Britain Needs Majority Rule, Not First-Past-the-Post

Many were attracted by more extreme platforms; Reform UK’s 14% of the vote set a new high for a hard-right party. Nearly 60% of voters ended up with an MP they didn’t vote for and who, they say, doesn’t share their political views. And Labour is currently trying to run the country after winning just 34% of the vote.

Britain’s first-past-the-post system deserves much blame

Many point their finger at Britain’s long economic decline, poor leadership and social media. But the country’s first-past-the-post voting system deserves much blame, too.

Under that system, in a general election each voter in a constituency opts for a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes — even when far short of a majority — wins. Indeed, in the elections of 2024, an astounding 85% of the seats were won without majorities.

Why proportional representation would make things worse

Moving to proportional representation (PR) would correct such an unbalanced outcome, and that is why PR often comes up as a possible reform. In its simplest form, constituencies are abolished, and voters opt for a party rather than a candidate. The number of seats a party holds in Parliament is simply proportional to the number of votes it gets nationwide. If Labour attracts 34% support, it gets 34% of the seats.

But PR would be a drastic departure from the system Britons have known for centuries. Voters would no longer have a local MP directly accountable to them. And PR would make fragmentation and polarisation worse.

For example, in contrast to the five seats Reform won at the last election, PR would allot the party 93 seats — according to 2024 voting patterns, which probably underestimate the effect of PR — a dramatic strengthening of the hard right at the parliamentary level. And, at the other end of the spectrum, the Greens would have got 44 seats in the Commons under PR, not a mere four.

What Majority Rule means

A simple example: ten friends must choose a restaurant for dinner. The four carnivores all prefer Steakhouse to Salad Bar to Tofu Table. Three of the vegetarians have the ranking Salad Bar > Tofu Table > Steakhouse, and the remaining three, Tofu Table > Salad Bar > Steakhouse.

Under first-past-the-post, the meat-eaters win; Steakhouse comes first with 40%. But Salad Bar — the winner under Majority Rule — is a more democratic choice: 60% prefer it to Steakhouse, and 70% rank it above Tofu Table.

How Majority Rule would change Burnley

To see why Majority Rule is so attractive politically, consider the constituency of Burnley, whose 2024 election result, arranged from the political left to the right, was: Green 3.8%, Labour 31.7%, Liberal Democrat 23.1%, Conservative 20.3%, Reform UK 19.5%.

The Labour candidate won under first-past-the-post, because 31.7% is the biggest percentage of all. But he is not the appropriate person to represent this constituency — a large majority of constituents, the Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Reform voters amounting to 62.9% of the electorate, lie to his political right and, understandably, they will feel disaffected without a more conservative MP.

Majority Rule rectifies this bias and elects the Liberal Democrat candidate: the majority group of constituents just mentioned will all rank him above a Labour or Green candidate, and Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters — with a majority of 58.6% — will place him above any candidate to his right.

I am assuming here that voters prefer candidates closer to their own politics to those farther away — an assumption validated by an overwhelming fraction of voters in American data from states where voters rank candidates. Thus, as Majority Rule requires, the Liberal Democrat defeats every other candidate in a pairwise comparison.

A counterweight to polarisation

Majority Rule is also a counterweight to polarisation, as the 2024 result from South Basildon & East Thurrock shows, again listed from the political left to the right: Green 4.3%, Labour 30.5%, Liberal Democrat 2.7%, Conservative 25.7%, Reform UK 30.8%.

Observe that although the Reform candidate won the seat, barely, he was clearly too extreme for most voters, who largely — 58.9% of them — opted for mainstream parties. Majority Rule would remedy this mismatch by electing the Conservative candidate: Conservative and Reform voters together constitute a majority preferring him to any candidate to his left, while all the mainstream supporters prefer him to the Reform candidate.

In fact, in the 2024 election, no Reform candidate at all would have been elected under Majority Rule. As in South Basildon & East Thurrock, all were too far to the right for their constituents.

Majorities do not mean timid leadership

Going by the democratic principle that the majority should prevail, one would be hard-pressed to argue for any system other than Majority Rule to elect a constituency’s MP. Even so, one might worry that acquiring majority support against every other candidate might force a politician to make compromises that result in colourless and timid leadership.

History is reassuring. American president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Clement Attlee, for example, won two of the biggest majorities on record, in 1936 and 1945, respectively. Yet they were radicals who introduced a blizzard of public-spending and nationalisation projects to lift their countries up.

A bold agenda is perfectly consistent with Majority Rule, if the would-be office-holder can communicate their vision persuasively to the public. Roosevelt and Attlee proved this can be done, and democracy requires no less from today’s leaders.

Eric Maskin, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor at Harvard University and an honorary fellow of three colleges of the University of Cambridge.

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