First Past the Post is a rigged market in voting
It should be no secret to those of you who know me well that I consider myself a market-friendly liberal. Bolstered by an active state willing to redistribute and ensure equality of opportunity, I’m always impressed by the wealth producing power of markets. But beyond the pragmatism that markets are just more likely to leave us wealthier than centralised planning would, there is a moral dimension to markets that keeps me wedded to them: having relatively free markets allows for freedom of choice in the economic sphere; it gives freedom for the consumer to spend their money how they see fit and allows the producer to offer that freedom in tandem- individuals don’t greatly design how the market operates but with each little choice we make, whether to go vegan or choose one brand over another, we are influencing a greater system which is receptive and fighting to cater to our preferences.
To me, markets represent a kind of instant, democratic feedback system where the sum of individual choices are constantly adjusted- it is voting, only with your wallet, and the various firms competing for your money are much like the political parties that compete for the votes you cast every 4 or 5 years at the ballot box. Modern electoral democratic processes are not exactly markets in political preferences but maintain heavy elements of them. For those of us that have some confidence in the ability of markets to notice and respond rapidly to the ever-changing preferences of individuals and communities, it would make sense to ensure that our democracy would resemble more of a genuine market rather than a bureaucratic construction which does little to actually satisfy the wants of voters.
Britain, as well as a handful of other primarily Anglophone democracies, still uses the First Past the Post (FPTP) system to decide legislative elections. For the uninitiated, it is a winner-takes-all system in which the candidate with the most votes in a given electoral district (or constituency) wins the right to represent all voters in a given constituency, despite the fact that many voters in the same constituency may have very different preferences, in many cases, the majority of voters in each constituency would prefer to be represented by another party! To me it is ironic that often the most pro-market figures in the UK support an electoral system that functions least like a market and results in very distorted outcomes that fail to accurately represent preferences. Arguments about the freedom to choose, which such people often love to use for the economic sphere, don’t seem to extend to the electoral system where instead some would prefer to usher in arguments about stability and predictability- arguments that are similar to those of mercantilists and monopolists in the early days of the modern market economy during the dawn of the industrial revolution. As it stands, FPTP produces a duopoly on voter preference which would look terribly unfree if adapted to an economic context. To illustrate I’ll give an example:
Let’s say that the UK decides to operate a FPTP style licencing regime for supermarkets:
- It divides the UK into 650 districts where consumers can theoretically buy from any supermarket they like for a trial period six weeks
- At the end of that six-week period all supermarket visits are tallied up and only the most visited supermarket in each district gets to operate in that area for the next 5 years.
From this a flurry of economic distortions could arise:
- Supermarkets which don’t have a strong enough pull in any one area but could be popular overall, let’s say Morrisons, would find themselves virtually vanish overnight with ASDA or Tesco sweeping up their consumers in the coming period.
- As these licences reach their expiry date and require relicensing, some Lidl shoppers (worried that the more expensive Tesco brand would win the monopoly in their area) would reluctantly shop at ASDA in order to stop Tesco from getting the licence. They’re unhappy but they might prefer a slightly less luxury-focused brand, even though they would ultimately prefer to shop at a discount one instead.
- One of the dominating behemoths, let’s say ASDA, could opt for a corporate strategy of only producing strict discounted, cheap wares with few, if any, luxury items. While pleasing a core plurality of consumers, the general public are stuck with something niche or unpopular with the majority earning the licence because it happens to command more support than any other competing brand.
- The granting of such monopolies may force existing niche brands to merge together in order to compete for specific geographic supremacy; the Co-Op and Iceland may have very different things to offer consumers but know that they’ll hardly be able to obtain those licences- so they merge, and niches that would have risen naturally in the market would have disappeared.
No economic liberal could support a system so ludicrous as to give an in-built advantage to the two most popular firms in any market and create ways that distort the very ways firms choose to operate. Even if nothing was to stop new entrants to the market from registering as a company and attempting to earn the licence themselves, the odds are stacked against them. First Past the Post operates precisely like a rigged market as voters are still free to choose but are tactically bound to make sub-optimal choices: in return they are forced to face an unhealthy market of unchallengeable local monopolies and the added horror of a national duopoly, which in some times (like the Blair-Cameron era) represents firms with very minor differences, or in other times (like the Foot-Thatcher era) represents two very different niche firms that leave much of the consumer base unsatisfied.
So how do we move an electoral system to achieve something like the consumer satisfaction in open and free markets? Considering that electoral systems only really represent a quasi-market this cannot be replicated entirely but there are several features that voting should take which helps to achieve not just simply resemblance but the effectiveness they provide for accurately representing people’s preferences:
Proportionality
Firms that hold a percentage of market share do not gain any privilege for coming top in a local area, nor should political parties and candidates. In the market every single purchase counts and they influence every other market actor but in FPTP only the first highest actor in the voting market counts- thousands, if not millions of votes are wasted and unable to accurately influence the political marketplace. Making as many votes as possible look like the overall outcome of seat distribution is crucial to resembling a functioning, free and fair market in voter preference.
