Why PR?

We believe that the number of votes a party receives should be broadly reflected in the number of seats they gain in Parliament. Under FPTP, 30% of the vote could translate to winning 60% of all seats – or 10%. We don’t think this is democratic, or a good way to run a country.

In the past century in the UK, no single party has won a majority of the popular vote, but they have almost always won a majority of the seats. This leads to governments that most of the country never supported, and laws being passed without the public’s consent. 

PR would mean that parties are fairly represented in Parliament, based on how many people voted for them.

We believe that everyone’s vote should matter and should be equally important. Around three-quarters of votes cast at the 2024 general election made no difference to the outcome, because they were either cast for losing candidates or were additional votes that the winning candidate didn’t need. Votes cast for smaller parties are disproportionately likely to be effectively wasted.

Under FPTP, disproportionate power is also given to marginal constituencies, while voters in safe seats are effectively ignored. PR would mean every person’s vote would matter, no matter where they live or who they vote for.

Read more about the 2024 general election results.

We believe citizens should be able to vote for who they believe in. At the last election, almost one-third of voters didn’t cast their ballot for their first choice because they thought it would be a wasted vote. This leaves many people feeling disillusioned and frustrated, distorts public opinion and means that many valuable perspectives don’t get a hearing in Parliament. 

PR would allow people to choose who they actually want, without worrying about wasting their vote.

Increasingly, voters are moving away from the traditional two-party system and opting for a wider range of parties. However, our outdated voting system can’t handle that kind of diversity of views, and delivers increasingly chaotic results that have little to do with public opinion. This makes the switch to PR more urgent than ever.

Read more here.

Proportional Representation is already used in the vast majority of the world’s most stable and successful democracies. Various forms of PR are also used to elect the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the London Assembly. It’s Westminster that’s the outlier.

In fact, only two European countries elect their Parliaments fully by First Past the Post: the UK and Belarus – a dictatorship.

Our analysis of OECD data shows that there is a correlation between higher trust in politics and proportional voting systems. On average, nations using majoritarian voting systems suffered from 45.9% distrust in government, whilst those using proportional systems had an average of 39.9%. When considering the highest levels of trust, the best scores could also be found in nations using PR systems, with all five nations scoring higher than 50% on trust using some form of Proportional Representation. Read more here.

Research also consistently shows that countries with PR tend to have higher voter turnout. It’s simple: people feel more motivated to vote if they feel like their vote matters.In the UK, trust in politics is dramatically low, and turnout at the 2024 general election was a historical low of 60%. Disillusionment with democracy risks fuelling dangerous forms of populism and extremism. This makes moving to a fairer voting system particularly urgent.

Under First Past the Post, the vast majority of governments are single-party (even if that party didn’t win a majority of votes). This means that governments can push through their agenda with little need to compromise or engage with opposing views. It can create a more adversarial and toxic political culture, where parties are incentivised to attack each other rather than work together, and where political debate becomes increasingly polarised.

Under Proportional Representation, coalitions are far more common, meaning that representatives of different parties need to speak to each other and look for common ground. This leads to policies that are better thought-out, that take into account the views of a larger section of society, and are more likely to stick for longer.

First Past the Post also encourages people to vote tactically, and parties to campaign negatively: against their main rival, rather than for their own policies. Over and over again, we are seeing campaigns that are based on fear (“if you don’t vote for us, X will win”) rather than putting forward a positive vision for the constituency and the country. We believe that a proportional system would increase the quality of political debate by pushing parties to make a positive case for their ideas.

Climate policy is often a long-term political project that crosses party lines. Proportional systems encourage a more cooperative form of policy making that allows the implementation of future-focused measures protecting the environment. A recent study found that countries with PR were less likely to have climate policy reversed after changes in government. This follows previous studies also showing a link between proportional voting systems and effective environmental policy.

Click here to read more.

Proportional Representation leads to more diverse Parliaments and better representation of the different groups that make up society. This is particularly well established in the case of gender equality. Studies consistently show that First Past the Post is the worst electoral system for women’s representation. Meanwhile, countries that use Proportional Representation tend to have more gender-balanced parliaments that better reflect the views of all sections of society.  

In New Zealand, the adoption of PR led to the number of Maori representatives tripling and the number of women MPs going from 20% at the final FPTP election to almost 50% at the last election.  

First Past the Post also means that the value of a person’s vote depends on where they live, which can lead to some groups – such as certain ethnic minorities, young people or renters, for example – not being prioritised in policymaking. PR would mean that all voices are heard equally, and allow minority viewpoints to be properly represented in Parliament.

With an increasingly multi-party system, First Past the Post has failed to produce stable governments, with five Prime Ministers in four years (2022-2026), or seven in a decade. Without majority support, it’s no wonder they struggled to carry the country with them and collapsed. 

 

Contrary to a common myth, our research shows that countries with Proportional Representation are, on average, more politically stable than those without. Click here to read our groundbreaking report on voting systems and political stability.