Despite the hung parliament, who wins the election matters

Another one from "the other place" so, again, apologies about charts not quite fitting. This is about the potential legitimacy crisis that we're heading for if the party that 'loses' the election forms the government. In practice, I suspect that Conservative supporting newspapers will support any arrangement that puts the Conservatives back in office as just and proper while any arrangement that puts Labour in will be a stitch-up or a coup. Similarly for the Labour supporting papers.

Here's the actual post and I've added a few more comments at the end.

Most sensible predictions for the election are that, barring a late swing one way or the other, Britain will elect another hung parliament in May. Whether the Conservatives or Labour are the largest party varies between forecasts but, either way, on May 8th David Cameron and Ed Miliband will be scrambling around trying to put together a deal with the other parties to form a majority in the House of Commons.

In 2010 the fact that the parliamentary arithmetic so favoured a Conservative-Lib Dem deal meant that we didn’t face the issue of the party that ‘won’ the election not forming the government. That is much more of a possibility in 2015 and any government that emerges could face a crisis of legitimacy, regardless of what is constitutionally proper.

Constitutionally, the government is formed by whoever can command a majority in the House of Commons which, in practice, has tended to be the leader of the party with the most seats and that has also tended to be the party that has the most votes.

We have had occasions where the election has been close, in February 1974 the Conservatives won more votes but Labour won more seats and Harold Wilson became Prime Minister when the Tories and Liberals couldn’t reach a deal. In 1951 the opposite was the case with Labour winning fewer seats despite winning more votes and Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street. So we have a clear constitutional precedent that it’s seats and not votes that matter.

Last year, before the referendum and the SNP surge, it looked possible that the Conservatives would win more votes but Labour might win more seats because of the way each party’s voters are distributed. In that scenario – despite constitution being clear that it’s seats, not votes, that matter – the public took a different view:

By 2-1, the public think it’s votes, not seats, that make you the winner of the election and give you the right to form the government.
And then in 2014 the SNP surged and Labour’s chances of a majority diminished sharply, leaving us with the current situation.

Recently we were asked to take part in various prediction exercises and my view was that Labour are more likely to be able to form a government because current polling shows the two parties will have similar numbers of MPs and the SNP are willing to support Ed Miliband but not David Cameron.

This is the case whether Labour or the Conservatives are ahead on the actual number of MPs but which party has the most MPs would radically alter how such a government is seen by the public.

We tested this scenario with voters who, again, believe the legitimate government is based on the party that ‘wins’ the election. Vote share is not mentioned in this question (too many variables for what is quite a theoretical question to begin with) but given the way the electoral system operates we can be confident that the Tories winning more votes and Labour more seats is far more likely than the other way around.

Liberal Democrat voters are the only ones who believe that the majority coalition would have more legitimacy than the single largest party while Labour and especially the Conservatives say the opposite.

What this tells us is that the scenario for government formation that we currently think is one of the most likely is one that voters would view as highly illegitimate, namely the Conservatives winning more seats or more votes than Labour but Ed

Miliband becoming prime minister with support from the SNP or Liberal Democrats.
In fact when we asked supporters of the smaller parties (Lib Dem, SNP, UKIP, Green) who they would want to go into coalition with support or opposition varied enormously depending on whether the suggested partner was the biggest or second biggest party. Half of SNP voters would support a coalition with Labour if they are the largest party but this drops to a third if Labour have fewer MPs than the Conservatives, the Greens are similar (60%, dropping to 30%). On the Conservative side, 40% of UKIP voters favour coalition with the Tories if they are the largest party but just 19% do if Labour are the biggest.

It may not make the biggest difference to what sort of a government we get but whether Labour or the Conservatives ‘win’ on May 7th will make a big difference to how the eventual government is viewed by voters.

OK so the other point that I meant to include is that all of these questions are theoretical and, just like newspapers, I'd expect most committed partisans to find that a coalition that included their party was 'legitimate' although the experience of the Lib Dems after 2010 shows you how small a fraction of your voters committed partisans can be. 

Similarly, the results of the other questions in that survey (p93 onwards here) show differing levels of support depending on whether the prospective coalition's "big" partner was the largest or second largest party in the Commons. This doesn't factor in vote share but my takeaway from all this is that simplistic assumptions, such as the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition theoretically representing 59% of the 2010 vote, will not cut much cloth given that people vote for parties for different reasons.