Scotland’s Voting System The Additional Member System

How does it work? The Scottish Parliament elects 129 MSPs in total 73 of these MSPs are elected by the 73 constituencies in exactly the same way as MPs are elected using the First Past the Post system The remaining 56 are elected by The Regional Party List System So there are two types of MSP – Constituency MSPs and List MSPs (73+56 = 129 MSPs in total.)

The Regional Party List System

For this part, Scotland is divided up into 8 large constituencies or Regions, each with several seats in them These Regions are the same as the ones used for electing Euro MEPs In these Regions, people cast their vote for the PARTY they want The seats in the Regions are then shared out according to the proportion of the vote won by each Party. Before the election each party will draw up a list of MSPs in each Region. If the party wins three of the Regional seats, the first three names on their List become ‘List MSPs’

Advantages of the Additional Member System

It takes at least some of the unfairness out of the system – especially for the smaller parties as the results for the 2003 election show… PARTY CONST REGN TOT CON 3 15 18 LAB 46 4 50 LD 13 17 SNP 9 27 Greens 7 SSP 6 Ind 2

The FPTP part keeps a strong link between each constituency and their Constituency MSP In Scotland the voting system has led to two coalition governments which have been quite stable It also means that TWO parties are making policy instead of one so more of Scotland’s voters views are being taken into account Because voters have TWO votes instead of one, they have been ‘giving a chance’ to parties they might not have picked before – e.g. the Scottish Socialists and the Green Party

People who might not have bothered to vote under FPTP because their party had ‘no chance’ are more likely to go out and vote because their List vote will definitely count for something parties can make sure that groups who are underrepresented can be boosted by putting more of them on the Regional Lists near the top of the Lists

Disadvantages of the Additional Member System

the List MSPs are picked by the parties – the voter only votes for the party not the person - so the people of a Region might not know much about their List MSPs List MSPs don’t have a constituency to represent. This has already caused ‘turf wars’ in the Scottish Parliament- i.e. arguments between List and Constituency MSPs about who should be doing what

It could, in the future, lead to coalitions where the two (or more) main parties don’t co-operate so well and they may fall out a lot causing frequent elections One of the coalition partners may be quite small but will have a lot of influence as part of the government – is this fair in a democracy for a small party to have so much influence?