Everyone knows that First Past the Post favours the largest party. At the last Westminster election, Labour managed to turn 34% of the vote into 63% of parliament – a full 29 percentage points more. Thankfully we don’t use this system in Holyrood, but even here the largest party still gets an uplift. In 2011, for instance, the SNP won 54% of the Scottish parliament on 44% of the vote – 10 percentage points more.
The Scottish Parliament is made up of constituency MPs elected under First Past the Post, and regional ‘additional’ members that are supposed to even out the distortions of the constituency results. So why does the Holyrood system still tend to favour larger parties?
After the 2011 Scottish election Professor Sir John Curtice and Dr Martin Steven looked at the results for our report The 2011 Scottish Parliament election In-depth. They found that there are three key features of the system that give rise to this tendency:
A regional, rather than a national, system of proportional representation
Scotland’s 56 additional members are not allocated in proportion to each party’s share of the list vote across the country as a whole. Rather, they are allocated separately in each of eight regions. The typical region contains nine constituency seats and seven regional ones. As a result, a party needs to win just over 1/17th of the vote, or 5.9%, in a region to be sure of winning a seat – and in practice is certainly likely to require more than 5%. Parties that cannot pass this de facto threshold remain unrepresented, leaving more seats to be allocated to other larger parties.
For example, in 2011, both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens struggled to win seats. In winning just over 5% of the vote the Liberal Democrats only managed to secure representation in four regions, leaving their vote elsewhere unrepresented. With only 4.4% of the vote this fate befell the Greens in six regions. Together with the fact that apart from the independent candidate, Margo MacDonald, in Lothian, none of the smaller parties or independent candidates managed to win any seats, despite collectively winning nearly 8% of the list vote across Scotland as a whole, a significant body of votes did not contribute to the election of any candidate, thereby leaving more seats to be allocated to larger parties including, not least, the SNP.
There are too many First Past the Post seats
Additional seats account for fewer than half the seats in all regions. As a result, if a party is particularly successful in winning constituency seats there may be insufficient additional seats for it to be possible to correct fully the disproportionality created by the outcome in the constituencies.
In the Lothians region in 2011, the SNP won eight of the nine constituency seats – and thus half of all the seats in the region – despite winning just over 39% of the list vote. Its proportionate entitlement was seven seats. The ‘extra’ SNP seat would otherwise have been won by the Liberal Democrats who, as a result, failed to secure any representation in the region.
The d’Hondt method favours larger parties
The regional seats are distributed using the d’Hondt method. This method tends to favour larger parties, making it particularly difficult for a party to win its first seat. Alternative methods are available that do not have this property. In particular, the Sainte-Laguë method treats both large and smaller parties equally.
The use of the d’Hondt system clearly favoured the larger parties and made it more difficult for smaller parties to secure representation. Taking the West of Scotland region as an example, both Labour and the SNP would have won one seat less, while both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens would have secured a seat instead of being left without any representation.
West of Scotland Region
For the sake of clarity, votes for smaller parties have been excluded.
Forming a more perfect parliament
Put together, each of these features played some role in generating the disproportionality in 2011. No electoral arrangement is perfect, and if there are improvements to be made, we should not be afraid to make them. While a full upgrade to the ERS’ prefered system, the Single Transferable Vote, is one option. Improvements can be made to the current system by changing the balance of seats, electing members nationally, or using a fairer voting formula. Either way, Scotland should look again at how its parliament is elected. Further reform would help make Holyrood more democratic, more representative, and better able to serve everyone in Scotland.
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