 2017 was a result produced by FPTP, showing that FPTP doesn’t always produce clear results, and second this disaster wasn’t caused by a single party failing to get a monopoly on power but by a failure of the parties to cooperate. You can have a smoothly running multi-party government if the parties can agree to form coalitions, Germany has done it for years, Ireland as well, it just depends on the political culture you foster.
Is it more difficult? Sure, different parties have different agendas and ideas on how to solve our issues, if they have to cooperate rather than one simply getting all the power that means difficult conversations about what issues to prioritise and how to work them out, but is a single party monopoly really better?
Well, if it’s what the voters want, the answer is probably yes, if the voters give a big mandate to a single party then that party should decide how things go, proportional systems don’t stop that from happening. For example, Malta is the one country that exclusively uses STV to decide its parliament and it has consistently ended up with majority government and 2 party rule for decades, not because the system is broken but because that’s how people actually voted, third parties just aren’t popular in Malta.
But that’s usually not what the voters want as our case studies have shown, even though the British system is designed in a way that usually hands power to a single party almost none of those parties have actually ever gotten more than a third of the electorate’s support, why should we reward parties that can’t even get a third of the electorate on board with the keys to absolute power?
I suppose it again comes down to if you think the will of the people should be key or not, if you value strength and decisiveness more than public approval then maybe a system like FPTP is best, but if you value democracy it doesn’t make any sense to support a system where political parties can fail upwards.
Coalition agreements have their own problems of course, although they ensure a broader amount of parties and views are represented they’re also negotiated by the parties themselves, not the voters, and that means a coalition deal between the parties might not be what the voters wanted, for example in 2010 in the UK the Liberal Democrats were the kingmakers, they could’ve formed a government with Labour or the Conservatives but they ended up choosing the Conservatives, a decision that was extremely unpopular with the Lib Dem voter base. Although the party leadership was happy with what they’d managed to achieve in government many of their voters were left feeling angry and betrayed causing a large drop in trust and popularity for the Lib Dems, with their share of the vote dropping by 15% at the next election (from 23% to 8%).
With a proportional system where the chances of one party getting a majority are generally lower and coalitions become more necessary as a result the risk of this would only get worse, with the prospect of unpopular governments taking power through backroom deals between party bosses. I think that isn’t as bad a problem as minority rule but it’s still a problem, that’s why I believe in recall (we could imagine, for example, that with recall Lib Dem voters angry at the coalition could’ve launched a campaign threatening to recall their MPs unless they changed their coalition partner), the simple truth is that no representative system, no election system, however well crafted, can produce a result that matches the people on its own, democracy needs more.
As for the direct elements, I do agree that boiling down complex policy decisions to singular votes is difficult and imperfect, but this is no different to boiling down the even big range of options proposed in elections to voting for a few parties to go into parliament, or even just voting for a single person when it comes to Presidential elections, at least with a referendum you have a choice over a specific policy, law or proposal where you can give a clear answer.
For all the arguments we had about how to implement Brexit we at least knew in the Brexit referendum that the people who voted Remain all wanted to stay in the EU and the people who voted Leave wanted independence from the EU. You can’t get something like that in an election, there’s an infinite number of reasons someone might vote for a candidate, maybe they agree with all of their party’s policies, maybe only a few them but they think the candidate is the best option on the table, maybe they just like the candidate as an individual and don’t care much about the party they’re standing for.
A great example of this is Scotland, Scotland’s leading party for the last decade or so has been the Scottish Nationalist Party (the SNP) which campaigns for Scotland to have independence from the UK, but although the SNP have always put independence at the front and centre of their proposals it isn’t their only policy, they have lots of other proposals on foreign policy, energy, immigration, nuclear weapons, welfare and other issues, it’s unlikely but possible that someone who supports their stances on these issues but doesn’t support independence could still vote SNP.
That’s the problem with elections, they can only tell you how people voted, not why they voted, which means that by themselves they’re not a good judge of the public mood even if you get the details like proportionality and turnout right, no matter what certain parties might say an election can’t be a referendum.
When it comes to the resources involved in arranging these kinds of votes my answer is simple, you can’t put a price on democracy.
Is it expensive to hold referendums and other votes? Yes it is, and sometimes those votes fail, but civil rights shouldn’t have a price tag, we could save even more money by abolishing elections entirely but no one would take that idea of cost cutting seriously, nor should they.
It is important to try and avoid timewasting votes though, votes that are held even though they have no chance of passing, but I think that’s possible to do if you balance the maths. The Swiss are an example of that, except for the popular initiatives most of the referendums put to the Swiss people the results pass, if you put the thresholds for triggering a vote high enough you can give people rights like recall and referendum without having them be constantly abused by timewasters.
Tyranny of the majority is more of a hypothetical problem than a real one, because of the turnout problem almost no political decisions have been a case of tyranny of the majority, when we have tyranny it’s nearly always tyranny of the minority, a political elite making sweeping decisions on behalf of a majority that is usually either opposed to them or just complacent.
But it’s true that if we implemented a real democratic process, tyranny of the majority would become a genuine problem, unlike the other complaints this is one I have to admit is a genuine one, not every decision should be made collectively or put to a vote, I do believe there are some rights that every individual should have that shouldn’t be at risk of being taken away by the court of public opinion.
Key examples? Voting rights, the right to freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, the right to basic needs required for life (like health, nutrition and shelter), protection from cruel and unusual punishments, protection from discrimination based on attributes like race or gender, separation of church and state, these are some that come to mind.
Even in my hypothetical idealist democracy, these rights would be ringfenced away constitutionally, voters wouldn’t be allowed to use a popular initiative to implement Jim Crow segregation, torture or mass surveillance, they wouldn’t be allowed to raise the voting age back to 21 and disenfranchise millions of 18-20 year olds, they wouldn’t be allowed to ban the expression of unpopular opinions, they wouldn’t be allowed to make a religion a “national religion” or “state religion” that gets promoted at the expense of others, they wouldn’t be allowed to instruct the government to abandon rough sleepers rather than provide them with housing.
