The purpose of this paper is to outline how parties will seek to compete against multiple opponents within the UK’s FPTP electoral system.

 

The UK is one of the few countries in the world that still uses the FPTP majoritarian voting system. The UK has been able to retain this system largely because the public has historically opposed coalitions and has been unwilling to support challenger parties. However, recent polling demonstrates that five parties are now competitive within England. With nationalist parties performing well in Wales and Scotland, and Northern Ireland not adopting the politics of the other UK nations, the whole of British politics now faces multi-party politics.

Usually, when democracies transition to multi-party contests, they adopt a voting system that either reflects how people vote proportionally or expresses a more sophisticated view of voters’ preferences. However, after the lost AV referendum in 2012, electoral reform has not featured heavily in British politics. Further, the UK currently has no plans to change from FPTP. This creates a rather unusual scenario where a democracy has developed multiple competitive parties that are all trying to secure the highest number of votes within relatively small constituencies.

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This paper outlines this logic and argues parties will compete within this series of FPTP multi-party contests by targeting specific constituency types. It argues that 6 constituency types enable the five competitive parties in England to win parliamentary representation. Therefore, smaller parties historically undermined by FPTP can now use this system to win representation and deny the two main parties complete control over government. Consequently, this has the potential to translate the multi-party nature of political support in Britain into the House of Commons. If successful in doing so, this will increase these parties’ influence over government. This will make coalitions increasingly more likely and create incentives to renew talks on electoral reform in future parliamentary cycles.