This was an election of records broken for all the wrong reasons. Alongside record levels of disproportionality, record lows in trust and engagement delivered a significant drop in turnout.
Those who did turn out delivered a message – the party system and certainties of old are changing.
The 2024 General Election was the first in which four parties gained over ten percent of votes and five parties over five percent of votes. Labour and the Conservatives recorded their lowest combined vote share (57.4%) in the era of universal suffrage, with other parties and independents taking over 40 percent of the votes.
This was an election of multi-party voting, breaking away from the Brexit-driven two-party squeeze seen in the previous two elections, but not translating into a multi-party parliament. The votes piled up for the Reform Party and the Green Party, who received over 4 million votes and nearly 2 million votes respectively, but these did not translate to their fair share of seats, Reform gaining five seats, and the Greens only four.
Volatility also reached a new high. Voters continued to shop around, switch parties and decide later who to vote for. The electoral shocks of the last decade continue to influence our politics, forging new political alignments, and uncertainty for parties and voters alike.
Westminster’s voting system is not designed for this electoral landscape and, as a consequence, delivers results that are not only highly disproportional but uncomfortably fragile. Small changes in vote share over the last decade have resulted in vastly different results.
Voters also continued to try to make the electoral system work for them by voting tactically – nearly a third, again at this election, said they would be opting for a party that wasn’t their first choice in order to keep out another.
But it is not just the voters who were remarkable at this election. With turnout down to 59.9%, only narrowly missing the previous low experienced in 2001 (59.4%), non-voters also spoke loudly. At 40.1%, the non-vote was higher than any party’s vote share.
We have delved underneath the headline election outcomes to reveal the full picture from this election and we have analysed what the election might have looked like under a range of different electoral systems.
As UK General Elections continue to break records for all the wrong reasons, it is time to consider how things could be better.
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