To be clear, I don’t think people would actually vote for these things, definitely not in my country anyway, but I have to have the honesty to say yes, if they did I would still want it to be blocked, the will of the people should have limits.
When it comes to voters being unqualified I would also have to agree, in a way. Yes, I definitely think the average person right now does not have the knowledge to make policy decisions. However, I don’t see this as an argument in favour of excluding the people from the political process, or for elitism, I see it as an argument for education.
Because many of our political elites also have no clue how to make policy decisions, which is why those decisions keep leading to disastrous consequences and why most representist systems see the ruling party change every few elections, politicians get too comfortable, make too many mistakes, then we throw them out.
If we want we could go back further, were the eras of rule by monarchs grand eras of prosperity? No, even though these monarchs were supposedly “born to rule” they frequently led their people to disastrous wars, foreign and civil, as well as intense religious strife, with unbelievers being repeatedly burned at the stake.
The idea that elites know so much better and are so much smarter than us is just bullshit, and anyone who looks at politics over the years can see that.
But why do we, the people, not know better? Because we aren’t incentivised to. Since so much of the “democratic” process today is indirect and tied to representatives, ordinary people don’t have much of a role in the system and so don’t feel a need to learn about it.
Why would you bother learning about how laws are passed if you have no role in passing them? Why would you learn how the branches of the state work and what they are if you aren’t part of them and odds are they won’t listen to you?
In other words, uneducated populations are not a problem of democracy, they are a problem of not having enough democracy.
The solution, in my mind, is political education. I actually got an education on politics in school, it was one of the subjects I studied for “A Level” (the middle period between High School and University), I spent 2 years being educated about voting systems, political ideologies, constitutional processes and so on, I had a great teacher who despite being a liberal was keen to encourage debates and enjoyed seeing people in the class identifying with ideologies outside her own and outside what the majority thought, she encouraged critical thinking, criticised groupthink, and taught us about the systems that rule us.
The vast majority of students in the UK, in their hundreds of hours of yearly learning, don’t get an education like this, learning barely anything about these subjects even though they have such a major impact on their lives, there is a required “citizenship curriculum” for high schools but it only contains broad topics rather than any structure and it has no exams or tests unlike formal high school subjects (known as GCSEs in the UK), meaning that oversight to see if it’s actually being taught is lacking.
In my case it boiled down to the bare minimum - 1 or 2 lessons that were quickly forgotten amongst the hundreds of lessons from subjects we actually had to study like Art, Technology, Science, English, Maths and so on.
I would change this, as part of democracy building I would make Politics a formal, required subject for every student in every school with no leeway for schools to phone it in, so as many people as possible entered adulthood with an understanding of how the process works and the parts they can play in it.
A democracy is stronger when voters show up, but it’s much much stronger still when those voters are well educated. I don’t believe that education is out of reach, if I could learn these things the vast majority can too, I wasn’t an exceptional student by a long shot, I don’t say that to put myself down but simply because it’s true, there were many others who worked harder, paid more attention and cared more about their subjects than I did, yet I was able to learn too.
Ideally these democratic processes would be encouraged from an early age, as a small example, in some school subjects the curriculum allows a choice of different topics to be focused on for study, in my experience this choice was usually just made by the teacher with little or no input from their class, I would make it so these processes are voted on by students instead, allowing them a degree of influence over their studies and introducing them to democratic power.
Sources: Pearson A Level Politics Specification - Pages 8 and 9, Eduqas GCSE Film Studies Specification - Page 5
Another key element to this subject would be media literacy, this was something I didn’t get an education on in school, I had to teach myself, but it’s a skill that’s vital for democracy especially in a mass media age, students should learn how to evaluate information, how to look for and judge sources, what misinformation looks like and the techniques used to promote it, how to tell the difference between facts, speculation, interpretation and lies.
This knowledge is the weapon every person, every voter, should be armed with, because it could change their lives for the better.
Complimenting that knowledge should be a system where politics is much more accessible, it should be way easier than it currently is to find out exactly what the hell is going on in our parliaments, to find out what the people we pay and elect to represent us are actually doing, there are resources out there already in many cases, for example in the UK there’s the brilliant website “They Work For You” which provides simple to understand breakdowns of how all of parliament’s MPs vote and what they have to say, the Constitute Project has copies of national constitutions around the world complete with short side notes that explain what of their segments is about, but few people know of these kinds of resources.
Many other basic entry level areas are highly inaccessible too, even something as simple as reading and understanding a law can be extremely difficult, especially since many laws work by rewriting other laws, actually finding what these rewrites have done and comparing them with the original is a complicated process.
It doesn’t have to be. Just look at this, when I make a change to the Entropic Domain GitHub (the program I use to post those changes) shows me the difference between old and new. Google Docs, the program I used to originally write this article, has the same feature, both programs give me a full edit history of the projects I’ve worked on with easy showcases of what changed and when, Google Docs even lets me label each part of that timeline if I want, so I can keep tabs on how things have developed.
But if I want to see how laws make changes like this I have to work harder. For example, here is a passage of the Online Safety Act, a mammoth law passed by Parliament last year tackling a wide range of topics, in particular it increases the power of our communications regulator OfCom, here’s a part where it does that:
Can you tell what the hell this is about? Of course not, because there’s no context. This law changes the rules by editing an existing law, the Communications Act, if I want to see what was changed I have to go out of my way to search up the Communications Act, then manually switch between the copy of the original and the current version to see the changes.
Is that intensive, backbreaking work? Well, no, but it could be much easier, and when we’re talking about laws that govern our lives it should be very easy to read them and see what impacts they have, don’t you think?
