The most immediate effects are felt by individual citizens — in how they vote, how they feel about voting, and how connected they feel to the government that results.

Satisfaction and legitimacy take a huge hit. Research consistently shows that voters in democracies that use more inclusive voting systems report higher satisfaction with democracy — even when their preferred party isn’t in government. This finding points to something important: what people want from democracy is not just to win, but to feel that the outcome was fair and that their voice counted for something. This willingness of people whose side lost to accept the result as legitimate and trust that the system is working is known as “loser’s consent”. FPTP erodes this consent, because losing voters can see clearly that the outcome doesn’t reflect the actual distribution of political views in the country. A government that half the country considers illegitimate is governing on a weakened foundation — and that fragility affects everyone, not just the losers.

Sincere voting is penalized. Voters who support parties unlikely to win in their riding face a dilemma that no-one should have to: vote sincerely and waste your vote, or vote “strategically” and try to elect someone you only consider the “lesser evil” — not someone you actually support. The evidence shows that this dynamic suppresses both turnout and authentic political expression. Voters in this position vote less often than others, and when they do vote, they are less likely to vote for the candidate they actually prefer. This is not a personal failing — it is a rational response to a system that punishes honest voting.

Many voters have no direct contact with government. Voters in ridings not held by a government-party representative have no elected member who can carry their concerns directly into cabinet or the government caucus. Opposition members can raise issues in the chamber — and they do — but they have no seat at the table where decisions are actually made. For a large share of the electorate in any given election, the link between casting a ballot and influencing government is effectively broken.

The distortions of First Past the Post don’t just affect voters — they shape the parties themselves, often in ways that make them less effective, less representative, and less healthy as democratic institutions.

Parties atrophy where they don’t compete. When a party has little realistic chance of winning seats in a region, it has little incentive to invest there — no local offices, no serious candidate recruitment, no sustained effort to listen to and engage with voters. Over time, the feedback loop between party and community breaks down entirely. But the consequences go further than poor communication. Parties that don’t build a genuine presence in the areas they lose also lose the ability to raise donations, develop future candidates, and attract local talent there and they become blind to the concerns of those areas. The organizational roots that might allow a party to understand and respond to a community simply never grow. Parties become more centralized and more remote — organizations that talk at voters in winnable places, rather than listening to citizens everywhere.

No-hope candidacies waste everyone’s resources. Every larger party, and most smaller parties, are effectively forced to field candidates in ridings they have no realistic chance of winning. This consumes money, volunteer energy, and organizational capacity that could be put to better use. It also makes candidate recruitment harder and less rewarding — few capable people want to invest heavily in a campaign they are almost certain to lose. Under other voting systems, every candidate would stand in a genuinely competitive position. That would make it easier to attract strong candidates, give local party members real reason to engage seriously with voters, and direct resources where they can actually make a difference.

Ironically, this is even bad for good politicians. The representatives most at risk under First Past the Post are often not the weakest performers — they are capable, experienced members who unfortunately happen to sit in swing ridings. When the balance of power shifts, parties often lose some of their most experienced and community-connected members all at once — institutional knowledge that they may never rebuild.

Parties appealing to voters with minority political views are structurally penalized. Voters with minority views may represent a significant number of people, but if they’re spread across the province or country, the parties they support may win only a fraction of the seats their numbers warrant — or none at all. These voters are effectively unrepresented, and the parties they support are denied the resources, visibility, and credibility that they need to play an effective role in the public conversation.

When the connection between votes and representation is distorted, the policies that result are distorted too — in ways that favour the few over the many, the short term over the long, and competitive (swing) ridings over the rest of the province.

“Loyal” ridings get the goodies. Governments have a direct and well-documented incentive to disproportionately direct spending, infrastructure investment, and policy attention toward those ridings that vote for their MPs. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s simply a rational response to electoral incentives, and researchers have documented it in Canadian federal and provincial spending patterns. Every voter outside those loyal ridings is, in effect, subsidizing a system that pays more attention to someone else (see Jacques (2021) Distributive Politics in Canada: The Case of Infrastructure Spending in Rural and Suburban Districts).

Policy whiplash undermines long-term planning. Majority governments elected with a minority of votes can enact sweeping policy changes that most voters opposed — and the next government can reverse them entirely. In areas like energy, healthcare, and climate policy, this kind of pendulum governance is not just frustrating — it is genuinely costly, as institutions, businesses, and communities are repeatedly asked to reorganize around shifting priorities, and businesses that invest based on the policy in effect at one time can see their investment wiped out when the government changes.

Under-heard communities are under-served. Communities whose support is geographically dispersed — rather than concentrated in winnable ridings — are chronically under-served by government. This includes many rural communities, linguistic minorities, Indigenous communities outside concentrated areas, people in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, and others. The problem is not simply that they are outnumbered. It is that they are under-heard: without a representative who genuinely understands their situation and has a personal stake in advocating for them, their needs rarely surface in the policy conversations that matter. Being heard is the prerequisite for being served.

“Short-term“ism crowds out long-term thinking. Governments focused on the next election tend to favour visible, quick-return spending over structural investment. The incentives built into First Past the Post consistently push against the kind of long-horizon policy that complex challenges — infrastructure, climate, healthcare — actually require.

The effects described above are serious on their own terms. But they also accumulate into something larger: a democratic culture that is less open, less trusting, less engaged, and less capable of addressing the challenges we face together.

Public discourse narrows. When significant political perspectives are systematically under-represented in legislatures, media coverage follows. Journalists and commentators focus on the parties and positions that hold power; ideas without a visible legislative presence receive less airtime, less rigorous examination, and less development as policy proposals. This narrows the range of options society actually considers — not because those ideas lack public support, but because the electoral system filtered them out before they reached the chamber. The result is a public conversation that is poorer than it should be.

More proportional systems are associated with better outcomes — for everyone. The evidence here is striking and worth taking seriously. Countries with more proportional voting systems consistently rank higher on the UN Human Development Index, on measures of social trust, on press freedom, and on democratic quality indices such as the V-Dem index. This is a correlation, not a simple causal claim, and proportional voting is not the only factor in play. But the pattern is consistent across decades and across countries — and it suggests that how a democracy translates votes into power has consequences that reach well beyond the ballot box and directly into the quality of life of its citizens.

Legislatures that don’t reflect their electorates make worse decisions. Proportional systems are consistently associated with more diverse representation — in terms of gender, professional background, ethnicity, and life experience. This matters not just as a question of fairness, but as a practical matter: legislatures that look more like the societies they represent are more likely to address the full range of challenges those societies face, and more likely to develop policies that work for a broader range of people.

Vulnerability to takeover by those on the fringes. Our current system does not keep comparatively fringe political views out — in fact, it can give them a path to absolute power. One approach is what’s called internal capture: under First Past the Post, motivated minorities can capture a major party’s internal nomination processes and, once that party wins power, exploit the leverage of over-representation to shift policy dramatically — well beyond what most of their own voters actually wanted. This is not a hypothetical: it is what has unfolded in the United States over recent decades. Another is to set up a new party and then reap the disproportionate rewards when your main competitor folds. This arguably happened in BC in 2024 when the centrist BC United Party folded mid-election, encouraging all its supporters to vote for the further right BC Conservative Party. Or consider what Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Reform Party, said recently: “First Past the Post can be your enemy, but there comes an inversion point at which it becomes your friend.” Proportional systems tend to make more fringe views visible and bounded, subject to the scrutiny and coalition-building pressures that legislative participation requires. That transparency is, in practice, a more reliable check on fringe influence than exclusion from parliament.