Can the Boundary Commissions Help the Conservative Party? Constituency Size and Electoral Bias in the United Kingdom

Abstract

As part of a strategy to remove perceived biases operating against it in the system used for elections to the House of Commons, the British Conservative party is promoting a revision of the rules used by the Boundary Commissions to ensure greater equality in constituency electorates. A Bill designed to achieve this—and also to reduce the size of the House—was introduced to the House of Lords in 2007. This paper critiques that Bill and suggests an alternative formulation that would better achieve the goal, whilst identifying a number of operational difficulties that its implementation would involve.

Representing People and Representing Places: Community, Continuity and the Current Redistribution of Parliamentary Constituencies in the UK

“…That argument prevailed -despite academic analyses that showed its relative weakness in relation to other sources of bias in the operation of the electoral system (Johnston et al, 2009;Thrasher et al, 2011); continuity and community remained as criteria to be deployed in quinquennial redistributions, but only within the unbreakable constraint that all UK constituencies should have an electorate within five percentage points of the national average.…”

“…Although academic commentators had indicated that electorate size variations were only a minor reason why the Conservatives were disadvantaged in the translation of votes into seats (Johnston et al, 2009;Borisyuk et al, 2010b), the party determined to press ahead with the change. This was linked with a decision to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600 (another change promoted by Tyrie -2004 -and justified in the Conservatives' 2010 manifesto as reducing the cost of politics and thereby refreshing popular trust in politicians after the expenses scandal of 2009), with the number of MPs to be fixed.…”

“…A 2004 pamphlet had argued the case that electorates should be equalised across the United Kingdom (Tyrie, 2004) and this was followed by a Bill debated in the House of Lords in 2007, but not subsequently in the Commons, requiring all constituencies to have electorates within five percentage points of a single UK quota (Johnston et al, 2009). …”

Voting Power and Procedures

“…The rules, written by politicians, looped and recursed in such a way as to be mutually contradictory. This was pointed out, with increasing stridency, by a small number of academics (McLean and Mortimore 1992;McLean 1995McLean , 2008McLean and Butler 1996;Rossiter et al 1999;Johnston et al 2009). The contradictions in the system arose because one rule (Rule 1) required the House of Commons not to continually increase in size; while at least three of the other rules had the effect, jointly and severally, of increasing its size at every redistricting.…”

“…In various publications (latest Johnston et al 2009), the UK academics interested in apportionment had offered a template for a non-contradictory set of rules, in lexical order with electoral equality lexically prior to other criteria. This template was used as a reference point in drafting.…”