Democracy 101 - Electoral Reform with Make Votes Matter

Resource type: Podcast

Democracy 101 is the monthly podcast series from Cumberland Lodge, giving a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of democracy. In this episode, we explore how electoral systems and electoral reform can affect policy and the impact that it has on young voters. To help us explore these topics, we are joined by Ella and Reuben from the youth wing of Make Votes Matter, a single-issue campaign for proportional representation.

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Cumberland Lodge · Democracy 101 – Electoral Reform with Make Votes Matter

Transcript

00:05

Munny Purba (MP)

Welcome to Democracy 101, the monthly podcast series from Cumberland Lodge that provides a comprehensive introduction to key concepts in democracy. In this episode, we’re focusing on electoral systems and the push for reform, a critical issue with far reaching implications for representation and political engagement.

00:21

Joining me are Ella and Reuben, members of the youth wing of Make Votes Matter, a cross-party pressure group advocating for proportional representation. Together, we’ll explore the current first past the post system and how it impacts different communities, especially young people and marginalised groups.

00:39

Ella and Reuben will share insights from their research and we look at how moving to a more proportionally representative system could reshape the future of democracy in the UK.

00:51

Thank you, Ella and Ruben for joining us for this episode of Democracy 101 we’re really happy to have you here talking about voting systems.

Ella E (EE)

Thank you for having us.

00:59

Reuben B (RB)

Yeah. So happy to be here.

01:01

Great. I’m glad you are. We’re glad to have you. So I thought that we would kind of just kick off with you introducing yourselves and how he kind of got involved with Make Votes Matter and the whole idea of voting.

01:14

I’m Reuben. My day jobs are fundraising in the arts and education sectors and also I’m a musician. I recently graduated from Kings College, Cambridge, doing music and one of the things that I engaged with a lot in my final year was I was treasurer of the Politics Society there and that’s really when I became exposed to electoral systems and about all the problems around that and how that affects young people.

01:40

And also, during my final year, I got really interested in data and in how we can use data to create stories and to reveal surprising stories and how that can work with lived experiences and how those two things can work together.

01:54

Hi, I’m Ella. And I’m a Masters student, currently studying anthropology in London. So I first got involved with Make Votes Matter all the way back in January of this year, 2024, when I was living in Sydney, Australia, of all places, really.

02:08

And I still find it quite funny how it took me leaving the UK to realise just what was wrong with the way our democracy works, but moving to Australia really was the catalyst for me. I remember quite vividly one time walking down the street of the neighbourhood I just moved to and I witnessed a local council election that was spilling out onto the pavement from the community centre and I was really quite struck by the buzz and the excitement that seemed to be going on.

02:33

And also the young faces of the people who were involved with the campaigning and there was a huge contrast to anything that I had seen in the UK, local or national. So I really was pondering why was that the case? And as I was curious, I googled and my answer that local elections in Sydney use a different electoral system to ours. I mean, I’ve always been very politically engaged. I did politics at A Level, but I never really thought about turning my attention to elections.

02:59

Until I voted in 2019, for the first time, I still remember the very guttural feeling that I had when I saw the results for my constituency and saw that my candidate was nowhere near winning. Ever since then, you know I’ve explored ways that young people have got involved in politics other than voting, so I even wrote an article all about how Japanese young people use rap music to make their voices known.

03:21

But I never really thought about changing our elections so that young people could get better representation in politics. But now, alongside Reuben, we’re helping to spearhead a new direction for Make Votes Matter to try and get more young people involved in the cause for electoral reform. And I’m in particular, very interested in looking at how more women and girls and non-binary folk can get involved and benefit from proportional representation.

03:45

Thank you. I think that’s a really nice overview to kind of understand how you got involved and kind of the issues that you’re focusing on. And I think what might be a good way to get other listeners intrigued with this topic is really trying to break down what the system we have now and what the idea of proportional representation is, that might be quite helpful.

04:04

I mean I can start with describing what an electoral system is, which is also sometimes called a voting system. It’s the main feature of any sort of democratic country really.