Voters are not lacking in knowledge because they’re stupid, but because we have systems where ordinary people usually have very little role in making the laws little effort has been put into making them understandable to those people even though these are laws we all are expected to follow, running the risk of fines, arrest or violence if we don’t, understanding the system is left almost exclusively to lawyers, judges, representatives and other middlemen, when this is how society is designed it’s hardly a surprise that political engagement mostly comes from a small minority and most don’t know their rights, their responsibilities or their power, it’s a design that’s not fit for purpose.
The Pace of Progress #
So how close are we to (or if you prefer your glass half empty, how far away are we from) fixing this democratic deficit?
Well to be honest, things are pretty bad, in my last last few days of work on this article I decided to go much bigger than looking up a select few case studies, I decided to look up every country in the world, and I really do mean every country, even the countries that the rest of the world pretends don’t exist, that’s the 195 sovereign states that are recognised by the UN and the 10 that aren’t.
Click here to read the full dataset from this analysis
I made a table that includes every single branch of every single parliament in every single country and judges them based on 3 categories, the voting systems they use, whether or not they have an electoral threshold, and whether turnout in these votes is mandatory or optional.
Based on these 3 criteria I rated all of these parliaments and the countries they belong to using a traffic lights colour system, then I made a tally of those systems and ratings.
Before I talk about these results I do have to include a warning here, there is a margin of error in the data I’m about to show, with the graphs and facts I mentioned in the rest of the article about elections the data was 100% accurate because they were results from specific elections, where the results came straight from the electoral commissions of the sites themselves, with this it’s a bit more murky.
If I was to fill out the table by checking every single country’s government websites or electoral commissions to find out how their systems work it would have taken weeks or even months, so I didn’t do that, instead I mostly used lists from Wikipedia, particularly its List of Legislatures by Country, its electoral threshold page and its pages for Open and Closed Party Lists, only when those resources failed to give me a quick answer would I start digging deeper, first to the Wiki pages of the specific parliament I was looking at or sometimes the page of a recent election in that country, because those pages usually come with a summary of the voting system, only if that also failed me would I branch out further to political databases or electoral commissions.
Wikipedia has an undeserved reputation as a dodgy source of info because “anyone can edit it” when it actually has a fairly robust moderation system and a passionate community that keeps many of its pages up to date, but I do have to admit that relying on the summaries of Wikipedia articles without fact checking them does leave some room for things to go wrong, there might be things that Wikipedia editors for those pages failed to mention or simply got wrong, and since I mostly didn’t double check their info myself and just copied it if they got it wrong, I got it wrong; It’s also just vulnerable to human error since it’s incredibly complex and I’m the only one who has worked on it, with no peer review to help spot mistakes.
Even so I’m confident that the vast majority of the dataset I’ve put together is correct, but I do just have to put that disclaimer out there for the sake of transparency, I can’t guarantee that this info I’ve collected is 100% fact but I do think it will build a useful picture that’s worth talking about.
Now, the table. It’s ratings are pretty simple:
Red is bad, it’s for countries that either don’t have elections, have elections that are blatantly undemocratic (indirect elections where a tiny minority votes instead of the general public, or non-competitive elections where no opposition candidates are allowed) or have elections that use a non-proportional system (like First Past The Post).
Yellow is okay, it’s for countries that are on the way to having a decent election system but are held back in some way, that includes countries that use a proportional system but also use something non proportional alongside it, countries that use a proportional system but tie it to an electoral threshold, or fully proportional systems that don’t have mandatory turnout, because like I mentioned before even if you have the best election system in the world its results aren’t going to reflect the people if they don’t use it.
Green is, as you might have guessed, good, it’s for countries that exclusively use fully proportional voting systems and have mandatory turnout.
So how did the world do?
Well, of the 205 nations in the world today, 95 got a red score, 109 got a yellow score, and the green score?
…a grand total of 1 country. Yes, 1.
That’s the small European nation of Luxembourg.
Now you might think okay, but that’s not fair, you’re rating countries that have fully proportional systems as yellow just because they don’t force their people to vote, if we got rid of that unreasonable rule things would get a lot better, right?
There’s a point to be made there, it’s rare but some countries do manage to get very high turnout voluntarily, Malta’s last election had 85% turnout and that was a decades level low point, all of its previous elections since 1971 had managed over 90% turnout, it helps that the country has a very small population but that’s still an impressive accomplishment for a voluntary system, and it’s also in a country that exclusively uses a proportional system for electing its parliament, what if we treated countries like that as positives rather than middle grounds?
Well unfortunately things don’t get much better when we do that, the number of countries I disqualified from getting a green rating solely because they had optional turnout was just 21, that leaves us with 22 countries that only use proportional voting systems for their parliaments without being tied down by thresholds, the other 183 countries are either running disproportionate elections, not having elections at all, or mixing proportional and non-proportional systems.
To get into specifics, there are 73 houses of parliament around the world where their members are decided by undemocratic means, that’s either they’re appointed, elected by a small elite instead of the public (indirectly elected) or in the case of 15 houses, they’re from countries where elections have been suspended.
There are 63 houses that are solely elected using a single non-proportional voting system, the vast majority of those (40 of them) are elected by First Past The Post, but there are some other models in there too.
75 houses are elected using a single proportional voting system, which sounds great on paper but the vast majority of those are using a party list system with an electoral threshold on top, which means in practice they’re not going to be as proportional as they might sound.
