Blog 07

Blog 07

According to Duverger’s law, the effective number of parties is a direct effect of the electoral rules. In other words those states that have adopted single member district plurality (SMDP) rules have 1-2 effective parties, while states that utilize proportional representation (PR) rules have many. Does this law hold up when analyzing the number of effective parties in the United Kingdom?

Officially the UK is listed as having a SMDP electoral syatem.¹  However, in the last general election for the UK’s House of Commons (one branch of the bicameral legislature) there were actually 50 political parties that received votes!² How many of these parties are considered effective? After using the percent of votes per party in to the party efficiency formula (neff=1/Σ(p2)) the effective party number turned out to be 3.72. This is quite curious as this result usually indicates a use of a PR system. What causes this contradiction? How can multiple effective parties survive in a SMDP system when they cannot in others?

                At first I thought that maybe the UK is operating a hybrid electoral system which encompasses just enough PR qualities to allow the survival of more than two effective parties. One such quality determining electoral system is the formula used for awarding seats to candidates. The Formulas for PR systems are vastly different from the SMPD ones. The UK however, uses the ‘first to pass the post’ formula¹ which is typical SMDP. Instead of filling seats based on the percentage vote of a party, the ‘first to pass the post’ formula simply states that the candidates who receive the most votes in a constituency get the seat. Hence bigger parties are favored creating normally two big effective parties.

                My thoughts then turned to lists. PR systems generally use lists so that electors vote for their party, which in turn appoints candidates to the seats won. Whether the list is closed (voters have no say in who is on the list) or not makes no difference. Again the UK passes the SMPD test as it doesn’t use lists in its elections; all candidates are directly voted in.³

 After these finds in my research, it is easy to see that the UK definitely is not running a hybrid system. The question still lingers about how parties survive in the UK electoral system.  My attention then turned to thresholds, or the minimum requirements for a party to remain active. What I found, or rather what I didn’t find intrigues me: I could not find any mention of a threshold for political parties! The only threshold is for actual candidates who need 10 voter signatures and 5% of the vote or a 500 pound fine is imposed.¹ This explains why there are so many parties involved in an election, and especially why parties like the “pirate” party is allowed to survive.

                While this development would explain a slight increase in the party efficiency number, it does not explain why there are nearly four effective parties. Just then, another interesting fact caught my eye: it was the number of seats in the House of Commons. Apparently there are 650 seats that correspond to 650 constituencies; 533 in England, 69 in Scotland, 40 in Whales, and 18 in Northern Ireland.¹ This is interesting to me because the UK is an extremely small country and to fit so many districts they must be relatively small. This could explain why the party efficiency number is so high! With so much cultural and political diversity, these small districts could facilitate members of smaller parties being awarded seats in the legislature. My suspicions were confirmed when looking at the numbers of voters in Scottish districts. The party which received the most votes was not the popular parties, but the Scottish National Party, meaning they won seats in parliament and their party efficiency increases. The same was true for districts in Whales and Ireland and would probably prove true for certain English districts.

                So in conclusion, England happens to have the right set of circumstances to contradict Duverger’s law. They have small enough constituencies in a small enough country, with a diverse enough population, with no threshold for political parties which effectively allows smaller parties to have more effectiveness than usual. Such a circumstance might never exist anywhere else, but is an exception to the law.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1) Inter-Parliamentary Union database: http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/2335_B.htm

2) Wikipedia election world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2010

3) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_United_Kingdom