Been seeing outraged posts all day about the recent UK election.

[conuly]

I'm so sorry, guys.

Comments

[hudebnik]

Yeah. My take (not that I know anything special about British politics) is that the whole subject of Brexit has become so tiresome and divisive that voters went for whomever promised to put the subject behind them the fastest. There's psychological research showing that committee meetings held when the participants are hungry are more likely to take "what the hell, let's try it" sorts of actions, just so the meeting can be over sooner.

I gather there's also a representation problem, similar to what we have in the U.S.: Tories and other strongly-pro-Brexit parties got something like 46% of the popular vote, but won something like 60% of the seats because the pro-Remain voters are an overwhelming majority in some places and a minority everywhere else (although I don't know of any evidence that the "packing and cracking" is intentional, as it is in many parts of the U.S.)

There are probably more pro-Remain and Brexit-dubious parties than pro-Brexit parties, which could also produce the above effect, but I gather the parties on both sides made agreements to avoid splitting the vote (e.g. if there's a strong Brexit-party candidate in this district, we won't run a Tory there, in exchange for the Brexit party running nobody in that other district, and similarly on the other side). Still, part of the lesson is that winner-take-all single-representative districts work really badly when there are more than two candidates.