2024 at the ERS: Our research making the case for democratic reform

Each year we write an Annual Report which looks back at our achievements across the last 12 months, and explains how our team have campaigned towards securing our vision for a democracy fit for the 21st Century.

By using our voice in the media, developing in-depth research and policy, campaigning and influencing and making the case online we’ve led the charge for reform in 2024.

Ian Simpson, Research Officer:

“Across this year the research team has continued to conduct independent, in-depth and timely research into the state of our political system. Conducting high-quality research is key to achieving our strategic goals as it provides the evidence base for our policy and campaigns. Research was central to our work on the General Election and provided the basis for our media and digital campaigning. We had prepared for the General Election by mapping the changes that had occurred to the UK parliamentary constituencies following the boundary reviews. This ensured we had a thorough understanding of the electoral landscape prior to the election and enabled us to produce interesting data during the campaign and after the results were announced”
At the start of the year the research and communications teams together drew up a new messaging guide for use by the Democracy sector. This was the final thread of the messaging research project which took place in 2023 in which we engaged multiple research agencies and tested messaging on PR on the general public. We shared this messaging guide with National Campaign for PR early this year and the messaging we created was used during the general election.

In May there were local council elections in many places in England, and once again we highlighted places that saw highly disproportional outcomes, with voters failing to be represented properly. We renewed our call to replace FPTP with STV for English local elections, matching the tried and tested system used for Scottish local elections, which produces outcomes that much more closely match how people have voted in their local area.

There were also Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections across England and Wales and a number of elections for directly-elected mayors, including high profile contests in Greater London, Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Tees Valley. These were the first set of PCC elections held under the First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system after the previous Conservative government scrapped the use of the Supplementary Vote (SV) system for PCCs and elected mayors as part of the Elections Act 2022. We highlighted how this reduced the mandates of the mayors and PPCs who were elected and called for FPTP for mayors to be scrapped. We also gave evidence to the Greater London Authority elections committee on the impact of using FPTP for these elections.

In May this year we also launched our report Pursuing Parity: Examining Gender Quotas Across Electoral Systems, with a webinar in May for our members and supporters as well as others in the sector. The report laid out how the electoral system can impact the diversity of an elected body and how gender quotas can work in conjunction with different electoral systems to produce more gender-balanced legislatures. This piece of research found that elected bodies which use proportional representation are more likely to have larger numbers of women in their elected bodies than countries which use majoritarian systems.

With the anticipated change in Government came an increase in conversations around the second chamber and ERS published our views on the way to an elected second chamber in our report, Unfinished Business: Routes to an Elected Second Chamber. With the first steps towards Lords reform passing through parliament this year in the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill we have been using our work on options for reform to inform and press the case for stage two.

Following the Electoral Commission estimates of the number of people missing from or incorrectly registered on the electoral rolls, we used census data across England, Scotland and Wales to estimate the numbers of eligible voters missing, or inaccurately registered. This work was used to further our campaign for automatic voter registration (AVR), highlighting to MPs, policy makers and the general public, the vast numbers of eligible voters who could be enrolled under AVR.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.