Lastly, 65 houses have their membership decided by multiple methods, that’s either a mix of a single voting system and an undemocratic system (appointment/indirect election), a mix of multiple voting systems or a mix of multiple voting systems and undemocratic systems, in none of these cases are multiple proportional voting systems mixed together, so all of these houses are also non-proportional.
| System | One Vote or Multiple? | Single or Multi-Member Constituencies? | Preferential or Non-Preferential system? | Is this a form of Proportional Representation? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STV (Single Transferable Vote) | One | Multi | Preferential | Yes | |
| Closed Party List | One | Multi | Non-Preferential | Yes | Voters can only vote for a party, not a person, winners decided by lists the party prepared in advance |
| Open Party List | One | Multi | Non-Preferential | Yes | Voters can vote for individual candidates, allowing candidates lower on the list to get elected when they otherwise wouldn’t have been |
| Mixed Party List | One | Multi | Non-Preferential | Yes | Some parties use an open list, others use a closed list |
| FPTP (First Past the Post) | One | Single | Non-Preferential | No | |
| AV (Alternative Vote) | One | Single | Preferential | No | Also known as IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting) |
| TRS (Two Round System) | One | Varies | Non-Preferential | No | After the initial election (the first round) a new election is held between the top candidates (the second round), the winner of round 2 is elected If a candidate gets a high enough % of the vote they can be elected in the first round without needing to go to a second (20-25% in Iran, 50% in France) |
| SNTV (Single Non-Transferable Vote) | One | Multi | Non-Preferential | No | |
| MBS (Majority Bonus System) | One | Multi | Non-Preferential | No | Works the same as a party list system but extra seats are given to the winner |
| Block Vote | Multiple | Multi | Non-Preferential | No | |
| Borda Count | Multiple | Multi | Preferential | No | Votes for lower preferences are worth less |
| AMS (Additional Member System) | Multiple | Multi | Non-Preferential | Partially | This is a mix of First Past the Post and a Party List system, some MPs are elected to constituencies by FPTP while others are elected by the lists, the list element is proportional while the constituency element is not Also known as MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) |
For example Ireland uses STV for the Dáil, a fully proportional system, but its Senate (the Seanad Éireann) uses a mix of indirect elections and unelected appointment to decide its makeup: Most senators are elected by various special interest groups like TDs, local councillors and students of certain universities while several are appointed by the Irish prime minister, the Taoiseach, the Irish public have no say over who gets to be a senator even though the Senate makes up half of their parliament.
This isn’t as bad as it might immediately seem, under the Irish constitution the elected Dáil is the superior branch of parliament and the Senate can’t stop the Dáil from passing laws, but it can delay them and it is a key part of the lawmaking process, that (along with the country having optional turnout) led to Ireland being downgraded from green to yellow.
The vast majority of countries that have proportional election systems for their parliament will have another house that doesn’t or an electoral threshold, which is why there are so many proportional systems being used around the world but so few green rated countries.
Now of course there are plenty of other factors at play with these systems that I didn’t look into to keep the research process short, factors like the conduct of elections (aka, whether or not they were rigged) or how easy it is to vote or run in the elections. For example Russia got a yellow rating because it partly uses a proportional party list voting system, another country, Equatorial Guinea, was rated yellow for the same reason, while the US and UK were rated red because both of the houses of parliament in the US use a non proportional voting system while the UK uses a non proportional voting system for one house and appointment for the other.
But as much as Britain and the USA are a mess, they are much further along the road to democracy than Russia, where (as mentioned earlier) genuine opposition candidates are simply disqualified from running in the elections, or Equatorial Guinea, where blatant electoral fraud means that official results have shown the ruling party winning over 90% of the vote on 90% turnout in every single election since the 1980s, except for one election in 1993 which was also rigged but more modestly; The leader of that ruling party President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has been running the country ever since he took power in a military coup in 1979, bumping off his uncle President-for-Life Francisco Macías Nguema who had been running the country since it gained independence in 1968, not exactly a shining bastion of people power.
If we were to include judgements on things like electoral fraud and election fairness into the table a lot of countries would switch from yellow to red, quite a few would have gotten upgraded from red to yellow, but we wouldn’t have any changes in the green column, because not committing massive fraud is kind of the bare minimum, not something that should earn you first place.
But the point is the vast majority of the world population is “represented” by people who either weren’t elected or were elected through systems with exclusionary designs, a voting system is just the entry level hurdle of democracy building and it’s one that the overwhelming majority of states have already failed at, far more than just the states that are academically labelled as dictatorships or otherwise undemocratic countries, which is roughly half of them.
For the 21 countries that did get past the electoral hurdle I’m sure many of them have their own problems with things like accountability and direct people power just like our previous case studies, it’s likely that none of them are truly worthy of the name “democracy”, democracy still eludes us.
Conclusion #
So that’s my pitch, on the problems of the current idea of democracy and a vision of what I feel is a brighter future that could come closer to the meaning of the word.
Even if you don’t agree with that concept, that’s okay, if you think democracy is not possible or too impractical and that a government which mirrors its people isn’t ideal, that’s understandable, I can see why some people would be convinced by the criticisms of democracy and why my answers to them might not be enough.
But I hope if one thing could come out of this it’s that we call a spade a spade, we label the current system representism or something similar, and recognise that democracy, whether you like the idea or not, is something very different.
Once we have an understanding of what these terms really mean, we could have a proper conversation on the ideas, and let people judge for themselves what they really identify with.
I think if we did that, most would want democracy after all, I’m confident there’s an empowering middle ground between tyranny of the minority and tyranny of the majority where a credible, working democracy could sit, we don’t really know until we try.
It would be difficult work, not only because of all the unlearning and relearning and systemic change needed, but also because of the new burdens, the good thing about the current representism is that because the representatives have all the power, they also take all the responsibility, when things go wrong we don’t have to do much soul searching ourselves, we just kick the current batch of representatives out and vote in new ones, in an actual democracy we would have to shoulder much of the political responsibility as well, the joys of our successes and the shame of our failures, knowing that we had a part to play in them.
But if we leave that burden to be carried by a small group of elites I don’t think their shoulders will be able to hold the weight, there’s a lot to be said about politicians, how they often tend to be sleazy, liars, corrupt and so on, but they’re also victims of this system in their own way too: They’re placed with an intense level of responsibility that they shouldn’t be, their worth is often judged based on the outcomes of this broken system rather than their actual talents, they’re expected to always have an answer and shamed if they don’t.
