I noticed a lot of non-Tory grumbling last week regarding the UK elections that went like this: “Yeah, you may have won a majority of the seats, but you did it with only 36.9% of the votes.”
In the States, that would be cause to whinge that you did not receive a mandate. In the UK, that’s just a normal election. The only mandate UK voters can point to is whether or not a party won enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government. And the Conservatives did so, by at least 8 seats (I was reading somewhere that you needed 323 seats to form a government without a coalition, which seems odd to me since a majority, 50% + 1, would be 326 seats; but the Tories, with 331 seats, have a majority no matter how you slice it).
So where did the other 63.1% of the votes go? Well, the Brits have a fractured political process because they operate their elections in a manner called “first past the post”. In other words, when they have an election, ‘leventy-dozen parties can participate, so long as they can make the deposits on the seats (which they lose if they don’t win the seat). So the vote share of the FIVE other “major” parties that won seats was Labour, 30.4; UKIP, 12.6; Liberal Democrats, 7.9; Scottish National Party, 4.7; and the Greens, 3.8.
And that doesn’t even count the other TWENTY parties that had candidates running (including perennial favorites like Sinn Fein, the Monster Raving Loony Party, the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party, and so forth, a few of which actually won seats; or the however many other parties the BBC counts under “Other Parties” (apparently they got exhausted and just lumped the rest into one bunch) who took 0.5% of the vote and elected one candidate amongst them. These numbers come from here, BTW.
It seems to me that any ruling party in the UK is lucky to get anywhere close to 40% of the vote.
Compare this to the States, where we have primaries and runoffs and all kinds of shite that the Brits don’t have, including rules like “if you didn’t get at least x% of the votes in the last general election, you can’t be on the ballot in this one”, and where we try very hard to streamline our elections for any given office down to no more than two or three parties (and don’t always succeed even with all that). It’s EASY for a US politician or his/her party to get more than 50% of the vote, at least if the party in question is the Republicans or the Democrats (or in some states, the corresponding statewide party that pretends to be independent of the Republicans or the Democrats).
The bottom line is that, other than sour grapes, I can’t figure out how anyone in the UK could grouse that the party that won the majority of seats in the House of Commons didn’t receive a majority of the votes. The only way that could happen would be to shut some of the tiny single-issue parties out of the process, probably by restricting ballot access based on past performance. As long as the system is hanging wide open, the “first past the post” style election is never going to produce a true majoritarian government.
For what it’s worth, I think the Westminster parliamentary system only really works in the UK, where even in the country that birthed it, it doesn’t work well. It can be demonstrated that it works even more poorly in other countries that have adopted it — specifically, I have in mind Israel, where the country ought to be led by a government of national unity right now but where Likud has barely scraped back into office with a coalition of the damned. And that’s just one thing about the Israeli system of government that sucks.