The electoral system in the United Kingdom is democratically inefficient.

Opponents of Prime Minister David Cameron have taken to the streets as a result of Cameron’s surprise victory in Thursday’s UK elections, and unfriending has commenced, and a monument defiled. A lot of objections center around Cameron’s austerity measures. When pointed out that Cameron just won a majority, his critics return by pointing out that he only won 37% of the vote.

That complaint mirrors some comments I recently made with regard to Alberta where a New Democratic Party won a majority of seats with only 40% of the vote.

While the NDP is set to gain a significant majority of seats, at the time of this writing they haven’t cleared 40% of the popular vote. The two conservative parties, the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party, together combine for 53% of the vote (the Liberal Party as 4%). Since Alberta has single-member districts, the effect of the split vote doesn’t just keep either of the conservative parties from winning a majority in the assembly, but splits the votes in individual districts as well, handing the NDP an outsized number of seats.

It’s entirely possible that in a head-on-head election between the NDP and either the PC or WR parties, that the NDP would have won. However, we don’t really know whether that’s true or not. There are basically three solutions to this disconnect. You can have direct runoffs, a transferable vote (also known as IRV), or proportional representation. Direct runoffs are the most familiar to Americans, because we use them for most primary races and some states use them in general elections. The transferable vote is more fair, and like runoffs do allow you to keep districts in tact, though a little more complicated for those who aren’t used to it. Proportional representation basically takes votes and assigns them according to how many votes they get, which has the advantage of allowing for numerous parties but the disadvantage of allowing for numerous parties and making constituencies less local and intimate (or adding a lot of legislators).

Margaret Thatcher relied on a split opposition.

The United Kingdom has a strong aversion to abiding by Devurger’s Law and a remarkable patience with the consequences.

None of the aforementioned democratic inefficiency is particularly pressing when there are only two parties of significance, but that hasn’t been the case in the UK for a very long time. The flouting of Devurger’s Law has long been on the left, since the upstart Labor party took a run at the Liberal party and managed to displace them without actually killing them. Since then there have been three parties, two on the left and one on the right. The result is that even though the leftward parties have gotten a majority of the vote, Labor has alternated power with the Conservatives. They’ve been remarkably patient about this, neither merging the parties nor reforming the system. If they voted together, Margaret Thatcher may not have happened.

The United Kingdom democratically chose this democratic inefficiency.

When the latest and greatest innovations in democracy are not adopted where they should be appropriately adopted, or when a nation sticks to what seems an archaic way of choosing its representatives and leaders, I have a tendency to assume a degree of institutional inertia or something along those lines. In the US, we don’t have the electoral college because it’s popular (nor, as with the Senate, because it benefits more states than it hurts). We have it because it’s really, really hard to change. While I believe that a system of proportional representation in the US would be really hard to pull off, we haven’t expressly chosen single-member districts in over 200 years.

You have to look very closely to see the Yes vote anywhere.

The United Kingdom, on the other hand, chose this. And recently, at that. One of the conditions of the Conservative-LibDem coalition was that there would be a referendum on the IRV. Even though it is the system of choice for some things in the Kingdom, the public overwhelming rejected it by a margin greater than 2-to-1. Not a single region on the entire map supported, and only one region (Northern Ireland) gave it a level of support of over 40%.

The initiative was somewhat popular at first, but the “No” campaign – with a lot of help from the Conservatives – successfully turned the tide of public opinion. Many political scientists believe (though I’m less sure) that the arguments against it lacked foundation. But even if the people were duped, that’s how democracy happens. It’s harder to argue against a systems democratic foundation when the people recently had the opportunity to adjust it and chose not to.

The London protesters need to take it up with the general public.

And the general public continue to say “No, thanks, we like this very much compared to the alternatives.” More than one person has suggested that the disparate results of UKIP, getting over 12% of the vote but only one seat, might cause Brits to re-evaluate their system. I suspect – though to not know – that shutting UKIP out is more of a feature than a bug, as far as most voters are concerned. Sometimes it is the preference to keep marginal parties marginal. On the other hand, it could solve the SNP problem (to those who see it as a problem) by reducing their presence considerably. Such decisions shouldn’t be made on the basis of which parties are liked and disliked, of course, but that’s still what’s likely to happen.

However, this time the conservatives won.

David Cameron, evidently the Man of the People

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this election that has mostly gone unreported, is that conservative parties have won a majority of the vote for the first time in over half a century. You have to go all the way back to the 1950’s before you get even an ambiguous result (where it’s unclear either liberal or conservative parties won a majority) and possibly all the way back to the 1930’s. While the seat totals show a schism on the left, in terms of people voters, the right faced a bigger one. And they won anyway. If you combine the votes of the Conservative Party, UKIP, and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists, and you are above 50% without even having to contemplate the LDP (which I will get to). So with perfectly proportional representation, a Tory-UKIP coalition is the most likely result.

