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Parliamentary Constituencies

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The Electoral System in Britain

Abstract

Determining the precise boundaries of parliamentary constituencies across the United Kingdom, and therefore the number of voters in each, is a matter of very great importance in electoral affairs. A healthy parliamentary democracy must aspire in its elections not only to ‘one person, one vote’, but also to the representative principle of ‘one vote, one value’. If, as a result of constant shifts in population, one constituency comes to contain 101 492 voters, whereas another one has only 42 845, then the combined political representation of these constituencies is contradicting a very basic tenet of electoral equality. These numbers were in fact those in the constituencies of the Isle of Wight and in Surbiton respectively at the time of the 1992 general election. Such wide divergences between the sizes of the electorates in different constituencies across the United Kingdom have been far from uncommon at recent general elections (see the table on pages 114–15).

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Notes and References

  1. Source: Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Electoral Statistics 1992 (HMSO, 1992, Series EL No. 19), p. 2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College, University of London, USA

    Robert Blackburn (Reader in Public Law)

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  1. Robert Blackburn
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© 1995 Robert Blackburn

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Blackburn, R. (1995). Parliamentary Constituencies. In: The Electoral System in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24090-6_4

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