Andy Burnham has announced a national commission on electoral reform, and made a commitment to put changing the voting system in Labour’s next general election manifesto.

The implication seems to be that he wants to enact reform without a referendum. That aspiration is understandable. The UK last held a referendum on the voting system in 2011, when the coalition government put the Alternative Vote (AV) system on the ballot paper. As research has shown, reformers can fairly argue that AV was defeated then, at least in part, by widespread misinformation. Referendums don’t have to be like that: notably, New Zealand has done much better. But the scars of 2011 run deep.

At the same time, securing legitimacy for a new electoral system is vital. We do not want the system to become a political football, kicked around by successive governments in response to their particular needs. Something like that has happened in Italy over recent decades, and it harms confidence in democracy.

So far as possible, such fundamental rules of the game as the voting system should be decided not by the players of the game – politicians – and far less by one of the sides in that game – the government of the day – but by the political community as a whole. The standard way for generating consent in a democracy is through elections, based on........

© The Conversation