First-past-the-post Voting - Effects

Effects

The effect of a system based on single seat constituencies is that the larger parties gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties are left with a disproportionately small share of seats. For example, the 2005 UK General election results in Great Britain were as follows:

e • d Summary of the 5 May 2005 House of Commons of the United Kingdom election results (parties with more than one seat; not incl. N. Ireland)
Seats
Seats % Votes % Votes
Labour Party 355 56.5 36.1 9,552,436
Conservative Party 198 31.5 33.2 8,782,192
Liberal Democrats 62 9.9 22.6 5,985,454
Scottish National Party 6 1.0 1.6 412,267
Plaid Cymru 3 0.5 0.7 174,838
Others 4 0.6 5.7 1,523,716
628 26,430,908

It can be seen that Labour took a majority of seats, 57%, with only 36% of the vote. The largest two parties took 69% of votes and 88% of seats. Meanwhile, the smaller Liberal Democrat party took over a fifth of votes but only about a tenth of the seats in parliament.

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