04:12

It’s basically just a set of rules that dictates how elections and any other types of vote, we might all think of the referendum in 2016 for Brexit, the rules about how they should be held and how the results are counted essentially.

04:24

And there are many different types of voting system and many different versions are used around the world, but the one that we use in the UK is called first past the post. It’s actually a very simple form of what we call a plurality system, which is a system where a candidate only needs to win the highest amount of votes to get elected. So not even 50%.

04:45

But yeah, it’s the system that elects our Members to Parliament and decides which parties can form our government. But maybe Reuben can explain a bit more about how the voting actually works under first past the post.

04:57

That was fantastic, Ella. Thank you. Did a lot of the heavy lifting for me. Yeah. So with first past the post, each constituency elects a single representative into government.

05:11

And so just to start to highlight some of the problems that arises, is, let’s say, 12,000 people vote for candidate A and 10,000 people vote for candidate B.

05:17

Candidate A will get into government and be the only representative for that constituency, despite the fact that 10,000 people voted for candidate B. And that’s why a lot of European countries and countries from around the world adopt more of a proportionally representative system.

05:33

So, for example, the Netherlands has a party list proportional representative system, which is where you vote for a party, instead of an individual candidate, and then those parties get allocated proportionally across the country. And what that means is that you can have multiple representatives for one area. And so in my previous example that would mean that the 10,000 people who voted for candidate B would still be represented somewhat in their constituency.

06:01

Whether that constituency is the size of a town or a county, or in some models actually it’s the entire country, and hopefully that sort of made sense.

06:10

Yeah, I think that’s really important overview to give because I think some people like you said, Ella, get confused with voting systems.

06:15

What it really means and where our votes really count or don’t count. And so I think that’s really helpful to give that kind of clear explanation. But it’d be really nice for you to then go into explaining a bit about some of the topics, interests that you have in terms of voting systems and I know Ella you mentioned getting women and non-binary folk involved.

06:36

And Reuben, also, I think you’ve kind of worked around wasted votes and what that means for young people. So maybe kind of going into why you got involved in those things and how that’s kind of played out for you.

06:46

Yeah, of course. So obviously my work has generally focused more on gender equality. And I have discovered some incredible things that show just how changing the electoral system might help in pushing forward the agenda for gender equality.

07:00

I’ve been primarily looking at how policy and law have been feminised in different parts of the UK. So what do I mean by that? Basically, how have different parties in different parliaments made their policy more attentive to the needs of women? So obviously Westminster is not the only parliament here in the UK, we have the Welsh Assembly or the Senedd, and the Scottish Parliament too, as well as our friends over in Northern Ireland.

07:23

But I’ve been focusing on the first two and both of these parliaments have, you know, a lot of powers to shape policy and establish new laws on gender equality.

07:32

And I have noticed in my research quite a sizable difference in not only the amount but also the quality of gender equality policy coming from Westminster. And it’s very interesting in Scotland and Wales they use a different system for their elections, as I mentioned before, it combines both first past the post, but also elements of proportional representation.

07:53

Which quite simply means that they elect more representatives to Parliament for each constituency than we do in England or in Westminster general elections, and this has honestly been very good for women and young people as well. Wales actually was the first parliament, I think in the world to achieve gender parity, that is to ensure that half the parliament consists of female MPs.

08:14

And they did that all the way back in 1999, which is quite incredible. Scotland also achieved this in 2021, most recently. However, Westminster is still 100, I think over 100 women off this target, which is quite a significant difference. And this is just talking about representation of women in the seats of Parliament and imagine what we could do for gender equality if we could have a Parliament that comprises of, you know, over half of MPs who are female or non binary. It really would be wonderful.

08:43

Yeah. And I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it when we’re thinking about systems that already exist in the UK.

08:50

We don’t really have to look that far to see what can be done. It gives us some hope that maybe, you know, with our neighbours and actually those within the UK, they can give us some really, really valid examples. And Reuben, did you wanna talk a bit about what you’ve been up to?

