Tag: Democracy
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How might the 2021 Senedd election have looked under the proposed new system?
My blog for Make Votes Matter on the proposed Senedd electoral system. Yesterday, Mark Drakeford and Adam Price published a “joint position statement” on Senedd reform. The agreement proposed the use of a closed list D’Hondt PR system to elect 96 Members of the Senedd (MSs). The system would have 16 constituencies, each electing 6…
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Joint opposition lists help un-skew the Hungarian electoral system, but they’ll still need a 3% lead to win
Five months from the 2022 Parliamentary elections, Hungary’s opposition is just about holding together the coalition needed to mount a credible campaign against Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government. Last month, they chose their candidate for Prime Minister: Péter Márki-Zay, mayor of Hódmezővásárhely. Márki-Zay, a conservative politician with no national experience and practically no party of his…
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Five Lessons from the Metro Mayor Elections
Back in April, I tried to consider what our expectations of the 8 combined authority (metro) mayoral elections should be. As I said at the time, these weren’t meant to be predictions, but an attempt to think about what a “baseline” result would look like, based solely on national polls and general election results. On…
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Thesis: Moving the Goalposts: Orbán’s Fidesz, Strategies of Party Competition and Electoral Authoritarianism
My undergraduate thesis: Moving the Goalposts: Orbán’s Fidesz, Strategies of Party Competition and Electoral Authoritarianism
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Peterloo led eventually to electoral democracy – but there’s one big bit of unfinished business
New evidence shows that it’s the Right that tend to benefit from the UK’s unequal electoral system. The Left is gradually embracing Proportional Representation, but it needs to move faster. This was originally posted as an article for OpenDemocracy: Peterloo led eventually to electoral democracy – but there’s one big bit of unfinished business Today marks…
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Peterloo 200: the path to Proportional Representation
16 August 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. To commemorate the massacre, I have been working on a report for Make Votes Matter, co-authored with the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform. From the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, through the Chartist and suffrage campaigns, to the rise of the Labour Party, working people have…
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New York Times – U.K. Voters’ Frustration High as 99% Are Sidelined in Prime Minister Election
My quote from this piece in the New York Times, about the Conservative leadership contest and dissatisfaction with politics. Most galling for many is that the decision lies with the Tories, whose party members are determined to have Brexit delivered by Oct. 31 at any cost. That view has been rejected by the majority of…
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Tactical voting on the basis of the 2014 European Elections
Disclaimer: I am a Labour Party member and will be voting for Labour in May’s European Elections. This blog is not intended to encourage tactical voting but to explore from an academic perspective whether various parties’ claims to be “the main Remain party” in the upcoming European Elections stand up to scrutiny. One of the biggest…
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The Impact of Electoral Systems on Economic Democracy in Developed Democracies
This essay was written for the quantitative methods component of my comparative politics module. A PDF of the essay is available here, R code is available here, and replication data is available here. With the challenges of climate change, globalisation and a backlash against established political and economic institutions, many political commentators have pointed to…
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Greens for a Better Europe – Book
I’m really excited to see the launch of Greens for a Better Europe – Twenty Years of UK Green Influence in the European Parliament, a book which I contributed a chapter to, co-authored by Klina Jordan. The book will be available from early March. Until then, here is the abstract of mine and Klina’s chapter.…
Owen Winter 