Rethinking electoral reform: ranked-choice voting, minorities and democratic resilience

As electoral reform returns to the UK political agenda, new work by LSE Law's Prof Tarunabh Khaitan questions the assumption that Westminster's choice lies between first past the post and proportional representation.

we would not ordinarily call a system fair if it recorded a mild preference for a larger house but ignored an intense aversion to an asbestos-ridden one

The Government has said that the Prime Minister is committed to a new voting system and welcomes a national debate on electoral reform, although the current Representation of the People Bill will not itself legislate for such a change. There have also been calls in Parliament for a national commission to examine alternatives to first past the post.

Across four recent publications, Prof Khaitan argues that this debate should look beyond how accurately votes translate into seats. Electoral systems also shape how parties compete, whether politicians need support beyond their core voters, where political bargaining takes place, and how easily concentrated support can translate into influence over government. In choosing a system, Prof Khaitan suggests, we should attend not only to voters’ positive preferences but also to the intensity of their preferences, as well as their fears and aversions. As he puts it, "we would not ordinarily call a system fair if it recorded a mild preference for a larger house but ignored an intense aversion to an asbestos-ridden one."

In a new open-access article in The Political Quarterly, "The Perils of Proportional Representation for Ethnic Minorities", Prof Khaitan accepts that proportional representation may increase the number of ethnic minority MPs. He argues, however, that it may at the same time hurt minorities' substantive interests, particularly where they are targeted by exclusionary political movements. Under proportional systems, a party with a committed but limited base can win a sizeable bloc of seats and bargain its way into government. Across European and Israeli PR systems (whether list-PR or STV), anti-minority factions have been winning enough seats to come to hold the balance of power every now and then. Under ranked-choice voting (RCV), a candidate generally needs to be acceptable to a majority of voters in the constituency. Comparative evidence shows that ranking in single-member constituencies allows voters to register their aversion to ‘marmite’ parties, which tend to rank as their first or last preference, but only rarely get enough second preference votes to emerge a winner.

The article proposes retaining single-member constituencies for the House of Commons while replacing first past the post with ranked-choice voting, supplemented by an upper chamber elected on a staggered manner based on the first-preference votes of every Commons’ election. For supporters of proportional representation, the proposal keeps proportionality in Parliament but places it in the chamber whose main task is to scrutinise government rather than to form it. He explains that the UK’s party system has changed significantly since the 2011 referendum rejecting the Alternative Vote, and that that proposal was not presented as a packaged reform for both chambers.

In a Verfassungsblog post, "Indirect Militant Democracy: What German Runoffs Tell Us About Ranked Choice Voting", Prof Khaitan draws on German local runoff contests involving the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), research on German voter preferences, and comparative evidence from Australia. He argues that electoral rules can change the incentives parties face. Under RCV, candidates who cannot win outright have reason to become acceptable as a second or later choice to voters outside their core support. Prof Khaitan calls this "indirect militant democracy": general electoral rules that reward broader appeal while leaving all parties free to organise and compete, thus obviating the need for party bans that the German system permits.

In a Prospect column earlier this year, "Britain's electoral reform debate is too narrow", Prof Khaitan argued that the traditional defence of first past the post, its tendency to consolidate politics around two broad parties, is increasingly difficult to sustain in Britain's fragmented and territorially differentiated multi-party system. The comparative origins of the argument lie in a Social Europe article, "Proportional Representation Is Breaking Dutch Democracy", co-authored with Mike Winterwerp. It examined how the Netherlands' highly proportional system has been accompanied by party fragmentation and increasingly difficult coalition formation. It argues that governmental instability or dysfunction under PR’s fragmented party system is another factor that increases voters’ appetite for anti-system parties.

The four pieces apply a theoretical framework Prof Khaitan set out in "Balancing Accountability and Effectiveness: A Case for Moderated Parliamentarism" (2021) in the Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law. There he had argued for a legislature of two chambers with distinct roles. One, elected by a moderated majoritarian system such as ranked-choice voting, supplies confidence to the government. The other, constituted proportionally, checks the government and makes key constitutional appointments. The design seeks to combine the stability associated with majoritarian systems with the pluralism associated with proportional ones, both moderated to penalise anti-democratic parties.

Prof Khaitan does not present electoral design as a substitute for rights protections or other constitutional safeguards. Nor does he suggest that RCV can stop any particular party from winning: a party with sufficiently broad support can prevail under any democratic system. His claim is that a ranked ballot allows voters to express both their first choice and their willingness to support others, so that breadth of acceptability counts towards who represents a constituency. As the Government contemplates a national debate, Prof Khaitan argues that the options considered should extend beyond the familiar binary of first-past-the-post and PR, and that the consequences of electoral design for minorities, political incentives, and democratic resilience should form part of the discussion.