09:03

Yeah, sure. So I’ve been looking on whether young people as a group, which I’ve for the moment defined as 18-to-24s, whether they are disproportionately affected, negatively affected by first past the post compared to the broader electorate.

09:17

And initially the way that I’ve been looking at this is to see whether there is a correlation between the proportion of young people who live in a given constituency and the proportion of wasted votes in that constituency. Just to define what a wasted vote is, a wasted vote is a vote that was either surplus to what a winning candidate needed to win that election, or the vote went to a candidate who wasn’t elected.

09:46

So just as an example, if a Labour candidate won a constituency by 10,000 votes, that means that 9,999 of those votes didn’t really matter. They weren’t needed to get that person into government.

09:54

And so we call those wasted votes because they don’t really matter. They have no impact on the result of that constituency’s election. And this is the main problem with first past the post. It’s these wasted votes. It’s the fact that you can go to the polling station and then your vote just sort of goes off into the ether.

10:14

And so yeah, I looked at whether there is a correlation between how many wasted votes there are in a constituency and how many young people there are in a constituency. And the big thing that I found was that young people were, on average, more likely to have their vote wasted at the last general election than the broader electorate, as a direct consequence of first past the post.

10:35

And there are a few constituencies that really, really jump out as particularly bad. Just to give an example, we’ve got constituencies like Nottingham East, which has the second highest proportion of wasted votes in the UK, and a proportion of young voters three times higher than the national average. And so I’ve got all of these examples, which in future I’m hoping to gather lived experience information from to really see first of all, whether people living in these constituencies know about this.

11:00

And second, whether they feel like their vote hasn’t mattered in recent elections.

11:04

Thank you for explaining, because I think that is something that will really help young people understand a bit more why voting matters and why electoral reform possibly also matters for them more personally. So I think that’s a really nice segue into thinking about.

11:20

If we’re trying to get young people more engaged in this idea of electoral reform, what do you feel would be kind of the best ways to engage them and kind of maybe some advice that you would give them if they are interested in how can they get involved?

11:32

Yeah, of course. That’s a great question to reiterate what Reuben was saying, your vote is so crucial, in that it is the link between your voice and corridors of power where you know your voice will be heard and the way in which your vote is delivered is extremely important in making sure that your voice, your concerns, and your issues are spoken at a national level.

11:52

So yes, so incredibly important issue to be thinking about as a young person.

11:57

But quite surprisingly, not many young people are engaged with this cause for electoral reform, and I really think that’s just because of the way that young people sometimes get treated in, you know, spaces of political discussion. I mean, Reuben might feel the same way, but as you know, relatively young people, you know, we’re still in education.

12:17

Sometimes the most radical thing you can say when you’re working with political organisations is to remind them that young people are not lazy and they’re not stupid.

12:23

And I’ve written an article about this for Make Votes Matter. You wouldn’t believe how many times I have actually been talked down to in situations where I think I do have a new insight to bring some new knowledge, you know, a new perspective and there seems to be this real prevailing narrative nowadays that young people just don’t care for democracy, don’t care for our democratic processes.

12:45

And lack any sort of will to engage, which I think is just very silly. I think, yeah, this sort of discourse is very insulting and it really at the end of the day, drives young people away from important conversations about the future of our democracy.

12:59

There’s a term that I always used to show this. It’s a term that gets thrown around quite a lot when describing how young people engage with social media, in particular, this word called slacktivism, so slacking in activism. But to say that young people are slacking when it comes to engaging in politics is honestly, yeah, very ridiculous. Distrusting our political system and not wanting to vote.

13:20

And there are signs of this amongst the young population in the UK. They are not indicative of the laziness amongst young people. Instead, we need to look at the ways that young people make their voices heard in very creative ways.

