How does the UK electoral system work?
The UK elects 650 new MPs to the House of Commons, comparable to our House of Representatives.
The country is divided into 650 electoral districts, where each party puts forward one candidate for one seat. Independent parties could also compete for the seat. The candidate with the most votes will win the seat.
That system -‘first past the post‘ in the jargon – strongly favors larger fish. Therefore, Britain has historically been dominated by two parties: the Conservative Party, nicknamed the Tories, and the social democratic Labor Party.
Coalition governments are rare, although David Cameron’s Conservative Party had to govern jointly with the socially liberal Liberal Democrats and Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, had to rely on the tolerable support of Northern Ireland’s Protestant DUP.
This construction remains very unusual in England. Small parties do play an important role in the election itself. As well as the LibDems and DUP, there are also the Greens, Scottish nationalists and Welsh Social Democrats. Apart from that, there was also the new right-wing populist figure of the British Reformation, Nigel Farage, who was the biggest supporter of Brexit at the time.
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