How would Cameron have done in a runoff? More than just 50%+1, it turns out. Using Lord Ashcroft‘s numbers regarding the major party candidate choice of the four largest minor parties (SNP, Green, UKIP, and LDP), the Conservatives win roughly 57/43% in a hypothetical runoff. The numbers hold whether I assume that the “Don’t know” voters don’t vote, or vote in proportion to the others. Cameron doesn’t drop below fifty even if I take every “don’t know” and give it to Miliband. And all of this, despite the fact that (like everybody else’s) Ashcroft’s Polls turned out to be biased towards Miliband.

In short, it is extremely, extremely difficult to avoid the conclusion that between the two major candidates, Cameron was more popular (or less unpopular) than Miliband among those who voted.

The Liberal Democratic Party perhaps should not be considered operationally liberal.

One of the reasons that Cameron gets such a boost when I divvy up the votes from the four second-tier parties is that Liberal Democratic voters with a preference preferred Cameron to Miliband, by greater than a 2-to-1 margin. As such, I was really putting my thumb on the scale by not including the LDP as part of the conservative coalition.

How did this happen to what was, in recent history, the most liberal of the three major parties? My first thought was that it was an artifact of the rebellion against the LDP for coalitioning with the Conservatives after the last election. Yet the results dont bear that out either. if that were the case, I would think that the constituencies that the Liberal Democrats lost in 2015 would go to Labour as those who depart show their true colors. And yet most of them went to Conservatives.

So what happened to the liberal members of the Liberal Democratic Party?

Whatever the case, they’re evidently not there anymore. It’s possible that the exodus of liberals will make what is left of it more conservative or centrist than liberal. Or maybe not. But last cycle they seemed to split the liberal vote and hand-hold with the Conservatives. This cycle their rank and file prefer Conservative. It seems inaccurate to continue to think of them as “liberals like Labour but unable to get along.”

The English map looks almost identical to 1992, kind of like ours, and has an interesting relationship with coal.

The largest difference between 1992 and 2015 is, of course, Scotland. But it’s a remarkable similarity in part because Miliband is something of a protege of Neil Kinnock, who lost to John Major in 1992. In addition to all that, the elections have in common that the polls were very skewed towards Labour and what was supposed to be a mild Labour advantage turned into a substantial Conservative victory.

The convergence of factors into similar maps is not too terribly surprising. It’s not quite as amazing as the 1896 vs 2000 maps, which are the same but for a few states and that the parties switched sides (the now-Republican states having lined up behind William Jennings Bryan, and the now-Democratic states having supported McKinley). It’s nonetheless interesting to note that it is not a strictly American phenomenon. Of course, unlike the Republicans, the Conservatives have an urban presence even if it is their opponents’ current base of support.

The coalfields map is also pretty interesting, though also not alien to the United States. If you look at some of the non-urban places in Red America where the Democrats do unusually well, it’s places like Butte and Pocatello with strong union histories.

Scotland didn’t cost Labour this election, but it’s going to make it difficult for Labour to win majorities in the future.

While Tony Blair and Neil Kinnock argue about who is to blame for the collapse of Labour, a lot of the discussion focuses on Scotland and the decimation-is-too-light-a-word for it. The left wing of the party argues that New Labour killed it, though others say yes but it’s complicated (and that it was more a matter of lousy politics rather than centrist politics). Either way, winning all of Scotland wouldn’t have given Labour a leg up in the existing system.

Even so, it leaves Labour in a very big bind. Labour actually made light gains in England proper, taking more seats from the Conservatives than the Tories took from them. Embracing the SNP as potential coalition partners risks undoing that. But it’s going to be hard to win England proper with a sufficient majority to overcome both Conservative and SNP seats. The best case is what a lot of people thought that they were looking at last week, where they have a minority government without a formal SNP coalition. Unless this past election was a fluke, it looks like the Scotland question has gone from one where Scotland’s exit would greatly hurt Labour to one where it would actually help them.

Another victim of the SNP sweep were the Liberal Democrats, who have historically had a significant presence there and (like Labour and the Tories) is reduced to a single seat. Former party leader Charles Kennedy was among the many tossed out. Other than the SNP, the only party not to lose any seats in Scotland were the Conservatives, who went from one to one.

So what happens now?

For the Labour, it’s mostly about Scotland. Nick Cohen suggests that Labour needs to learn to actually love England. For Conservatives, they’re going to need to sail over some very rough waters with higher expectations than they’ve had up to this point. Even though the seat-count of the government is lower than before, they can’t blame the lack of progress on the LDP.

And for the LDP, The Telegraph’s James Kirkuk argues that history will look more favorably on outgoing leader Nick Clegg than the voters have. Which is a small comfort for those who have lost their job, and who remain members of a party for whom the rationale of its existence is a little hard to nail down. I expect that whichever direction Labour lurches, they will look for space in the other.

{Ed note: This post was updated to add the last section, a version of which had been included in a previous draft and was lost along the way.}