proportional electoral systems - party list systems

Again, as in the Preferential category, there are a number of different proportional systems, each with their own variants.

Party List Systems

These are the simplest form of proportional systems. Parliamentary seats are eliminated, and the voter has to vote for a party only. The parties then draw up a list of candidates, ranked in order of preference. Each party is then allocated as many seats as is in direct proportion to their votes, and their members at the top of the list are elected.

The list can either be closed (chosen entirely by the party), or there are some opportunities for it to be open (where the voter has some choice of candidate). If this was done on a simple UK wide basis, the results of the 1997 election would have been:

In this situation, all the other parties would have gained at the expense of Labour. It is obvious that the table is lacking in clarity because of the combination of the Northern Ireland MPs, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. Overall, they only obtained a few percent, however that was due to their standing in selected areas. Using a national list system penalises parties which are regionally based. As a consequence, the obvious solution is to have a regional list system.

2001 General Election and a Pure Party List System

Labour won a second landslide in the 2001 general election. But it would not have secured a Commons Majority had seats been allocated proportionate to votes cast. Remember that Labour's share of the national vote fell to just 40.7% in June 2001. The allocation of seats under a list system would have looked like that shown in the chart below. Labour would have won only 268 seats - well short of the level required to have a majority over all other parties.

The method by which the seats are determined is uncertain. The method used in the example above is very simple, merely find the round number of seats, which is nearest to the precise percentage of the vote of each party. This is not universally used, and a popular method of allocating list representatives is to use what is known as the d'Hont allocation mechanism, coined by a French mathematician. This will be considered later.