2011 referendum takes a different turn

[catking]

Thinking back to 2011 and the AV Referendum, it was only relatively late in the campaign that No took a significant and decisive lead. Some early polls had it close and come had Yes ahead. There were even mutterings of some Tory cabinet ministers like Gove thinking of backing Yes.

What would have happened if Yes had won and we had ended up with AV?

The most obvious initial conclusion is that the 2013 boundary review would have been approved. It would also have weakened Cameron's position in the Tory Party  but it would also have altered the nature of the Coalition as the Lib Dems would have achieved their primary objective and might have therefore had to give more concessions to the Tories in Coalition in later years.

My guess is that AV's impact on the 2015 election would have been fairly modest. The Lib Dems would have held a few more seats against the Tories but the boundary changes would have helped the Tories so it likely would have balanced out and still seen Cameron win a small majority.

Any thoughts?

[therealriga]

Conservatives not worried about losing seats to Labour due to UKIP splitting the vote as those votes would have transferred back to the Conservatives anyway. Therefore, Cameron much less likely to agree to a referendum.

[sirbenjamin]

The 2015 AV GE would've resulted in a few freak results, perverse incentives and unintended consequences. There would've been a big kerfuffle involving very vocal folks claiming they didn't understand how it worked and possibly a few challenges to the results in certain cases. People would demand to know why their second choice was irrelevant but their friends second choice was decisive etc. The fuss made about the current boundary review would be nothing by comparison.

Frankly, if the 2011 referendum had passed (and if it had, it would've passed about as decisively as a certain other referendum) I think there would be a lot of pressure to have another referendum to ditch AV.

It's not a good system. There are very few people who are genuinely in favour of it, and the primary reason the 2011 referendum was lost so convincingly is because nobody was ever able to put together a cohesive and logically sound argument in its favour.

[neilm]

^^This

Had it been STV on the table we'd have seen a far more enthusiastic campaign. Even the lady at the polling station when I went to vote wasn't keen and she was meant to be promoting it!

[timrollpickering]

Aug 1, 2018 21:43:45 GMT therealriga said:

Conservatives not worried about losing seats to Labour due to UKIP splitting the vote as those votes would have transferred back to the Conservatives anyway. Therefore, Cameron much less likely to agree to a referendum.

Then hypothetical Cameron would have been a fool (and not just because the question itself needed settling with a new popular mandate one way or the other). The Ukip vote would likely have largely plumped. Some Ukip politicians with good local outreach might have encouraged significant anti-incumbent transfers but I suspect the sort of Kipper who would be in a position to do that would likely be in the final two.

The system under consideration was optional AV and there was nothing to suggest that voters who switched from Conservatives to Ukip would have come back on preferences. Sizeable parties in similar parts of the spectrum can just about co-exist under compulsory preferencing (although even then it's not an ideal situation) but under optional preferencing it can often lead to that section of politics taking over 50% of the first preferences but losing the seat because the votes don't all transfer to each other.

[timrollpickering]

Aug 10, 2018 19:36:37 GMT neilm said:

^^This

Had it been STV on the table we'd have seen a far more enthusiastic campaign. Even the lady at the polling station when I went to vote wasn't keen and she was meant to be promoting it!

I think we'd also have seen even greater voter bewilderment. If it took 357 words to officially explain AV, just how long would the official STV explanation have been?!

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Aug 10, 2018 21:12:02 GMT timrollpickering said:

Aug 10, 2018 19:36:37 GMT neilm said:

^^This

Had it been STV on the table we'd have seen a far more enthusiastic campaign. Even the lady at the polling station when I went to vote wasn't keen and she was meant to be promoting it!

I think we'd also have seen even greater voter bewilderment. If it took 357 words to officially explain AV, just how long would the official STV explanation have been?!

As STV was and is used for some public elections in the UK, it's already been done. The very first time was in 1918; the first draft was in Cd 8768.

The current rules for election counts in Scottish local elections are in Schedule 1 to the Scottish Local Government Elections Order 2007.

[timrollpickering]

I'm looking through that and I can't see an explanation to go in a booklet to be sent to all homes and be even longer and more offputting than some of the No literature.

[European Lefty]

This does raise another question: why oh why can proponents of PR in the UK not propose a vaguely sensible system?

[catking]

I might be one of the only people who actually quite likes AV.

[Deleted]

Aug 11, 2018 13:02:36 GMT catking said:

I might be one of the only people who actually quite likes AV.

I voted for it in the referendum.

[mondialito]

The AV Referendum foreshadowed the following years in British politics in many ways, the first being the way the Lib Dems jumped into coalition with the Tories in exchange for a vote on a system Nick Clegg had called a 'miserable little compromise' during the election campaign and seemingly not pushing for a) offering a different system such as AMS or b) introducing STV for local government alongside the referendum. It summed up neatly how the party let themselves be taken for a ride by the Tories in coalition with disastrous results.

[YL]

Aug 11, 2018 12:17:11 GMT European Lefty said:

This does raise another question: why oh why can proponents of PR in the UK not propose a vaguely sensible system?

