Does a PR system produce weak governments ?

the FPTP system, hence their desire to see it continued. 

        However, one of the major disadvantages of proportional representation, is that it has the tendency to produce governments with little lead over the other parties, thus making them weak and the legislation passing process even harder. One of the ways this happens is when no party has a clear enough lead to create its own government, and so a coalition government must be set up. This usually type of government is usually weak as it may not only face opposition from outside the government, but also from within from the different parties it consists of, who will by definition have differing political stances and objectives. An example of this was in 1999 and 2003 in the Scottish parliamentary elections, where Labour and the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government. This had shown a major gain in seats for the Liberal Democrats who flourished under a PR system, as smaller parties tend to do, yet at the same time a reduction in seats for the Labour party. Smaller parties tend to do better in a PR system if they still have a significant percentage of the vote, but perhaps not enough to win them the seat in a FPTP election. This percentage instead transcribes into a direct proportion of seats in a PR system, boosting the representation of these smaller parties. Another example of a smaller party rising under a PR system is the Scottish National Party in the Scottish parliamentary elections. They came 2nd in 2003, but worked their way up to 1st in 2007. However, their lead was tiny, only by a single seat, and so the government formed was weak from the very beginning, with heavy opposition from within the parliament from pro union parties like Labour and the Conservatives, who strongly oppose the intentions of nationalist parties like the SNP in terms of overall Scottish independence. The situation is similar in Wales, where in 1999 again there was a Labour LibDem Coalition, as neither party had a majority. Labour just managed to create its own government in 2003, but once again with no outright majority, and faced a tough time in office, and just like the SNP in Scotland, Wales’s nationalist party, Plaid Cymru were the biggest gainers of a PR system, coming second in 2003 and narrowing the gap even further in 2007, gaining an additional 3 seats, all at the expense of labour.

         The single transferable vote system (STV) is another proportional voting system, this time used in northern Ireland, and once again has a history of creating weak governments. However, this time it is specifically designed to do so, as to create a evenly weighted system of power between two rival religiously dominated parties, the catholic nationalist Sinn Fein, and the protestant unionist DUP. The history of political and religious tension in this area justifies the system used, but it once again shows Proportional representations inability to produce a strong government. In 2003, there was a pretty much even spread of votes between the unionist parties the UUP and DAP, claiming 27 seats and 20 seats respectively, and the nationalist parties the SDLP and Sinn Fein, who claimed 18 and 14 each. Despite the unionists making slight gains in 2007, rising to over 36 seats in the case of the DUP, there was once again no clear majority, and so the Northern Irish Assembly remained distinctly polarized, equally weighted with two parties of completely opposite political ideology.

        Once again, in the PR system used in the European parliamentary elections showed a significant rise in the number of seats allocated to minor parties, including nationalist parties and those totally opposed to the EU as a whole. This not only undermined the majority the winning party had in the EU parliament, but due to the nature of parties like the United Kingdom Independence Party, created major opposition within the parliament from so called minor parties. A party whose main aim is the total withdrawal of the UK from the EU will obviously not be acting for the betterment of the EU as a whole in the future, but rather to highlight its weaknesses and effectively undermine its authority. Parties like UKIP gained a significant 17% of the vote in 2004, accounting to 16% of the  seats, as opposed labour’s 22% of the vote and 25% of seats. Another significant benefactor of the PR system used are more extreme nationalist parties such as the BNP, who gained their first 2 MEP’s in 2009 at labours expense. In essence protest voting lead to high percentages of the vote for “minor” parties, who under a FPTP system like in the Westminster elections would remain minor, ended up securing increasingly significant amounts of seats, further weakening the position of the parliament as a whole.

        In conclusion, and including the Greater London Assembly, which also uses a PR system and shows similar results, we can see that all the proportional systems used in the UK have consistently failed to produce a strong government, and in some cases have been forced into creating coalition governments made up multiple parties in order to create at least a reasonably efficient party, something that has not happened in Westminster since 1945 under a FPTP system. It is thus that we can conclude that electoral systems based on proportional representation inevitably produce weak governments.