General Election 2024: A Big Night for the Smaller Parties
| Published date | 01 September 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058241282451a |
| Author | Rob Ford |
| Date | 01 September 2024 |
4POLITICAL INSIGHT•SEPTEMBER 2024
General Election 2024
A Big Night for the
Smaller Parties
Rob Ford examines the performance of smaller parties in the
General Election and finds that the hold of the traditional Labour-
Conservative duopoly over voters has never been weaker.
There was a silent revolution at
the 2024 General Election. While
the House of Commons remains
dominated by Labour and the
Conservatives, who hold 84 per cent of the
British seats, the share of votes going to the
‘big two’ dropped below 60 per cent for the
first time since the universal franchise was
introduced. With four in every ten voters
casting a ballot backing fresh options, the
hold of the traditional two-party duopoly
over voters has never been weaker.
This fragmentation of the vote has
magnied the role of our ‘rst past the post’
electoral system. Winning locally is the only
metric that matters in rst past the post –
no one gets any seats for second place, no
matter how many votes they win overall.
Two kinds of parties prosper in a fractured
electoral landscape. The rst are parties which
remain big enough and broad enough to
defeat divided local opponents consistently
– this is how Labour were able to secure a
landslide Commons victory on little over a
third of the votes cast.
The second are smaller parties which
manage to concentrate their support
suciently to win in particular seats or
regions, despite a relatively modest national
vote share. More smaller parties than ever
managed to build local strongholds this
time – while the Liberal Democrats’ successes
were by far the most numerous, there were
also record gains for the Greens and Reform,
and strong representation for nationalists in
Scotland and Wales.
The biggest challenge for smaller parties
is often convincing voters that a ballot cast
for them locally is not going to be wasted
or help elect a party a voter really dislikes by
splitting the local opposition. For this reason,
despite the name, winning isn’t everything
under rst past the post. The party who
wins the silver medal in one election is often
best placed to recruit discontented voters
as the voice of local opposition in the next.
Smaller parties secured a record 234 second
places in 2024. If they convert even a fraction
of these silver medals into golds, then this
year’s fragmented outcome could be the
prelude to an even bigger rise in smaller
parties’ Commons representation at the next
election.
© Ian West / Alamy Stock Photo
Political Insight September 2024 BU.indd 4Political Insight September 2024 BU.indd 421/08/2024 16:2321/08/2024 16:23
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