In a democracy it is reasonable to expect a parliament to be representative of its electorate. Most European countries use a form of Proportional Representation (PR) to run their elections, but is there a particular PR system which stands out as the best and, if so, which system is it?
No election system is foolproof. For example, if enough voters want a far-right party in parliament, that’s what they will get. And this is as true of First Past The Post (FPTP) as it is of any form of PR. With FPTP experience shows that a new party must win more than a certain percentage of votes to start winning seats, but then it really takes off. And a party’s national percentage of votes bears no relation to its seats in the Commons.
Think of the 2024 election when Labour won 33.7% of the votes, but an eye-watering 63.2% of the seats. New projections from polling agency PLMR show Reform on course to win 225 seats at the next general election – that’s 35% of all seats with just 25% of the vote. By contrast, Labour and the Conservatives are projected to win 180 and 133 seats respectively, both with just 23% of the vote. PR would ensure that parties receive no more and no less than their due representation.
For the birds
There are basically only two types of PR: list systems and the Single Transferable Vote (STV). With a list system voters decide how many candidates of each party, or independents, are elected but the party apparatchiks decide which ones are selected. By contrast, with STV, parties are, in theory, irrelevant, as I will go on to show.
Party membership is a minority sport in the UK. It is estimated that some 900,000 people are individual members of political parties. The RSPB, by contrast, has 1.2 million members. So why, one might ask, pick a list-based system for the UK?
A short list of list systems
The Netherlands uses a single, national constituency. The November 2023 election was contested by 26 parties, 15 of which obtained seats. You can choose either party A, or party B or party anything else. If you like animals you might vote for the Partij voor de Dieren (party for animals). If you are from the immigrant Turkish community you might vote for Denk (‘think’ in Dutch, ‘equal’ in Turkish). If you are a pensioner you might vote for 50PLUS. But if you are of Turkish origin, knocking on a bit and fond of cats, what do you do? The election system forces you to vote for one of those parties. The PVV, Geert Wilders’ party, came top in the Netherlands with an unimpressive 23.5% of the vote.
However, we can speculate on the result if FPTP had been used. In the past, UK psephologists applied something called the Cube Law to predict, or guess, the number of MPs likely to be won by each party. This is the ratio of party A’s votes cubed, to party B’s etc. According to the Cube Law ratio, Wilders could have obtained about 56% of seats in the Dutch parliament.
Germany has a dual system. Half the seats are elected by FPTP but half from regional lists to ensure the overall result is party-proportional. There is one anti-democratic feature: the 5% bar, according to which, in order to gain any seats at all a party needs to have won at least 5% of the vote. (Other countries use a bar of varying magnitude, but that doesn’t make it fair.)
At the February 2025 election, parties representing 13.7% of the electorate were therefore arbitrarily excluded. The far-right AfD won 20.8% of the vote and 24.1% of the seats (thanks to the 5% rule handicapping smaller rivals). This is a concerning result since it means the AFD is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. However, it is not disastrous because the party secured no more, or only slightly more, than its due.
It makes sense, too, to look at recent state elections in Germany, for example Thuringia in September 2024. The AfD won 32.8% of the votes and 36.4% of the seats (again because of the absurd 5% clause). Compare and contrast with the UK election last year. Thank God the Germans use an imperfect form of PR.
List systems in other European countries operate more or less in the same way.
STV: freedom to choose individuals
As we have seen, with a list system voters are more or less obliged to vote only for a party. By contrast, with STV, voters decide both how many candidates they want to select and also which ones. Hence, in STV, voters have much greater control over candidate selection and parties are effectively irrelevant to the voting procedure.
STV is used in Ireland (north and south), Malta, and Australia (to elect the upper house). Ireland has 43 constituencies, returning three, four or five members. Candidates stand under party labels or as independents.
A voter can mark any number of candidates, regardless of party affiliation, in order of preference. To secure election, a candidate (not his/her party) needs to win a number of votes equivalent to the quota. This is the result of dividing the number of valid ballots by one more than the number of seats and then adding one vote, thus determining the number of votes that may be attained by only the number of seats to be filled.
For example, assume there is a 50-member constituency and 1,000 people vote. The quota is 1,000 divided by 5 +1 and rounded up. This gives a quota of 167. Five candidates can reach this quota, but six can’t.
Preferences and quotas
If, in the first count (the ‘first preference’ votes), fewer candidates reach the quota than the number of seats to be filled, the last-placed candidate is excluded from the count and those ballot papers are transferred to the next usable marked preference.
This is repeated until sufficient candidates have reached the quota to fill the available seats. In some cases, a seat remains to be filled in a constituency and no candidate can achieve a quota as there is nobody left to eliminate for a distribution. In such cases, the highest placed candidate, even without a quota, is deemed elected.
In Ireland, the outgoing speaker, (the Ceann Comhairle) if standing for re-election, is automatically elected.
At the November 2024 election to the Dáil various far-right groups received about 9.0% of first preference votes but, after no-hopers had been excluded and their second or third or subsequent preferences were redistributed, only 3.4% of the seats.
Another advantage of STV over list systems is that, with the latter, the link with a particular constituency is tenuous (or non-existent in the Dutch case) whereas, with STV, candidates are known in their communities.
Resilience
How easy is it for far-right parties to gain representation under STV in comparison with list systems? Gaining far-right representation is much easier with list systems because you are forced to think in terms of party A versus party B. You are obliged to pretend that party A is better in all respects than any other party, regardless of what you may think about individual candidates on its list and you can end up, inadvertently or not, giving your support to a plurality of dubious candidates.
With STV your choice is more nuanced. In this PR system you are asked to rank-order the candidates on the basis of what you think of them as individuals, regardless of their political affiliations. In other words, far-right candidates would need to be elected on their own merits. It is worth noting en passant that the Commons consists of 650 members elected from one-person lists. If you support Labour, for example, you are forced to vote for the Labour candidate, no matter how repugnant, or someone else will creep in.
As I have sought to show in this article, STV has significant advantages over list PR. STV therefore stands out as the voting system that, as advocates of voting reform, we should be promoting.
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