Should the UK adopt Proportional Representation?

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Zofia

SHOULD FPTP ELECTORAL SYSTEM BE REPLACED BY PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

Although FPTP’s position in rank of the best electoral systems in UK has been relatively shaken due to its failure in recent General Elections I believe that First Past The Post is the most simple, clear, stable and reliable electoral system. It is argued that proportional representation would ensure that all political parties would be represented in accordance to amount of votes that they win. This essay will justify whether Parliament should propose an alternative electoral system which would guarantee establishment of proportional representation in UK.

Recently, First Past the Post has been severely criticised due to its unfairness. It has been suggested that proportional representation offers a wide range of fairly aspects allowing equally smaller and new-established parties as well as those well-developed and popular. For example the final results of Single Transferable Vote retain a fair degree of proportionality, and the fact that in most actual examples of STV the multi-member districts are relatively small means that a geographical link between voter and representative is retained. Another example might be List system where parties are able to use the lists to promote the advancement of women politicians and allow voters the space to elect women candidates. In all regions of the world, PR list systems do better than FPTP systems in the number of women elected, and 14 of the top 20 nations when it comes to the representation of women use List PR. Similarly, AV plus would be very beneficial to small parties, especially Lib Dems. However, by allowing smaller parties to be elected, it is heavily possible that the more radical or extreme parties would get into the power whereas First Past the Post ensures that this does not occur.

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Some PR systems offer a great deal of compromise. An example of such system is described as Additional member system which is a combination a regional list(proportional representative) and FPTP. A proportion of the seats is awarded through FPTP. The rest are awarded on a regional list system. This means that every voter has two votes; one for constituency and one from a choice of party list. However, on the other hand, this means that parties that do less well in their constituencies such as Conservatives and Greens have their proportion of list votes adjusted upwards whereas those who ...

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