A guest blog by Dylan Difford. Dylan is a researcher specialising in elections and voting systems, as well as formerly a regular contributor to the Electoral Reform Society blog. The full report on which this blog is based can be found here.
You only have to pay a brief glance at most of western Europe – where proportional representation has been the norm for democratic elections for the entire post-war period – to notice that by-and-large it is hardly a sea of political chaos and crises; certainly not more so than the UK and France, the continent’s only two democracies not to use PR. And yet, opponents of electoral reform will often suggest that voting systems are a choice between fair representation and stability, presenting them as mutually exclusive.
But, by comparing the record of 17 established western parliamentary democracies who use a variety of proportional and non-proportional voting systems across the fifty years from the start of 1973 to the end 2022 against ten measures of parliamentary and governmental stability, we can comfortably put this all-too-common argument to rest.
Stability and PR
Below are the average results among both PR-using countries and non-PR users of our ten main indices of political stability – measuring everything from the term completion rates of parliaments to turnover of ministers through to the amount of time a party spends in government. On eight of the ten measures, proportional democracies, on average, outperform those that use majoritarian systems.
At the individual country comparison level, a PR user tops nine of the measures, with the time taken to form a cabinet being the only exception to the rule. Extending the analysis to 30 ‘medal spots’, 73% are by those that use fairer voting systems, a landslide majority if ever there was one.
Of course, on many of the measures, the difference between categories of voting system isn’t particularly big. But, given that the charge of opponents of electoral reform is that PR is inherently destabilising, even no correlation would have been enough to disprove their favourite argument.
The fact that PR-using countries are actually able to outperform those that use majoritarian voting systems undeniably shows that instability is far from an innate consequence of more proportional election results. In short, the idea you are sacrificing stability for superior representation is not borne out by the evidence.
Even on the two measures where majoritarian countries come out on top, there are question marks. Governments may be formed more quickly, but that is largely a cultural choice – experience in the UK at the national and devolved levels shows coalitions can be formed quickly when there is the political will to do so. And, while changes in the government’s partisan composition might be less frequent, the changes in PR countries’ governments are often partial, and, on average, parties actually spend longer in office, with greater ideological stability between governments.
Early Elections
Early elections in certain European countries are often cited as evidence of PR’s inherent instability, with, as the argument goes, fairer election results supposedly creating regular governability crises that necessitate frequent new votes. The data, however, tells a different story.
The top five – Finland, Luxembourg, and the three with no off-schedule elections, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland – are all users of PR. Most other proportional countries outperform their First Past the Post (FPTP)-using counterparts Britain and Canada – the latter having held nine elections more than a year ahead of schedule in the past fifty years. Many proportional democracies, far from being riddled with the instability of early elections, are actually less likely to have to return to the polls before time.
Were opponents of electoral reform to offer a more honest explanation of the variation in election frequency, they would instead drawn attention to certain institutional and cultural differences. The one thing the four weakest performers have in common is that prime ministers have significant discretion over the timing of an election, unlike in Norway or Switzerland.
Reactions to events such as cabinet disputes or governments lacking a majority also vary hugely between countries. A third of British elections in the last fifty years have been caused by governments unable to deal with small or no majorities. By contrast, minority governments are the norm in Sweden, and they have not required any snap elections.
Prime Ministers
When it comes to prime ministerial turnover, we again see significant variation within both categories of voting system, but with comfortably the longest average tenures coming in countries using PR. FPTP defenders might like to resort to highlighting Italy’s revolving door for the top job as a supposed risk of fairer elections, but it is clear that Italy is actually less representative of proportional democracies than Germany, the country of 16-year Chancellors Kohl and Merkel.
Once again, the degree of variation suggests the absence of a causal link, with both short-serving and abnormally long-serving prime ministers better explained by differences in political culture. But fundamentally, if PR really were an agent of chaos, we would just not see situations like in Germany, the Netherlands or Luxembourg where prime ministers serving the best part of a decade is the norm.
Governments
Probably the greatest measure of overall political stability is government durability – moving beyond just the leader of the government to incorporate how long each cabinet, often referred to as a ‘ministry’ in Britain, (e.g., Blair III, Brown I, Cameron I, Cameron II, May I, etc.) lasted relative to how long it could have lasted. This takes into account the frequency of the main three change events that occur in a political system: changes in prime minister, changes in the partisan composition of governments and elections. N.B. A reshuffle of ministers from the same party or parties alone does not create a new cabinet.
At this point, seeing countries like Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland towards the top is hardly surprising; nor is the sheer range between countries or the fact that our non-PR-users are fairly average in terms of stability. But then this is the pattern we see again and again – countries that use PR are clearly capable of the highest levels of political stability, more so than those that use majoritarian systems, reinforcing that PR’s association by its opponents with instigating chaos is utterly unfounded.
The UK’s score might seem low, but our fondness for snap elections and increasingly frequent mid-term changes of prime minister mean that cabinets rarely sit for as long as they could – indeed, only two of our last six have even served a quarter of the time they could have. FPTP is very clearly not imbuing British politics with the same level of stability that PR has ‘given’ Luxembourg (where only two of the last six cabinets have not seen out their maximum term).
Case Study: New Zealand
While countries using PR have invariably topped the tables above, what stands out most is the sheer variation between them, even those that use similar voting systems. A lot of this is down to differences in political culture and wider institutions. To have the best chance of discerning any definitive influence of voting systems, we need to turn to New Zealand, who, having switched from FPTP to Mixed-Member PR for the 1996 election, offer a near-perfect case of one political culture, two voting systems.
What’s interesting is how little the difference is before and after the introduction of PR. Most measures have remained almost identical – the only real shifters being that governments do take a little while longer to get formed (though still before the first meeting of parliament), but prime ministers and parties now actually serve longer in office on average. Even some ‘victories’ for the pre-reform era are somewhat illusory – cabinet durability does appear to have fallen, but when taking out the transitional first PR parliament, the post-1996 durability rate actually rises to 95%.
As ever with New Zealand’s electoral reform – the advantages of PR have materialised, the claimed disadvantages have not.
Conclusions
On practically any measure of political stability, it has been PR users who have been the most stable of our 17 countries, with nearly all proportional democracies reaching what would be viewed as a reasonable level of stability. Whichever way you cut it, it is impossible to see how there is a causal link between fairer election results and higher levels of political instability; particularly when any weaker performances are so clearly better explained by cultural or wider institutional differences and New Zealand’s reform has failed to yield any adverse consequences.
Ultimately, it is not credible to suggest that the UK would inherently become less politically stable if it adopted a PR voting system.
The full report, including methodological notes, a deeper analysis of each measure of political stability and a country-by-country commentary, is available here.