Election Turnout Decline And Immigration?

[Hypognosis]

Am I imagining it or has election turnout diminished to below 40% in the past couple of decades? Might this be in proportion to the cumulative total of migrants?

I have had no luck finding studies or news articles via search engine and hope you might have better luck.

After AOG's most recent thread, I wanted to pose the question of whether immigrants really do vote labour - as if that was the reason for his belief that Labour would adopt an "uncontrolled" attitude to it. What if, in fact, large numbers of them are not engaged with British politics at all? That would tend to drive down the election turnout percentages.

So, instead of British voters slowly losing interest, as the media tells us, it could be the same people turning out every time but (5yrs*200,000) additional people are present in the population stats but didn't bother to vote. (Between 1/55th and 1/60th drop in turnout per election according to how many millions UK population is.)

I view low turnout as a serious issue because it undermines the legitimacy of the government of the day, may inspire some existing voters to give up bothering and further repels the already-disengaged non-voter from ever getting involved.

With all the fuss about immigration, one would expect migrants to be exceptionally engaged in British politics. But are they?

[Hypognosis]

I have yet to read up on the detailed design of past PR mechanisms so here is my own crude attempt.

Stage 1.
People vote *positively* for the national government they want.
(No secondary, tertiary etc votes yet)
Voters are warned that tactical votes can potentially lead to *actual* seats for that party (including Monster Raving Loony etc.)

Stage 2.
National vote totals are expressed as a percentage (of what?*) and the 700 (ftsoa) seats are divided up accordingly. 1/700th is 0.00142 or 0.142% of the national vote. A minority party requires at least this amount, nationally, to be awarded a seat. "Independents" are not a party, as such but may nevetheless glean enough to earn a seat or two.

* Question: should this be as a percentage of votes cast (so apathetic non-voters do not skew the results) or as a percentage of national population (so parliament shrinks in size according to lack of turnout).

Stage 2b.
Based on the national percentages, each party is allocated its share of seats (50%=350, for example). They must then conduct a HR exercise and select their 350 best MPs, then allocate them to constituencies. A tricky parachuting-in exercise for some, a return to their home base for others.

Stage 3.
Constituency-level vote subtotals will be recorded so as to inform the process of assigning an MP to run it. A local Tory majority means a Tory gets first refusal on running it. Seats with the narrowest majority get their MP assigned last and minority parties and self-declared Independent ones are last in the queue for allocations.

To avoid the unpleasantness of constituencies being allocated an MP from a minority party which they detest, it might be necessary to have a half dozen more MPs in parliament (in 'without portfolio' style) than there are constituencies to allocate them to.

So an MP with a high local approval rating whose party wins the national vote stands a good chance of being allowed to self-select or be selected by their party to serve the constitency where they live. If their party comes second but they are in their party's upper echelons, they may get a prestigious posting to elsewhere. Minor parties who scored no majority in any individual constituency get allocated to seats with the smallest margins, with the idea of stimulating voter interest next time around (also works on the principle of fewest voters offended by the assignment).

There. Was I even close?

[jim360]

It's a very different system from the one most people mean when they talk of introducing PR. The system that is generally regarded as the best is known as "Single Transferable Vote", which works based on multiple-member constituencies. Say, constituencies of ten MPs or so. Parties therefore have a right to put up ten candidates per seat, but in principle the votes can be assigned to the individual MPs and not just the party. Voters are free to rank MPs in order of preference. Then the system works by setting a threshold of votes required to gain a seat (this threshold is set at 50% for a one-seat constituency, 33% if there are two seats, 25% for three seats, and so on). Anyone who reaches or exceeds this threshold gets elected, and, crucially, the "excess" votes are redistributed according to second preferences. If no new MPs are elected, the last-placed candidate is knocked out and his votes are redistributed also, and so on until all seats are filled by candidates who have reached the threshold. The general result for most constituencies would then tend to be that Labour and the Conservatives get two or three seats each, and the remaining four or five would probably be split between the minor parties.

By restricting the constituency size so that there are still not that many MPs per seat, there is still some link between voter and MP; this can be strengthened if voters are still able to vote for individual MPs (eg a vote for Labour candidate A over Labour Candidate B). By also allowing second preferences to be expressed, and distributing the votes around according to these preferences, the general results are also that the number of MPs elected is roughly proportional to the party's total vote share.

