IN THE AFTERMATH of last week's UK election a lot of thought has been devoted to the question of Britain's simple, but imperfect, election system.

While Ireland trundles away with its system of proportional representation - which allows for a much more representative parliament at the expense of longer election counts - the UK has a simple process that yields quick results but unrepresentative outcomes.

The UK's system is designed to yield stable governments, because of how it captures the public mood and inflates it to produce an overwhelming parliamentary majority.

By allowing each constituency to elect one MP - and then basing that on the person with the highest number of votes, rather than the broad consensus of the public - hundreds of marginal constituencies flip between Conservative blue and Labour red based on the general mood of the nation.

This results in parliaments where the leading party tends to have a huge lead in terms of seats, and (usually) enough to govern with a comfortable majority. 

UKIP's sole MP, Douglas Carswell, articulated the system's failings quite well in his acceptance speech. UKIP is a prime example of where the British electoral system of 'first past the post' protects the top two parties at the expense of everyone else. Its candidates came second in dozens of constituencies, but the compartmentalised British constituency system means it emerged with just one MP after winning 12.6% of the vote nationwide. The Green Party managed the same result, winning only one seat, with 3.8% of the vote nationwide.

Compare those with the results of the SNP - who managed 56 seats with barely 1.5 million votes, or 4.7% of the total UK turnout - or even the Democratic Unionist Party, which won 8 seats in Northern Ireland with less than 185,000 votes. With a fifth of UKIP's support, it won eight time as many seats.

A missed opportunity?

The UK did, of course, have an opportunity to change its electoral system only a couple of years ago. In 2011 the public voted in a referendum on adopting the 'Alternative Vote' system - essentially the same as Ireland's, in terms of ranking candidates by order of preference, but with constituencies remaining as single-seaters. In short, the UK would use the same system to elect each MP as Ireland uses to elect its President. The referendum was rejected by over two-to-one.

But with the UK election still fresh in the mind, we thought we'd look into how Ireland's electoral landscape would look if we followed the same system as the UK.

We've decided to look at the results from the local elections, where Ireland's electorate is split into 137 electoral areas within county and city boundaries. This would give us a population much closer to that of the 158-seat Dáil, rather than using the same constituencies as present, which would leave a Dáil of just 40-odd members.

Here's how the 137 boundaries would fall:

Our system added up the votes won by candidates of each party, and compared them against each other to work out which party was, simply, the most popular in each electoral area. Independent candidates were treated as separate one-off candidates and rivals to each other. In order to win a seat, an individual independent would have to outpoll the combined candidates of each other party.

The results were as follows:

Fianna Fáil 54
Fine Gael 52
Sinn Féin 22
Labour 2 (Glencullen-Sandyford, Balbriggan)
Anti-Austerity Alliance 1 (Cork City North-Central)
People Before Profit 1 (Killiney-Shankill)
Independents 5 (Greystones, Killarney, Galway City East, Galway City West, Cork City South-Central)

This is, of course, not exactly how an Irish election would turn out. In a UK-style setting each party would only run one candidate, meaning its total vote would possibly shrink: two candidates may combine to attract a higher 'personal' vote than their party allegiance would otherwise attract. Likewise, independent candidates may club up and support a ringleader, rather than having like-minded people running against each other for a single seat.

And, of course, incumbent TDs weren't running in the local elections - meaning a popular and long-standing member of the Dáil may expect to attract more votes than a lesser-known candidate running from the same political party, and a high-profile independent could pose a bigger threat to the parties than they would otherwise face.

Still, the breakdown shown in our little experiment reveals that Sinn Féin would be the major losers - even though their share of this Imaginary Dáil (16.1%) is almost equal to their share of the vote in the local elections (15.2%).

The big winners are the big rival parties of olde - Fianna Fáil, getting nearly 40% of seats with just 25% of the vote, and Fine Gael turning 24% of the vote into of the seats.

What does this tell us? As far as Ireland goes, not very much. But what it illustrates is that the British system is fundamentally designed to support the two biggest parties and turn the electoral landscape into a direct tug-of-war between them. If you need proof, look at the country that did the most to borrow the same model: the United States.

As long as the UK retains the system it has, it will be virtually impossible for UKIP, the Greens or even the Liberal Democrats to mount a major challenge and make more inroads in the duopoly. And while Labour's traditional support in Scotland veers towards the SNP instead, there's little reason to expect the Tories to be challenged any time soon.