The term 'hung parliament' has been used extensively throughout the British general election campaign. Aoife Blomer explains what it means.
What is a hung parliament?
A hung parliament is one in which no single party has an overall majority, which means no party has more than half of all MPs in the House of Commons.
If this happens, two or more parties may decide that they have enough in common to form a coalition government. Alternatively, another general election may be held in the hope that it delivers a more decisive result.
The chances of a hung parliament in the UK election:
Recent opinion polls have suggested a growing possibility of there being a hung parliament after the UK general election on 6 May.
As a result of boundary changes in the constituencies, the candidates are currently fighting for 650 seats, an increase of four on previous elections. That means an absolute majority would require one party to win 326 seats. If no party wins at least that many seats there would be a hung parliament.
In reality, it is not quite that simple because the Speaker of the House of Commons and his deputies, although members of parliament, do not usually vote.
Also, in the current parliament, there are five Sinn Féin MPs who refuse to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen and as a result are not entitled to a Commons vote.
In the simplest terms, the UK Labour Party will lose its absolute majority if it loses 24 seats and the Conservatives will gain an absolute majority if they gain 116 seats. Any result in between will mean a hung parliament.
What happens if there is a hung parliament?
The incumbent Prime Minister, in this case Gordon Brown, will remain in power until he resigns and may try to stay in government even if his party does not win the largest number of seats.
In 1974, Edward Heath stayed in power for four days after the election trying to put together a coalition, even though Labour had the largest number of seats in parliament.
A party can stay in power without an absolute majority by trying to forge an alliance with a smaller party to create a coalition government, which would usually involve policy concessions and allowing members of the smaller party into the cabinet.
In some countries, instead of forming coalition governments, agreements have been reached with smaller parties to support the government if there is a vote in parliament aimed at forcing an election.
Another possibility is for the biggest party to form a minority government with no agreements with other parties and just try to form majorities in favour of each individual bill as it comes up.
If no party is prepared to go down one of these paths then parliament will be dissolved again and there will be another election, although in effect that is relatively unlikely to happen because two elections so close together would be unpopular and the result would probably be the same.
Are hung parliaments common in the UK?
Hung parliaments are a rarity in the UK because single member districts are used to elect parliament (See 'First Past the Post Voting').
A party will only win a seat if it gets the largest number of votes in a single constituency. That means that parties have to try to appeal to as much of the population of individual constituencies as they can.
Smaller parties can win thousands of votes around the country but still not win a seat. The system makes it much more likely that a single party will win a majority. British politics has traditionally been dominated by two parties (Labour and the Conservatives), although there is evidence of a shift away from that.
History of hung Parliaments in the UK:
There have only been a handful of hung parliaments in the UK.
The most recently elected hung parliament was that following the February 1974 general election, which lasted until another election took place in October of the same year.
In the first of the two elections there was no outright majority. Labour won 301 seats compared with the Conservative Party's 297. Harold Wilson formed a minority government, but it did not last for long, with the October election giving Mr Wilson a slim majority of just three seats.
Prior to that, the last hung parliament had occurred following the election of 1929, with Ramsey MacDonald's Labour Party winning 287 seats to Stanley Baldwin's Conservatives' 260 and David Lloyd George's Liberals' 59.
Hung parliaments can also arise when slim government majorities are eroded by bye-election defeats and defection of MPs to opposition parties. This happened in 1996 to the Conservative government of John Major (1990–97) and in 1978 to the Labour government of James Callaghan (1976–79).
