The Liberal Democrats: One Member-One Vote

Abstract

The shift towards the selection of leaders in all-member ballots in Britain was pioneered by the Liberal Party in 1976. One member-one vote (OMOV) became a key feature of the successor party, the Liberal Democrats, from 1988 onwards. To this day, the Liberal Democrats remain the only major British party to use a ‘pure’ form of OMOV, undiluted by weighted votes in an electoral college or preliminary parliamentary ballots. This preference reflected the Liberal Democrats’ ethos of participatory democracy and was a natural development in a party (including its predecessors) that never won more than 23 seats in a general election between 1935 and 1992. The parliamentary wing was much weaker than in the Labour and Conservative parties, and consequently the extra-parliamentary wing enjoyed a higher status.