This is partly why we have a political class that seem so bizarre and alien, who repeat pre-prepared excuses, diversions and propaganda lines instead of just answering questions or trot out simple bite sized phrases to explain their policies instead of coming out with detailed explanations, “Strong and Stable”, “Get Brexit Done”, “For the many not the few”, their behaviour doesn’t make any sense because they’re working in a system that also doesn’t make any sense.
But they still often cling to that system anyway because they don’t want to knock over the foundations that got them their jobs, that’s why democratic change hasn’t happened sooner, if you’re a politician from a major party would you want to make the voting system more fair, knowing that it would make it easier for people to sack you from your job? Would you want to increase turnout, knowing that a lot of the new influx of voters might vote for your opponents?
I do think this is a fixable problem, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this if I didn’t, whenever I write about all the big problems that go on in the world I always try to give an optimistic, solutions spin on it at the end, and it’s with good reason. The representist structure might be a mess now, but it’s leaps and bounds over what it was until very recent history, until the mid 1800s less than a fifth of adult male Brits could vote and none of the women, it took until 1918 for most men to get the vote and 1928 for the majority of women to join them.
But eventually, after a mix of hard fought activism and random circumstances, it happened, change can be slow and making it happen can be painful and exhausting, but with persistence it does happen in the end, so this is a conversation worth starting.
Don’t just take my idea of democracy at face value, “rule of the people” is ultimately an abstract concept, there are plenty of different ways to realise it, there are many more countries we could draw from as case studies, weighing up the pros and cons of their approaches, I just focused on a select few because I’m only one person and I’d rather not spend 20 years writing this article.
And although the existing models for proportional representation are much better than the non-proportional ones they do have serious defects of their own, much as I believe in STV as a solution it has its vulnerability to poorly drawn constituency boundaries or even gerrymandering, which is when boundaries are purposefully drawn in a dodgy way for political purposes, unfairly splitting up voters and ensuring a certain party wins, this happened in Malta in the 1980s and it led to a result where the winning party failed to get a majority of votes but still got a majority of seats.
Party list systems by contrast are much less vulnerable to this problem but they concentrate an inflated amount of power in the political parties, since they decide who gets on their lists and where they get to be ordered on them they have a great amount of control over who wins the elections, it’s also a model that excludes independents who don’t want to join a party from power, in many list systems they can’t even get on the ballot and even in cases where they can they’re fighting in large constituencies where building a local reputation isn’t an option.
So there’s no silver bullet solution that solves every possible problem, but we can certainly do better than the current systems, there are all sorts of conversations to have about the different tools we should use to build democracy, it’s just a discussion most haven’t contributed to yet because they don’t know it needs to be had, they know the system isn’t working well as is, they just don’t quite know why.
This is my little part in trying to change that, let’s see if we can bring the meaning of democracy back to life, because I think it can work and it could be the best way of organising ourselves if we could just bring it into reality, if we start this conversation and make it widespread maybe we can.
Addendum - Election 2024 #
The Election Experience #
Today is July 6th 2024, the day the last result was declared for the UK’s latest election, the election was held on July 4th, all the constituencies except 1 had declared who had won their seats on July 5th, there was just 1 left - Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, where due to repeated screw ups the results had to be recounted 3 times, now those slowpokes are finally over the hurdle we have the full results.
It was a historic election, the Conservative Party (or, as we call them, the Tories) experienced the largest drop in seats for a century - losing 251 of them, before the election they had 365 and now they have 121, dozens of senior government ministers and party members lost their seats, the vast majority of Scotland, huge swathes of England and even the entirety of Wales went Tory free, all of the work Boris Johnson had put into turning the traditionally Labour held regions of Northern England, nicknamed the “Red Wall”, into a “Blue Wall” was undone, it was literally the worst result in their entire history as a political party, in terms of both votes and seats.
In fact, it was so bad that the Prime Minister didn’t even wait for all the results, or even half of them, to admit defeat, he conceded as soon as he won his own seat at just before 5am, a very bitter victory speech.
Even those that survived often did so by a thread, in the constituency of Rayleigh and Wickford, held by Tory Mark Francois, the party experienced the 5th biggest drop in votes in British election history, the former Chancellor (Economics Minister) Jeremy Hunt held on to his constituency of Godalming and Ash by just under 900 votes, the Tory Party Chairman Richard Holden gained his seat by just 20 votes after multiple recounts.
The Scottish National Party, the ruling party in Scotland which previously held 39 seats of Scotland’s 57 total, experienced a similarly brutal skewering, dropping all the way down to just 9 seats.
Most of these losses have been the Labour Party’s gains, as they now have 411 seats, well over the 326 needed for a majority in Parliament, but the third largest party the Liberal Democrats have also had a very happy night, achieving their greatest election result in history with 71 seats.
But that wasn’t the end of the shocks, despite Labour’s massive wins they also experienced high profile loss and extreme close calls. Thangam Debbonaire, who was going to be the culture minister in the new Labour government, lost out on that opportunity after she lost her seat to Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party, another party which had a historic result after gaining 4 seats total, after being stuck at just 1 since 2010 (and 0 before that).
Would-be Paymaster General Jonathan Ashworth lost his seat of Leicester South to an independent candidate, Shockat Adam, health minister Wes Streeting narrowly held his seat of Ilford North with just 528 votes after tough competition from another independent, Leanne Mohamad; The ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been suspended from the party under its new leader Keir Starmer and blocked from running in his seat of Islington North despite overwhelming support from the local branch of Labour, ran an independent campaign against his former party and won.
This election also saw the rise of the right wing Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage, which gained 5 seats but came second place in many others, destroying the former monopoly the Tories had on the right wing vote, as well as the early death of George Galloway’s Workers Party, where as I expected Galloway lost out as soon as Labour actually had a candidate to compete with him and turnout had returned to (near) average levels, although he and his party did come very close to winning in that seat and a few others.
