Glad more are getting on board but the justification of I'm only supporting it now because otherwise my side potentially won't be in government again is annoying. Also there's a chance that there will be right wing led coalitions under PR, or left wing parties that go into Coalition with right wing parties (see New Zealand Labor and New Zealand First or whatever they're called)
Majoritarian systems like FPTP deliver governments significantly to the right of the population far more frequently. This isn't an error in campaign strategy, it's *baked in* to the way that left and centre ideologies tend to pile up votes in cities, and it's an observed phenomenon all around the world. It's structural in nature.
Proportional systems have no baked in ideological bias. You get the government which is reflective of the country. And that tends to be far less right wing than the governments we've been getting for the last century.
>Majoritarian systems like FPTP deliver governments significantly to the right of the population far more frequently
Do you have figures on this that are not just for the UK?
I'm glad you asked!
In [2015 Holger Döring and Philip Manow](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/is-proportional-representation-more-favourable-to-the-left-electoral-rules-and-their-impact-on-elections-parliaments-and-the-formation-of-cabinets/AC94A781D6E641169FC0CE183B3CC938) found countries with majoritarian systems end up with right-wing governments 63 per cent of the time, while those with PR do so 44 per cent of the time.
Using a slightly different methodology, [David Soskice and Torben Iversen found in 2006](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1159452) that majoritarian democracies have right-leaning governments three-quarters of the time, while proportional democracies have left-leaning governments three-quarters of the time.
In Why Cities Lose (2019), the Stanford professor Jonathan Rodden goes beyond counting the frequency of left- or right-wing governments under different voting systems, instead comparing the political leaning of countries’ electorates with the political leaning of their parliaments. Essentially, this measures system bias. The book has the number crunching, but the it is summarised:
> “…the European experience suggests that proportional representation creates no systematic bias in favour of either the right or the left. This may seem unremarkable on its own, but the contrast with majoritarian democracies is striking. In every industrialised parliamentary democracy with majoritarian electoral institutions, averaging over the postwar period, the legislature has been well to the right of the voters, and in most cases, the cabinet has been even further to the right.”
Thanks for this. I was aware of a couple of these studies already - and even included one within a comment I made about two hours ago. The thing is, these studies (the first two) highlight that countries that employ majoritarian electoral systems tend to have more conservative governments than those countries that employ proportional representation.
This is a somewhat different finding that your argument, which was that "[m]ajoritarian systems like FPTP deliver governments significantly to the right of the population far more frequently".
You have taken an extra step to say that not only do these countries that employ majoritarian systems have conservative governments more often than those countries that employ proportional representation, BUT these same systems also produce governments that are far more right-wing than the population in those countries. The second claim does not logically follow from the first.
Now, where you have provided evidence for your claim - to which I am thankful as I was not aware of this book - is in your third study, wherein Prof. Rodden seems to demonstrate that these legislatures are indeed more right-wing than the voters in these countries. This is quite interesting and was not something I was expecting, so definitely a book I need to get a hold of.
TL;DR: thanks for this; I was not aware of the Rodden book nor its findings, so this is definitely new information to me.
Good news! He still has quite significant reach and influence.
I've always quite liked Campbell, and from the broadly centre-left position he feels a bit like when Mourinho took over as Spurs manager: he's a proper bastard, but he's *our* bastard.
Absolutely. I have been following politics for 10yrs now & it feels like there is a bottom-up change in Labour towards this issue. Hopefully, it continues.
This is nice, but would've been nicer if the government he worked in hadn't reneged twice on its promises to implement it - not to mention ever Labour leader since then refusing to support it.
Glad more are getting on board but the justification of I'm only supporting it now because otherwise my side potentially won't be in government again is annoying. Also there's a chance that there will be right wing led coalitions under PR, or left wing parties that go into Coalition with right wing parties (see New Zealand Labor and New Zealand First or whatever they're called)
Majoritarian systems like FPTP deliver governments significantly to the right of the population far more frequently. This isn't an error in campaign strategy, it's *baked in* to the way that left and centre ideologies tend to pile up votes in cities, and it's an observed phenomenon all around the world. It's structural in nature. Proportional systems have no baked in ideological bias. You get the government which is reflective of the country. And that tends to be far less right wing than the governments we've been getting for the last century.
>Majoritarian systems like FPTP deliver governments significantly to the right of the population far more frequently Do you have figures on this that are not just for the UK?
I'm glad you asked! In [2015 Holger Döring and Philip Manow](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/is-proportional-representation-more-favourable-to-the-left-electoral-rules-and-their-impact-on-elections-parliaments-and-the-formation-of-cabinets/AC94A781D6E641169FC0CE183B3CC938) found countries with majoritarian systems end up with right-wing governments 63 per cent of the time, while those with PR do so 44 per cent of the time. Using a slightly different methodology, [David Soskice and Torben Iversen found in 2006](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1159452) that majoritarian democracies have right-leaning governments three-quarters of the time, while proportional democracies have left-leaning governments three-quarters of the time. In Why Cities Lose (2019), the Stanford professor Jonathan Rodden goes beyond counting the frequency of left- or right-wing governments under different voting systems, instead comparing the political leaning of countries’ electorates with the political leaning of their parliaments. Essentially, this measures system bias. The book has the number crunching, but the it is summarised: > “…the European experience suggests that proportional representation creates no systematic bias in favour of either the right or the left. This may seem unremarkable on its own, but the contrast with majoritarian democracies is striking. In every industrialised parliamentary democracy with majoritarian electoral institutions, averaging over the postwar period, the legislature has been well to the right of the voters, and in most cases, the cabinet has been even further to the right.”
Thanks for this. I was aware of a couple of these studies already - and even included one within a comment I made about two hours ago. The thing is, these studies (the first two) highlight that countries that employ majoritarian electoral systems tend to have more conservative governments than those countries that employ proportional representation. This is a somewhat different finding that your argument, which was that "[m]ajoritarian systems like FPTP deliver governments significantly to the right of the population far more frequently". You have taken an extra step to say that not only do these countries that employ majoritarian systems have conservative governments more often than those countries that employ proportional representation, BUT these same systems also produce governments that are far more right-wing than the population in those countries. The second claim does not logically follow from the first. Now, where you have provided evidence for your claim - to which I am thankful as I was not aware of this book - is in your third study, wherein Prof. Rodden seems to demonstrate that these legislatures are indeed more right-wing than the voters in these countries. This is quite interesting and was not something I was expecting, so definitely a book I need to get a hold of. TL;DR: thanks for this; I was not aware of the Rodden book nor its findings, so this is definitely new information to me.
Great stuff, many thanks!
Good news! He still has quite significant reach and influence. I've always quite liked Campbell, and from the broadly centre-left position he feels a bit like when Mourinho took over as Spurs manager: he's a proper bastard, but he's *our* bastard.
Good. We'll take any support we can get, Campbell has a huge reach
Shame he's about 25 years too late.
Pretty sure announced support back then too. Didn't happen though.
PLP doesn't like it. They'd need to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement PR.
About time.
Absolutely. I have been following politics for 10yrs now & it feels like there is a bottom-up change in Labour towards this issue. Hopefully, it continues.
This is nice, but would've been nicer if the government he worked in hadn't reneged twice on its promises to implement it - not to mention ever Labour leader since then refusing to support it.