CHAPTER II
THE DIRECT RESULTS OF MAJORITY SYSTEMS
"I therefore agree that it is impossible to defend the rough and ready method which has been hitherto adopted as a proper or satisfactory explanation of the representative principle. It is not merely, as more than one speaker has pointed out, that under our existing system a minority in the country may return a majority of the House of Commons, but what more frequently happens, and what I am disposed to agree is equally injurious in its results, is that you have almost always a great disproportion in the relative size of the majority and minority in the House of Commons as compared with their relative size in the constituencies."
—THE RIGHT HON. H.H. ASQUITH[1]
"English writers," says Mr. Archibald E. Dobbs, in the Irish Year Book, 1909, "often write as if election by a bare majority was the only natural or possible mode of election, as if it was like day and night, seedtime and harvest; something fixed and in the nature of things, and not to be questioned or examined or improved." The unquestioning habit of our minds goes even farther than Mr. Dobbs suggests. For, although prior to the Redistribution Act of 1885, every great town in the United Kingdom, with the exception of London, was a parliamentary unit, yet the system of single-member constituencies made general by that Act is now regarded by many as another essential and permanent feature of the English parliamentary system. But if, as this chapter proposes to show, existing electoral methods may result, and have resulted, in a complete travesty of representation, if these methods fail in every respect to fulfil the requirements of a satisfactory electoral system, then neither single-member constituencies nor the majority method of election can be permitted to stand permanently in the way of effective improvement.
The exaggeration of majorities.
Since the Redistribution Act of 1885, when the system of single-member constituencies was made general, there have been eight General Elections, and these are amply sufficient to illustrate the working of this system. A complete analysis of these elections, prepared by Mr. J. Rooke Corbett, M.A., of the Manchester Statistical Society, appears in Appendix V.[2] It will be sufficient for present purposes if attention is directed to some of the more obvious of their lessons. The General Elections of 1895, 1900, and 1906, resulted in the return to the House of Commons of a number of representatives of the victorious party far in excess of that to which their polling strength entitled them, and this result, repeated three times in succession, has given rise to a widespread belief that this system necessarily and always yields to the victors an exaggerated majority. There is, however, no clear conception of the extent to which these exaggerated majorities diverge from the truth, and an examination of the figures is therefore desirable. Here are the totals for the General Elections of 1900 and 1906:[3]—