This is as close as possible to the best of both worlds, at least in terms of reflecting what voters ask for at the ballot box. What the MPs do afterwards is, of course, not in the voters' control. But in a fairer system it's reasonable to hope that the quality of MPs elected will go up too, and perhaps even the "protest" vote will diminish somewhat. Half of the reason some people vote for minor parties is that while they are aware that their vote will not lead to that person being elected, it's a good way to stick two fingers up to the system to have the teller read out "Monster Raving Loony Party", or some such.

[Hypognosis]

Well, at least one of us not only understands it but can explain it, without cue cards. ;-)

As good as it may be, one of the biggest obstacles to PR - or any electoral reform, for that matter - is that it is such a mouthful to explain and you have to repeat the exercise for every person (or crowd thereof) whom you wish to 'sell' the idea to.

[Hypognosis]

@Gromit (page 2; apologies for the delayed reply)

Thanks, also, for the corrections regarding turnout, which jim dealt with earlier. That was brain-fade, on my part and conflated recollections of EU and Police Commissioner ballots.

"Rather than immigrants not voting, the decline from the 60s and 70s is almost certainly due to young people not being part of the political process."

Well, I heard a piece on the news where it was said that most of the recent influx of migrants are under the age of 25. So they could be disengaged with British politics for both reasons.

The erosion of turnout is slow and small in magnitude and the percentage of immigrants is still barely 13%, at the national scale. Hence wondered if one was a reflection of the other.

[sandyRoe]

Isn't there a school of thought that holds the view that New Labour opened the floodgates to immigrants because they would vote Labour?

[jim360]

It's true that PR (and in particular, sensible PR as in STV) is harder to explain. On the other hand, while FPTP itself is easy to explain, it is in fact too simple. Takes absolutely ages to explain its flaws, but hopefully they are reasonably obvious once pointed out.

In preparing for the talk on voting I gave last week I discovered that FPTP doesn't even cope when there are only two parties involved. The 1951 election saw Labour win the vote share (48% to 44% but lose the Parliament by a handful of seats. This is a result of constituency v. National vote share, so you have to decide which is more important, but FPTP can't even cope with a two-horse race so in itself that is enough reason to ditch it and switch to something else.

As an illustration of how STV works, I looked at the 2010 election and considered the nine seats around Leeds-Bradford. In the system we have the seats were divided between Lab-Con-Lib as 6-1-2. Closer analysis of the vote share shows that in the Bradford seats, the Conservative party only just lost out. An STV election would correct this slightly, and most likely deliver a 4-3-2 seat split instead. Note that no new minor parties gain any seats. In this constituency the only party outside the top three with any real chance of winning a seat was the BNP -- but its vote share falls some way below the threshold to pick up a seat and there's nowhere else you'd expect such an extremist party to pick up second preference votes from, so it remains squeezed out.

By keeping the size of constituencies somewhere between one (when the usual split votes are not really reflected) and the full parliament (when the link with specific MPs is entirely lost), it's possible to deliver a far more proportional result without destroying that link, and at the same time one needn't worry about extremist parties gaining too much say unless the people genuinely demand it. Under STV the Green Party would most likely still have had only one MP in 2010 (or at most a second, picking up one in Norfolk), as it remained a niche party, while UKIP would be equally unlikely to pick up more than half-a-dozen at most, so the primary impact is in more fairly redistributing the seats between the three main parties.

[Hypognosis]

@Old_Geezer (from page 2)

//And one has to take a whole bundle of policies as one package knowing the party who gets in will falsely claim they have a mandate to do all the things no sane person wants them to touch with a bargepole.//

Quite so. There will be plenty of support for the EU referendum but they would take that at mandate to dismantle the NHS and all manner of other piblic services.


"But we must eat the yellow wobbly parts the good Lord serves. In life each man gets what he deserves.... "
http://www.textfiles.com/media/SCRIPTS/ba-quote.txt

[Hypognosis]

@sandyRoe

//Isn't there a school of thought that holds the view that New Labour opened the floodgates to immigrants because they would vote Labour?//

AOG didn't show much interest in this thread and the other regulars who state things like that haven't even showed up at all.