13:36

Protesting on the street, they’re making TikToks, educating others, they’re making music, you know, these are all key to getting young people involved in this discussion, recognising, appreciating and appealing to our music, our culture and our protest, our language, basically. And this is something which is called politicised leisure. So the idea that young people think about politics through the lens of their hobbies and their interests.

13:56

And that is reflected in the way that they speak about politics too. So at the heart of all of this, basically is convincing would be activists that discussions about democracy can be both fun and meaningful for them. And it’s thinking about how we can change and reshape the meaning of activism to ensure that young people are not only protesting on the street.

14:16

Not only making music, they are also participating in formal institutions and formal organisations too.

Really really good points to kind of bring to the table because I’ve also done a bit of research on this recently and it’s so true young people are so engaged but they just want it to be at their level and on issues that they care about and ways that they will understand.

14:36

And you mentioned there those ways that they engage with culture and music, you know, arts and issues and like I said that they care about. So really good point to make and bringing that to conversations with decision makers and the idea of electoral reform because it’s massively affecting them. And how can we engage them in this conversation.

14:53

Reuben, anything to add there?

14:55

Yeah. Well, I was just going to sort of build on what Ella’s saying. The fact that there’s these narratives of young voter apathy and disillusionment with political systems and things. And I think what we’ve shown, the research that we’ve done into the fact that the youth vote doesn’t seem to have as much power as the broader electorate.

15:15

Is it really that crazy then that young people feel disillusioned with the political system when on average, their votes are more likely to be wasted, and I think that’s something that it’s not a problem with young people. It’s a problem with the fact that they are not being represented in government and I think that’s the really key thing. I think every political organisation has a has a role to play in this. I think that’s very important.

15:34

Yeah, definitely. And I think like you said there, it’s really important to make the distinction between the apathy that people think is happening across the society and actually the system that does not allow for the engagement. And why is there a correlation there? And there definitely is, I believe, but really important distinction to make for sure.

15:51

I think we talked a lot about how to engage young people and thinking about electoral reform and why that’s affecting them and why that could be a conversation they’d want to engage in.

16:00

So if you could kind of give some advice to young people about, if they were thinking about getting involved, what could they do? Where would you kind of send them to use that voice?

16:10

Of course, yeah. I mean, it’s easy for us to sit here, me and Reuben and say, get involved with organisations like Make Votes Matter. Obviously that’s a wonderful choice. But you know with school, university, you know, your first jobs, hobbies, friends, you know, it’s sometimes hard to be a full time activist and we recognise that too.

16:29

But you don’t always have to do something massive or earth shattering to change the world you know you can start with the little things and they can really have a big impact. So what I did was study politics at A Level that gave me a really good understanding of how our democracy works, but also how to apply that to really important issues that we all really care about.

16:50

And schools and universities usually have a very good range of societies and clubs and all those sort of things that are dedicated to politics and debates, so understandably, if you don’t want to commit to an entire A Level, you can always test the waters there too.

17:00

So just getting involved is the first step.

17:01

Yeah. And what I would add to that, and it fits into that quite nicely, is the fact that modern life can often individualise people and isolate them from everyone around them. There’s research into like the fact that we don’t engage as much with our community anymore just because we’re working all the time and we’re disassociated from the communities around us.

17:21

And I think as young people, it can often leave us feeling quite isolated. I know it’s happened to me before where the issues you care about sometimes it feels like you’re the only one who cares about them.

17:29

And the thing is, is I can guarantee that you are not the only person who cares about those issues, and I think for your own mental health and for activism generally, it’s really important to join collectives in as many different ways as that can mean, whether that’s university demonstration, whether that’s a coffee group or a book club. All of these things they seem, you know, something like a book club, seems really small.

17:49

But I think prioritising mental health and well-being and feeling like you’re part of something where other people feel similar ways and you can work together, share tips of how to deal with this crazy world and things like that. I think that’s so important and I think that’s something that I definitely need to do more. It’s hard. But yeah, that’s what I’d say is join people. In as many different ways as that means.