It was a historic result for me personally, too, this was the first General Election where I was able to vote, I voted Labour and they ended up winning in my constituency, bringing 102 years of Tory rule to an end.
Election night was a very memorable night, after hours of the BBC being under an embargo, showing nothing but dogs, horses and other animals at polling stations (as well as some generic information about voting and apolitical anecdotes) 10pm finally came, the last call to vote passed and the exit poll (the estimated results of the election) was released, I briefly read it in the basement of a London bar while enjoying a punk gig, finding out that the Tories were on course for a total wipeout, when the show was over I headed home for an overnight watchathon of the results with my dad.
I had always stayed up to watch the results of election night when I was younger, sometimes with him and sometimes by myself, this time I wasn’t originally planning to since it had been obvious for over a year that Labour was going to win, but at the last minute I had booked an overnight gig for the evening of July 5th to the morning of the 6th, so I figured staying up for results night would help me adjust my body clock to power through the show.
There was a real sense of fun and thrill to the results: The tension of down to the wire results, recounts, seeing the nervy faces of milling about candidates in sports halls, the excitement as the pace picks up, with rapid results starting to pour in around half 2 in the morning, getting to see party discipline collapse among the losers as they become much more honest about their views.
Then there was the intensity around our constituency, the exit poll had marked our constituency as having a 95% chance to go over to Labour, but then the constituency of Broxbourne, which the poll had given the same odds, stayed Tory and became their second seat of the night, making me nervous that we would be one of the few parts of the country left represented by those crooks.
My dad pointed out that the Tory majority in Broxbourne had been higher than in our area but that only gave so much reassurance, it was still a high majority to overturn. Our constituency had been declared at around 4am last election, so as that hour approached my nerves got worse and worse, this was at the point where so many results were coming in that the BBC wasn’t even cutting to camera feeds of all the declarations, many of them were just coming up as blips on the bottom of the screen, a simple constituency name, colour, the party that won and “GAIN” or “HOLD”.
Then, just on time, our name came up, Labour GAIN.
They only actually used half the name of our constituency, shortening it so it would easily fit on the ticker, leading to a frantic few seconds of refreshing the results page to double check it really was us, after those few seconds the results finally popped up on my phone courtesy of a results tracker from the Manchester Evening News; It was true, Labour had won in our area, 102 years of Tory rule brought to a bitter end.
“YES!” me and my dad leaped up off the sofa, punching our fists in the air, then danced around the room in joy.
I had been (and still am) wary about Labour, especially because of Starmer’s tendency to behave in a rather slippery way, he won the Labour leadership contest calling Corbyn a friend and pledging to to treat the party’s Corbyn era manifesto as a “foundational document”, then he ended up ditching it, suspending Corbyn from the party and denying that friendship ever existed, he described himself as a socialist while his party had massively watered down public spending commitments, trotting out the line that “there’s no money left”, a reminder of the endless bombardment of the messaging that “there’s no magic money tree” from the Conservatives under former leaders David Cameron and Theresa May, even though many companies are making record profits (they’re simply pocketing the benefits instead of passing them on to the public) leading to a situation where prices and profits rise while wages stagnated. The lack of boldness and principle was worrying, I wanted a Labour Party like the one Britain supported in 1945, when the country was in far deeper shit than it is now, when our cities were smokestacks from endless waves of bombing and basic goods were still under rationing, the party that despite all those problems built a public health service that still exists today.
But despite all those misgivings I liked the local party candidate, who had supported a local campaign I was part of and was someone I had actually spoken with before, and the chance of defeating over a century of rule by the party that had been caught in scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal of blatant lies, abuse, corruption and misconduct was too much to pass up, especially since they had not just ruled my area for my entire lifetime, but ruled the country for 14 of my 21 years of life, I had been too young to remember any alternative.
So for me the result was in many ways very satisfying revenge, it was a shocking shift in the balance of power: Just a few years ago Boris Johnson had led the Tories to victory, sweeping away Change UK, Lib Dems, Corbyn’s Labour and all other naysayers and gaining absolute power, it seemed like under him the Tories were set for maybe another 10 years in office, then they were sent crashing down by scandal after scandal, losing the voters by their constant denialism to the point of absurdity.
Even though a lot of the excitement and tension went away after my seat was declared, seeing the remaining results come in, the Wales wipeout, the knife-edge wins and losses, more senior Tories losing seats, kept the night going with a level of intrigue.
It was also an enjoyable watch for exactly the opposite reason as well in many respects, kindness. After weeks of combative campaigning and years of generally vicious politics the venom seemed to melt away in many moments, I remember a moment in the constituency of Brighton Kemptown where the Tory candidate immediately started clapping for the Labour candidate when their victory was declared, there were numerous other moments like it, handshakes between candidates and praise between opponents, Sunak even took a moment to call Starmer a “decent public spirited man who I respect” in his resignation speech, it felt a little bit like the Christmas Truce in World War 1.
And crucially in every speech I saw everyone respected the results and didn’t blame the voters: Sunak apologised to his party and the public, accepted responsibility and stated that the result was a clear signal of change, telling the people “yours is the only judgement that matters”, defeated minister Penny Mordaunt told her successor that she would be working for the best employer, the people, who she credited for making all her achievements possible, then gave an honest reflection on the economic insecurity that caused her party’s loss, pledging “to anyone who is disappointed, democracy is never wrong”, Jeremy Hunt although victorious in his own seat gave a concession in his speech on behalf of his party, telling party members that rather than speculating on if the scale of their defeat was fair they should reflect on what caused trust to be lost, with humility, and telling people who had supported the Conservatives “don’t be sad, this is the magic of democracy”; These words don’t wash away all of the things they’ve done, but I do admire the ability of these people to reflect, take responsibility and exit gracefully after one of the most public career ending rejections imaginable.
