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What are the advantages and disadvantages of proportional representation?

April 26, 2017advantages disadvantages elections government politics proportional representation

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What are the advantages and disadvantages of proportional representation?

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Pro: Every vote is worth the same. Under our current system, if you live in a marginal constituency (ie one in which very few votes separate the front runners) your vote is worth far more than somebody who lives in a safe seat. (If you live in an area with a “safe” seat. Within that it also reduces the tempatation to vote tactically – since there is no benefit in voting for a party whose policies you don’t believe in, the party whose policies you DO believe in are more likely to get your vote. In addition to that, there would be better correlation between the number of votes a political party gets and the amount of influence it has. In this election, the number of votes labour got wasn’t much more than the number of votes for the LibDems (only 6% between them) yet Labour got more than 4x as many seats as LibDem. So both Labour and the conservatives have disproportionately more power than the number of votes they actually got (ever wondered why neither party has ever given us electoral