Multiplicity
Free markets do not operate as a zero sum game but FPTP does. If Tesco succeeds in one market that does not mean Aldi will have to succeed in by offering a similar, even if it performs less well in terms of total foot traffic. A voting system that allows smaller parties to be represented would be much like a market. Some markets are dominated by one firm, Google for instance dominates approximately 40% of the digital ad market, but competitors are still there. A system that elects multiple candidates from the same constituency is more likely to represent a market (which has multiple players in the same space, even if dominated by larger firms), some proportional systems still have cases where over 50% of voters choose a particular party or candidate, that is still valid provided that there aren’t artificial constraints on challengers.
Ranking
The problem of voting for the lesser of two evils in FPTP is not entirely alien to the marketplace. Some people shop at firms that eventually prove unprofitable and then have to choose an alternative, some people may have a shop they like relocate too far or not deliver to their local area. In many instances people shop by opting for second and third choices. In FPTP however, this choice is restricted only to the most electable choices- if you’re a Lib Dem supporter with no candidate on the ballot and can’t stomach voting for either Conservatives or Labour you might vote for the Green candidate, but they have no chance at all of winning. A ranked voting system allows voters to choose another small and unpopular party and still be counted, just as someone may choose Aldi if there isn’t a Lidl nearby rather than forcing themselves to shop at Waitrose. A perfect market would have practically unlimited choice, but a legislature only has a limited number of seats and therefore the choice has to be rationed in some way- what better way to ration that than to replicate what market actors already do when there’s sub-optimal choice in the market?
Frequency
Markets are more-or-less instant in their adaption to change in preferences, whereas realistically a parliament cannot have elections every five minutes for the simple reasons of voter fatigue and a lack of interest. Political anoraks may relish the idea of elections several times a week, but ordinary people vote for representatives precisely so they don’t have to endure this. However, voters often can express outrage or a sudden shift in opinion over their representatives. In the case of the UK Parliament constituency of Sheffield Hallam the controversies and scandals of sitting MP Jared O’Mara has left very few in doubt that he, and even the Labour Party label that he stood under at the 2017 election, could win an election in Sheffield Hallam today. Voters are waiting until this parliament ends to choose an MP they want while they’re clamouring for a new one. Under current UK law the Recall of MPs Act 2015 allows voters to recall their MP and face a by-election should 10% of voters in the constituency sign a petition requesting one- the caveats to this include short time frames and limited circumstances (such a custodial prison sentence of a year or less and suspension from the House of Commons by the Committee on Standards). The poor voters of Sheffield Hallam have to sit a while longer before they can act- a more market-based system would allow voters to respond quickly with a sacking of an MP, just as consumers may quickly drop brand loyalties and shop at another firm- the petition limit allows the state to gauge whether there is an actual outrage or not that warrants another election- this offers frequent enough elections without creating the electoral-market-only phenomenon of voter fatigue.
Overall, a voting system that would be as accurate to voter preferences and with a similar dynamism and adaptability to the market- both in short term change and long term transformation — would most likely be the Single Transferrable Vote (STV) — the preferred alternative given by electoral reform campaigners. It produces proportional results through a ranked voting system in which voters fill out a ballot with 1st, 2nd 3rd etc preferences out and elect several MPs, not just one, allowing multiple views within the same geographic area to win. While STV is admittedly a little bit complicated, the results it provides are very similar to a market in terms of accurately reflecting vote share, far better than FPTP, and unlike list-based systems of proportional representation voters can express second and third preferences to reflect how they might otherwise vote should their preferred candidate lose- STV is about satisfying preferences, just as the market does with inevitable scarcity, but not at the cost of distorting a reflection of popularity shares. This, bolstered with a system of “real recall” where unsatisfied voters can boot out MPs that achieve a certain level of unpopularity, would produce something like a free market in voting.
Ultimately the decision of how to reform Britain’s electoral system will include arguments beyond merely satisfying voter preferences; similar to how markets are regulated, some choices are restricted because pure unfettered choice may not be a good thing. We regulate products for safety and environmental standards, we create rules on commerce and trade: setting the rules of the game to allow choices to be free but maintain a level of fairness. Few people think that the market should be allowed to exist without rules and so an electoral system also requires some regulation and standards- but there is a line to be crossed between standards and rigging- a mechanism that systematically delivers monopolies and unhappy customers is not a market that anyone would defend, nor should it be defended in the pseudo-market of political preference. And unlike preference for supermarket providers, a preference for political choice has far greater consequences and far graver ones should it be as dysfunctional as we currently allow it to be. Reform of the electoral system would be a liberalisation in the market of people’s values and priorities, it is probably the most important and influential market of them all.