I lasted through this marathon of stories and results until just before 8am with 8 seats left to go, my dad had thrown in the towel a little earlier.
But since you’ve probably already read the rest of the article if you’re here, you probably know what’s coming next too, the bubble has to be burst.
Bursting the Bubble #
Was this a result that represented the people’s will?
No, no it wasn’t.
Everything that could go wrong with election systems did go wrong, we got a massively disproportionate result, a sizable drop in turnout and huge numbers of wasted votes.
Labour under Starmer actually got less votes in 2024 than in the 2017 and 2019 elections under Corbyn, they did get a very modest increase in their share of the vote since 2019 (about 1.6%) but that’s mostly because turnout dropped by almost 8%, Labour got a bigger piece of a smaller pie. Meanwhile, Reform UK got 14.3% of votes and 0.8% of the seats while the Green Party got 6.7% of votes and 0.6% of the seats.
Because so many of the results were extremely close (with majorities of only a few thousand, a few hundred or even less than 100 in some cases), winner takes all means that huge numbers of votes went to waste, according to the Electoral Reform Society 57.8% of voters didn’t vote for their MP this time around, in over a hundred constituencies the Tories lost out to Labour because of vote splitting caused by Reform UK, where in most cases even a small fraction of voters sticking with the Tories would’ve been enough to swing the results the other way.
And of course when we add in non-voters things get even worse, turnout was another area where the results were historic and not in a good way, it was the second lowest turnout rate in a UK election since 1885 (60% - The lowest was in 2001, 59%), just 20% of the electorate voted for Labour and yet they now have absolute power, as in previous elections the legitimacy gap caused by low turnout had disturbingly little mention in the conversation surrounding the results.
Having a majority of over 100 seats means that Labour get to essentially make all the rules with no input from any other parties, with a slimmer majority some Labour rebels could be enough to switch the numbers in the opposition’s favour on certain issues, but with this huge majority it would take a massive collapse in discipline for this monopoly to be even slightly challenged, this is “business as usual” under First Past the Post and the business is incredibly crony.
2024 UK General Election Results - Votes, Voters + Non-Voters and Seats won (Result)
On top of all that many people didn’t vote with their hearts in this election, a lot of the votes for Reform were protest votes by right wingers who just wanted to punish the Tories, many Labour and Lib Dem votes came from leftists and centrists with the same mentality, so just as I mentioned in the article, the election can only tell us how people voted, but not why, many of these votes were not expressions of support for the policies of the parties they went to.
The parties didn’t really campaign with their hearts either, much of this was about strategy. The Lib Dems got nearly the exact same share of the vote as they did in 2019, just like Labour, but what changed was which voters they targeted, both parties picked out key target constituencies to campaign for, most of them being Tory held constituencies, and bypassed the others, they didn’t win over more voters, they won over different voters, the right kinds of voters to make a difference.
The result is an election that tells us almost nothing about the public mood, we know what they voted against, the Tories, most of those who voted Reform almost certainly knew they weren’t going to win power, that they were probably letting Labour in by the back door, but they voted Reform anyway, preferring to punish the Tories rather than save them.
And in those cases where Labour lost to independents we do know why, except for Corbyn those independent candidates stood out because of a single issue, Palestine. Voters were angry at Starmerite Labour’s refusal to condemn Israeli war crimes, something that caused particular anger given that Starmer himself is a former human rights lawyer who should know better.
When it comes to Corbyn he was a very popular MP in his constituency, put simply his re-election was a clear condemnation of Labour’s decision to force him out of the party, even though his ideals and persona had failed to win over the country at large many of his local constituents were still on his side.
But what did the public vote for? What do they actually want to be done? We have no idea, and that makes the country’s future very uncertain.
The one silver lining about all this is it has catapulted the conversation about proportionality into the mainstream, the BBC has reported on the huge gap between votes and seats from Reform and the Greens, describing the election results as “the most disproportionate on record”, the left have naturally pounced on the fact that Starmer got less votes than Corbyn, left-leaning outlet The Guardian ran with some telling lines: “He won the votes, now Starmer just needs to win over the people”, “Reform’s small seat count conceals size of its threat”, the right wing Express newspaper has started asking if we should adopt proportional representation and pushed an article claiming Reform would have won 93 seats under PR; The Tories were staunch backers of First Past the Post this election, the fact that it has so cruelly (and unfairly) decimated them has given the political right pause for thought, helped by their drift to Farage who has been a consistent PR supporter for over a decade:
We remain steadfast in our support for the fundamental principles that underpin the UK’s constitutional settlement. We remain committed to the First Past the Post system for elections, maintaining the direct link with the local voter. We will not change the voting age from 18. We will maintain rules to tackle voting fraud, including the requirement to show ID.
Interviewers have been asking a lot of questions about how representative this government is after getting two thirds of the seats on a third of the vote, the Greens have been platformed condemning it, with Carla Denyer especially hammering home one particular line that “First Past the Post is only used in 2 European countries, the UK and Belarus”, Reform and Farage have been doing much of the same thing, and because they’ve gone from a zero seat blunder (or in the case of the Greens, a one seat wonder) to actually having multiple MPs, they’re getting more attention than they otherwise might have done.
That means the issue of proportional representation has the potential to come to the forefront, which is very encouraging, but making that change actually happen would likely be a very brutal long term fight, even though the Labour Party as a whole has overwhelmingly backed PR Starmer himself is against it, considering that First Past the Post has rewarded him with so much power, power he wouldn’t have under PR, he will likely fight very hard to keep the system the way it is if the calls for it to change become louder.
