Recent Articles

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Which Women Win? The 2015 English local elections

This is a guest post by James Winterbotham, University of Exeter James Winterbotham is an undergraduate student of social sciences and data analysis at the University of Exeter. As part of a team working with...

Posted 08 Mar 2016

Graphic of women

5 Myths About the Scottish Lobbying Bill

This is a guest post by Pete Mills from Unlock Democracy In the first week back after Christmas, MSPs debated a Bill to introduce a lobbying register designed to let ordinary people know who is...

Posted 25 Jan 2016

Our top ten most read blogs of 2015

2015 was the busiest year ever for the Electoral Reform Society blog, with monthly readership over double the level we had in 2014. As we get stuck in to 2016, we thought we’d look back...

Posted 04 Jan 2016

ERS Blog

It’s time 16 and 17 year olds got the vote

Last month saw a big victory for campaigners for a fairer franchise: the House of Lords supported giving 16 and 17-year-olds a vote in the EU referendum. Votes at 16 is now in the Bill. But...

Posted 04 Dec 2015

Putting PR in Parliament

UPDATE, December 3: The Bill has now been rescheduled and will be heard on Wednesday 16th December. —- It’s not an opportunity that comes up very often, so this is an important one: this Wednesday,...

Posted 30 Nov 2015

Our bloated second chamber

The House of Lords is already the biggest chamber in the democratic world – yet it is growing in size with each new government. As peers sit in the chamber for life, it grows with...

Posted 19 Oct 2015

House of Lords

Localism and devolution – ERS at Labour conference

“Devolution is a hot topic,” said Jane Dudman, Guardian Public Leaders editor, who chaired the first of three ERS fringe events at Labour Party Conference 2015. The topic was: “can Labour reclaim devolution and localism?”...

Posted 13 Oct 2015

Party over Principle: Independence in the Lords

The House of Lords is often assumed to be more independent than the Commons because it is less strongly whipped and because it contains Crossbench members who do not have a party affiliation. But it’s...

Posted 09 Oct 2015

House of Lords