Increased voter volatility has meant that this was the first UK election where four parties received over 10% of the vote,
Voters are more willing to switch parties than at any time in nearly a century, with the 2024 general election the most disproportional in British electoral history, a new report has found.
Analysis by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) shows that the parties’ votes have shifted more than at any time since 1931, with voters more willing than ever to ‘shop around’ and vote for smaller parties than in any other election in modern times.
Increased voter volatility has meant that this was the first UK election where four parties received over 10% of the vote, five parties received over 5% of the vote and Labour and the Conservatives received their lowest combined vote share (57.4%) in the era of universal suffrage.
The ERS states: “The historically disproportional result also highlighted how the current First Past the Post electoral system, which is designed to work largely as a two-party system, is struggling with the shift towards multiparty voting and is producing erratic results where parties receive seats far out of proportion to the share of the votes that they won.
“Notably, Labour received a whopping 63.2% of seats on just 33.7% of the vote, meaning a 1.6% increase in the party’s 2019 vote-share saw it more than double its seats in parliament to 411.
“At the other end of the spectrum, Reform UK and the Green Party received just over 1% (1.4%) of the seats between them, after winning more than 20% of the vote combined.”
The ERS also states that the volatility at the election can be put down to the rise of ‘cross-pressured’ voters – voters who now find themselves aligned with different parties on different issues, such as one party on economic issues and another on cultural ones.’
“These cross-pressured voters are more likely to decide later who to vote for and are more likely to switch party between elections, contributing to higher volatility”, says the ERS.
Darren Hughes, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, said: “It is clear from the general election that the public is voting as if we already have a proportional electoral system, with people voting outside the big two parties in unprecedented numbers.
“Voters are shopping around like never before and switching between parties at a greater rate than we have seen in a century. However, our current two-party voting system is struggling to cope with this new multi-party reality and has produced a parliament that least resembles how the country actually voted in British history.
“This will not help trust in politics, which is at an historic low, and is why we need to move to a fairer, proportional voting system that would accurately reflect how the country voted before the next election.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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