It’s so obviously bad that personally I don’t remember seeing anyone actually praising or offering a defence of FPTP this time around, maybe that’s just because the all powerful social media algorithms aren’t pushing me towards them but even Labour supporters happy with Starmer seem to have just kept silent on the issue or pointed out that these absurd results happened under the Tories as well, not just Labour, the closest thing I’ve seen to praise of FPTP is that some have pointed out the fact that it has kept Reform from winning huge numbers of seats that they otherwise might have gotten.
Understandable, a Reform spokesperson has stated that it’s an “inconvenient truth” that the UK should have been neutral with Hitler in World War 2, 1 in 10 of its candidates were Facebook friends with the leader of a Neo-Fascist political party, over a hundred more of them had to be dropped after numerous scandals and the party leader is a guy who has openly said he wants to ditch the NHS and move to US-style paid health insurance, these are not the kinds of people that should be in power or in parliament.
But let’s remember, FPTP doesn’t discriminate between extremist and reasonable, it discriminates based on size and election strategy, the Lib Dems and Labour were able to massively increase their seat share without increasing their votes just by strategizing and focusing on target seats, what’s stopping Reform from doing the same thing next time around? Nothing, and considering that Reform came second place in nearly 100 seats they’re in a very strong position to do so if they play their cards right, this system isn’t keeping us safe, the only real barrier to extremism is an educated public that show up to vote.
The only consolation of all this is that because so many of Labour’s new seats were captured with extremely slim majorities, majorities that could easily disappear in 5 years time if the party isn’t careful, they might be more conscious about the public mood and use their power more wisely than they otherwise would have, this is a really bizarre situation where a government is both extremely secure and insecure at the same time, they have absolute power but it’s an absolute power that relies on a few hundred seats that could easily be lost with even a small shift in voter behaviour, Labour will have to spend these next 5 years with the next election already at the front of their minds.
I actually started writing this article after the election had been called, which no doubt must have had an influence on me deciding to pivot from a few other articles I’ve been working on to talk about democracy, but as I said in its introduction these were ideas that had been brewing around in my head for years, now was just a fitting time to vocalise them. I decided to finish the article before election day and leave dissecting the results to this addendum so I wouldn’t have to rewrite the main structure to include a bunch of examples from this election, I always knew the results would back up my arguments, although I was shocked by how much they did, I definitely wasn’t expecting this to be the most disproportionate election in our modern history.
And for some time I think I did, when I went to the polling station, took my ballot from a polite poll worker in a queue of other well-spirited people, studied it carefully in private and filled it in, cross in box, then folded it and put it in the ballot box, my hand shaking a little as I did so. Then again when I watched the results, seeing the once powerful crumble live on TV, the strangely dignified handshakes, celebrations and commiserations, I didn’t quite park my cynicism as Mason asked but maybe I put it to the back of my mind, where it had usually been in the front.
But even then the glimmers of reality still found their way in, when midway through the marathon it was announced that we were headed for a century long low in turnout, when the results breakdowns were coming in making it blatantly obvious that seats were being won not through popular support but through vote splitting, I don’t take joy or satisfaction from being right about these problems, but being asked to ignore them is like trying to ignore a giant elephant in the room while its trunk is hovering in front of your face.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to admire, there is: The hard working poll workers, ballot counters and returning officers who worked day and night to ensure that the process went smoothly, which with very few exceptions it did, the reporters who rapidly brought information on gains, losses and specific data for constituency after constituency hundreds of times over, with a camera in every count. All of these people worked very hard and powered through intense exhaustion to tell the people what their political future was going to look like, I very much admire these people and the work they have done, I prefer this a million times over to the systems many others live under where elections are pre-scripted events with results that were decided in advance, or where they simply don’t happen.
But what would make this all so much sweeter would be a system that truly reflects the people’s will, whether its close to my personal views or not, the knowledge that all those people up and down the country were working so that tens of millions of voters could not just speak but be heard loud and clear, the first step to a democracy that could do the same.
It’s possible, and maybe now the shock of seeing what’s missing can make it a little more so.
Credits #
- Writing and research by
Elwood
- With writing assistance, title suggestion and thumbnail art by Massimiliano Camassa
- And feedback from G0utBack
- Graphs by Elwood (unless otherwise sourced)
- Made with Google Sheets
Assets #
Election Data Tables (Google Doc link) #
National Voting Systems Table and Tallies (Google Doc link) #
Voting Systems Dataset (Google Doc link) #
Associated Graphs (Google Sheets links) #
- National election systems around the world
- National election systems around the world (with leeway for turnout)
- Voting Systems per house of parliament
- Voting Systems per house of parliament (simplified version)
Election Graphs (Google Sheets links) #
UK #
1983 General Election #
2010 General Election #
Twickenham Constituency #
Liverpool Riverside Constituency #
Whole country #
2015 General Election - Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency #
2017 General Election - Whole country #
2019 General Election - Whole country #
2024 Rochdale By-Election #
2024 General Election #
USA #
2016 Presidential Election - Whole country #
2020 Presidential Election #
Texas state #
Whole country #
Other countries #
German 1933 Federal Election - Whole country #
Irish 2020 General Election - Whole country #
Australia 2022 Federal Election - Whole country #
House of Representatives #
Senate #
Swiss 2023 National Council Election - Whole country #
Changelog #
Edit 1 - 08/07/2024 - Added addendum and 2024 UK general election graphs, plus various minor corrections and formatting changes Edit 2 - 13/07/2024 - Improved display of graphs and other images by reducing their size so they can appear side by side, improved translation related to Egon Krenz, added links to graphs into the main article, plus various minor corrections and formatting changes Edit 3 - 18/07/2024 - Added more detail to explanation of German Party List system and a map of Bundestag constituencies, added mention of where “None of the Above” is used in elections around the world, added discussion on the problems of Coalitions, corrected description of Switzerland’s disproportionality (the problem was originally described as unfair constituency boundaries, it’s actually unfair numbers of seats on offer) with extra election maps to demonstrate, more info on Trump/Biden approval ratings, more minor formatting changes