Public support for PR is at an all-time high
A new report from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) shows that public support for PR among adults in the UK is at an all-time high.
The report, based on data from the British Social Attitudes Survey 2023, covers opinions on a range of issues, including social and political trust, populism and the impact of Brexit.
On electoral reform, it finds that 53% of those polled said they were in favour of changing the voting system, while only 40% said they were against. Excluding the don’t-knows, that’s 57% versus 43%.
The previous sweep of the survey, in 2021, found 51% of adults supported electoral reform. At the time, this figure was an all-time high, up from 43% in 2017. The new figure of 53% shows that the 2021 results weren’t just a blip. Support for electoral reform is real, and it’s growing.
Read a summary of the research, or download the full report, on NatCen’s website.
The section on voting reform starts on Page 24 of the report:
“One of the most important constitutional provisions in any representative democracy is the electoral system that is used to elect those representatives. A system of proportional representation might be expected to produce more coalition governments than the single member plurality system currently used in Britain, which has produced single party majority governments for most of the post-war period. We might therefore anticipate that changing the electoral system would be relatively attractive to those who have low levels of trust and confidence in the current system. Since the 1980s, BSA has often asked the following question about electoral reform. It summarises for respondents two of the key arguments that are often made for and against changing the system (Renwick, 2011) and then asks for their own view:
- Some people say we should change the voting system for general elections to the UK House of Commons
to allow smaller political parties to get a fairer share of MPs. - Others say that we should keep the voting system for the House of Commons as it is to produce effective
government. - Which view comes closer to your own?
The first option implies a switch to a system of proportional representation, while the second refers to the existing single member plurality system. Two years ago, Curtice and Scholes (2022) reported that, for the first time in forty years, a majority
backed changing the electoral system rather than keeping it as it is. That appears not to have simply been a temporary change of mood. As shown in Table 9, our latest survey also finds a majority (53%) are in favour of reform and the popularity of the existing system has slipped to a new low of 40%.”
