The recent British elections highlight why the rules — not candidates, parties, issues or ideologies — are the real kingmakers in democracies. The graphic shows the percentage of votes and percentage of seats won by the three major British parties. Look at the disparities! If the Tories and Labour had stuffed ballot boxes so they won more seats than British voters actually intended, everyone would have cried foul. If ballot boxes filled with votes for the Liberal Democrats were stolen from election booths, there would be calls for a re-election monitored by U.N. observers. But because the rules say the party with the largest share of votes in each parliamentary constituency wins the entire constituency, it looks like democracy even though large numbers of voters were effectively disenfranchised.
Regardless of your political views, winner-take-all rules are an abomination only slightly better than outright electoral corruption. (The United States has several variations of the British rules: See my Washington Post column about the Republican and Democratic primaries, for example.) Proportional representation, where parties are awarded seats in parliament commensurate with their overall vote share, encourage a greater diversity of political views in a country (because groups that have only small amounts of support are not entirely shut out of the conversation). Proportional representation also keeps one or two major parties, which are often responsible for writing the original election rules in the first place, from effectively silencing everyone else.
You want a hidden brain connection? We are unconsciously predisposed to see theft perpetrated at gunpoint as being worse than theft perpetrated by clever bureaucracies and scheming constitutional architects.