18:12

Yeah, and a personal recommendation for that. It’s a practical tip the app that I use is called Meet Up. It’s wonderful. It has many options for different protest groups or coffee. You know, coffee clubs, as Reuben mentioned, talking about a variety of different issues. So if you’re a bit lost of as to where to start, I would start there. It’s brilliant.

18:32

And I think you’re so right in saying that sometimes we feel disconnected and that our issues are only ours. Bringing that connection together can really show us that actually so many people, so many other young, and not just young, older people too, have an interest in this thing.

18:38

And the idea of collective power and collective action. We can really make a difference if we really put our heads together and, you know, go for this issue. And I think really good recommendations there from you both and also. Yeah.

18:57

I think Ella, as you mentioned, perhaps not even in a curriculum setting. But just if you are engaged or you want to be more engaged using everything we have around us to really try and get involved as much as possible.

19:05

I wonder as we finish off, you can maybe think about one, maybe some interesting factor or insight that you hadn’t thought you would come across in your research and the work that you do. And then finally where you kind of see the space of activism around electoral reform going?

19:21

Yeah. Well, I think personally something that’s really interesting to bring into the debates surrounding electoral reform is, I think one of the key buzzwords of the day.

19:29

Which is thinking about feminism and intersectionality, again going back to my focus on gender equality, I think it’s really important that we all look to diversify our political spaces. You know, especially when we’re talking to the young people of this country, not only are they of such diverse, you know, socioeconomic and ethnic, class, religious backgrounds.

19:49

They are also very proud to be vocal on behalf of other people in that sense, and my research has really looked at how electoral reform can push intersectionality.

20:04

Can get more people of colour, queer candidates, disabled candidates, so on and so forth into positions of power, into Parliament. And there’s some real promising data to be looking at, especially I was particularly surprised at the equalities agenda in Wales, which I think is far more progressive than any of sort of neighbouring countries, even in even in in Western Europe really.

20:24

And the importance they place upon making sure Parliament is responsible towards young people of all backgrounds. So I really think that that is a key tenant of what a lot of organisations are doing right now. So I’m really excited about the future for young people and activism around electoral reform.

20:45

I really think that it’s going in a direction where we’re gonna have this sense of multi-vocality. You know, there’s gonna be so many voices and so many perspectives. And as a person who loves proportional representation, that’s really exciting for me.

20:57

Great examples and I really look to you as kind of the youth representatives on this matter to kind of guide us.

21:05

Not in a, don’t, no pressure, but I feel that you have. You have the voice and you have the energy to do it. And I’m really looking forward to what’s come. Thank you. Reuben anything that you wanna add as we finish off?

21:16

Sure. Yeah. Just a final thing about something that I didn’t expect to come across is that it seems like all these issues are things that young people care about and no one else cares about and something that I just like to add as a positive note is I attended a grassroots forum with Make Votes Matter a few weeks ago, and I joined the call and I was the only person below 65 there.

21:36

And they were all shocked that a young person was interested in this. And basically the point I want to make is that, you know, as young people, we’re not alone in caring about wanting to reform our voting system and make it more representative. We have some allies, some old allies out there who have been fighting for this for a long time.

21:56

And I think, again that’s to my point about not feeling alone, that there are people out there who want what we want and who are fighting for what we’re fighting for. And I think that’s something to always try and remember.

22:06

Really lovely way to end and I think that we can kind of carry on that momentum in thinking that as a collective, as a community, as I mentioned, we really can do a lot and young people, their voices are so important and as much as they can and as much as we can help them get them out there, we should.

22:23

So thank you both for telling me about your research and all about electoral reform and Make Votes Matter.

22:29

Thank you so much for having us and letting us talk about our, you know, our research interests and Make Votes Matter, it’s been amazing.

22:35

Yeah, I think it’s so special that these spaces exist where we get to talk about this sort of thing. So thank you so much.

22:40

Thanks for listening. You can find out more about the work we do at Cumberland Lodge by visiting cumberlandlodge.ac.uk. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook, and TikTok @Cumberland Lodge.