ABSTRACT
The British political system has long resisted any sort of change in its electoral arrangements. The history of the so-called ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system was intertwined with the beginning of the extension of the franchise and exported to British colonies throughout the nineteenth century. The system was used throughout the twentieth century for elections to all tiers of government: local, national and European. Thus before the 1990s Britain might have been considered in line with the conventional wisdom that electoral systems rarely change. But 1993 marked a ‘burst of change’ across the rest of the world when Italy, Japan and New Zealand all changed their electoral systems and Russia introduced a new system (Dunleavy and Margetts, 1995: 9), while the newly emerging democracies across central and eastern Europe all chose either mixed or list systems. Britain began to look out of step internationally. At the European level Britain’s resistance to change was particularly prominent, as Britain became the only country by 1994 to remain committed to the first-past-the-post system for election to the European Parliament.
