Matthew's Journal

It seems to me quite likely that, had the Tory leadership election been conducted under FPTP, people would have voted differently from the way they actually voted in the first round. Indeed, one of the key arguments made by supporters of AV is that under FPTP, a large number of voters vote 'tactically', in the sense of voting for a candidate they think has a chance of winning rather than the candidate they would actually prefer. So it seems possible that DC would have won the Tory leadership election under FPTP. But this all seems to me something of a distraction. We're not really having a debate about who ought to be Tory leader, or about what the best electoral system for selecting a Tory leader would be. The analogy with national elections seems weak, both because the Tory leadership election has two voting colleges performing different roles, and because electing a party leader strikes me as a different thing from electing an MP, so there's no reason why the two voting systems should be aligned.

The recent election in Peru seems like a much better argument in favour of AV - in fact it seems pretty compelling as an argument that AV should be used for presidential elections (see also Ralph Nader). But are parliamentary elections (where a large number of MPs are returned) sufficiently similar to presidential elections (where the winner takes all) for the argument to carry across?