ABSTRACT
Electoral abuses spawn electoral reformers. The rate of reform activity and its variable success depends upon many factors, not least of which is the perceived level of abuse. As abuses gradually get worse, as with American malapportionment, or just become more apparent, pressure for reform rises and the electoral status quo is forced onto the defensive. This has happened in Britain since the 1974 general elections. A massive increase in Liberal votes from 1970 to 1974 failed to be translated into very many extra seats in parliament; while the Liberal vote approached twenty per cent, Liberal seats stubbornly refused to move beyond the two per cent level. Many commentators outside the Liberal Party proclaimed this situation to be unfair: electoral reform became a live issue again for the first time since 1931 (Finer, 1975; Rogaly, 1976; Hansard Society, 1976). In the U.S.A. there has been no major third party which has
suffered from the plurality voting system in the way that the Liberals have in Britain. Hence, there has been no equivalent attack there on the system of voting for representatives. American reformers are concerned with their most obvious remaining abuse, the gerrymandering described in the last chapter (Dixon, 1968; 1971; Baker, 1971; Mayhew, 1971). Thus reform move ments in the two countries operate at two separate levels. In America the cause of concern is districting; in Britain the issue is the system of voting. The British movement is the more funda mental in that it deals directly with the seat-vote relationship, and hence with electoral bias as defined in the last chapter. As we shall see, geographical solutions to districting problems are
unlikely to affect electoral bias greatly, since it is an inherent property of single-member constituency systems that up to half the voters must lose in every constituency. This chapter treats both levels of electoral reform. In the first
section, we consider reform of districting procedures and sub stantiate our assertions that such reform is unsatisfactory. The second section deals with the more basic questions that arise when we come to consider changing the voting system. As we might expect, it is easier to criticize the existing system than it is to find its replacement.
