The electoral system
There's a ranting letter in the D.Telegraph to the effect that each Conservative seat requires "5,000 more votes than a Labour seat".I'm not entirely sure what he means by this. In 2001 the Tories needed 50,000 votes for each of their 166 seats, whereas Labour only needed 26,000 (the Lib Dems needed 93,000). In the seats that they won the Tories took 21,402 votes, to Labour's 20,013 (Labour constituencies are smaller, but most of this is counteracted by their getting a higher share of the vote).
The general point is that a FPTP system is a winner-takes-all system. The Tories (and the Lib Dems) simply didn't win enough seats. In other words the system's biases are endemic, and wouldn't be solved by ending different constituency sizes (accounts for about 9 seats I think) or turnouts. Indeed as Chris Lightfoot has pointed out before, if constituencies get more similar in their voting patterns the system will get less and less proportional
posted by Matthew @ 4/24/2005 10:34:00 AM
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