Arrow's impossibility theorem?

(Personally, I quite like STV. It isn't without its flaws of course, but I think its detractors overstate them, particularly the hard-to-understand one. The Irish seem to cope fine. The version which used to be used for the Australian Senate was truly awful, though.)

[timrollpickering]

Aug 11, 2018 13:28:02 GMT mondialito said:

The AV Referendum foreshadowed the following years in British politics in many ways, the first being the way the Lib Dems jumped into coalition with the Tories in exchange for a vote on a system Nick Clegg had called a 'miserable little compromise' during the election campaign and seemingly not pushing for a) offering a different system such as AMS or b) introducing STV for local government alongside the referendum. It summed up neatly how the party let themselves be taken for a ride by the Tories in coalition with disastrous results.

As stated before, the reason the vote was on AV wasn't because the Conservatives ran rings around the Lib Dems but rather that during the Labour years a consensus amongst election system changers around Westminster had settled on that as an agreed compromise way forward (albeit without preparing properly or selling it to the grassroots). The Conservatives merely bid at the going rate.

[pragmaticidealist]

Aug 11, 2018 13:02:36 GMT catking said:

I might be one of the only people who actually quite likes AV.

I also like it. The Yes to AV campaign was even more inept than the Remain campaign though, hence its failure. 

[The Bishop]

Aug 10, 2018 18:16:07 GMT sirbenjamin said:

Frankly, if the 2011 referendum had passed (and if it had, it would've passed about as decisively as a certain other referendum) I think there would be a lot of pressure to have another referendum to ditch AV

I suppose the question is whether such a referendum would have been to restore FPTP, or instead move to a genuinely "proportional" system.......

[neilm]

Aug 11, 2018 13:28:02 GMT mondialito said:

The AV Referendum foreshadowed the following years in British politics in many ways, the first being the way the Lib Dems jumped into coalition with the Tories in exchange for a vote on a system Nick Clegg had called a 'miserable little compromise' during the election campaign and seemingly not pushing for a) offering a different system such as AMS or b) introducing STV for local government alongside the referendum. It summed up neatly how the party let themselves be taken for a ride by the Tories in coalition with disastrous results.

I admit that I voted no partly because I wanted to cause damage to the Liberal Democrats. I was unimpressed with them in government and wanted them damaged.

[mondialito]

Aug 11, 2018 19:58:38 GMT timrollpickering said:

Aug 11, 2018 13:28:02 GMT mondialito said:

The AV Referendum foreshadowed the following years in British politics in many ways, the first being the way the Lib Dems jumped into coalition with the Tories in exchange for a vote on a system Nick Clegg had called a 'miserable little compromise' during the election campaign and seemingly not pushing for a) offering a different system such as AMS or b) introducing STV for local government alongside the referendum. It summed up neatly how the party let themselves be taken for a ride by the Tories in coalition with disastrous results.

As stated before, the reason the vote was on AV wasn't because the Conservatives ran rings around the Lib Dems but rather that during the Labour years a consensus amongst election system changers around Westminster had settled on that as an agreed compromise way forward (albeit without preparing properly or selling it to the grassroots). The Conservatives merely bid at the going rate.

Fair enough, but given that at that point Cameron really needed a deal to save face after failing to win a majority, the Lib Dems could and should have demanded more given how anti-Tory their vote was at the time.

[therealriga]

Aug 10, 2018 21:11:02 GMT timrollpickering said:

Aug 1, 2018 21:43:45 GMT therealriga said:

Conservatives not worried about losing seats to Labour due to UKIP splitting the vote as those votes would have transferred back to the Conservatives anyway. Therefore, Cameron much less likely to agree to a referendum.

Then hypothetical Cameron would have been a fool (and not just because the question itself needed settling with a new popular mandate one way or the other). The Ukip vote would likely have largely plumped. 

Where's the evidence for that? Looking at Scottish local elections, UKIP terminal transfers (i.e. when no other UKIP candidate was available) were around 30% non-transferable and 70% transferable. The vast majority of UKIP voters did go on to transfer to other parties. Why would it be different, especially when it's explained to them how it will affect the result in a close contest such as 2015 was? All Cameron needs to know is that some of that UKIP vote is coming back his way, instead of being totally lost, as it would be under FPTP and he's less likely to worry about the UKIP effect.

[therealriga]

Aug 10, 2018 18:16:07 GMT sirbenjamin said:

The 2015 AV GE would've resulted in a few freak results, perverse incentives and unintended consequences. There would've been a big kerfuffle involving very vocal folks claiming they didn't understand how it worked and possibly a few challenges to the results in certain cases. People would demand to know why their second choice was irrelevant but their friends second choice was decisive etc. The fuss made about the current boundary review would be nothing by comparison.

They could certainly ask, but it would be little different to an SNP voter in Hamilton West asking why 37% of the vote was insufficient to elect an SNP there when 32% was enough in Hamilton East. All elections will have their quirks and at least under AV the explanation that the majority of voters backed the winning candidate makes a bit more sense than explaining that it was just down to a random break of votes as in the Hamilton example.