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The better points are anyway and as expected from @ailsa_henderson and @MalcH but since the Scotsman did not afford the space to print my rant about how the Holyrood system is NOT DESIGNED TO PREVENT SINGLE PARTY GOVERNMENT, here goes.
A thread. https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/how-british-empire-demise-may-point-way-ahead-scottish-independence-referendum-stand-3058502
A thread. https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/how-british-empire-demise-may-point-way-ahead-scottish-independence-referendum-stand-3058502
1. you have to come from a political culture that had never experienced anything else than first-past-the-post before devolution to come up with the trope that the Holyrood voting system was designed to prevent majority government.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2016-scotland-36205187
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2016-scotland-36205187
2. No electoral system is designed to prevent single party government.
If you win a majority of votes you get a majority of seats. That's called proportional representation.
If you win a majority of votes you get a majority of seats. That's called proportional representation.
3. What the additional member system in Scotland was maybe designed was to make it more difficult for a party to translate a plurality of votes into a majority of seats, which is what FPTP is designed to do.
4. The fact that did not work in 2011 when the SNP managed to turn 45.4% of the constituency and 44% of the regional list vote into 53.5% of seats was neither force nor fluke but tells us something about how half-hearted the move towards proportional representation actually was.
5. It is not that some systems are proportional and others majoritarian, but rather a continuum where Westminster FPTP is the least and e.g. the Dutch system is the most proportional.
The Scottish system is somewhere in the middle.
The Scottish system is somewhere in the middle.
6. It's key flaw can be understood when comparing with the German mixed member system, of which it is a slightly more majoritarian derivative.
7. In both Scotland and Germany you get two votes, a constituency vote and a list vote. First big difference, in Germany exactly half of the seats are constituency and half are list seats, whereas in Scotland 73 of the 129 are constituency seats, i.e. 56.5%.
8. In both cases, constituency and list votes are balanced against each other within regions - in Germany that means each state has a certain number of seats and for each state half of these are constituency seats.
9. But, and this is what the Scottish system does not do, the German system allocates seat distributions purely based on the regional list votes.
10. Example: in Rheinland-Pfalz, the CDU won in 2017 34.8% of list votes. But on the basis of 40.3% of the constituency vote, they won 14 of the 15 constituencies in the state. And that is 46.6% of all available seats (15 contituency + 15 list seats).
11. What happens then is that the CDU gets their 14 seats, but these can only amount to 35% or so of the total. What then happens is that 40 instead of 30 seats are allocated to the state, and the extra seats are used to allocate seats proportionally to all parties over 5%.
12. The evident problem here is that this increases the size of the parliament, and the more when only one party remains big and all others are small-ish. The CDU wins almost all constituency seats in five German states, always on the basis of just 40% of votes.
13. The Scottish system does not do that. The SNP would have a majority if it won 65 of the 73 constituency seats, and whether it does so on 45% or 55% of the votes does not make a difference.
14. The regional list vote percentages are used to allocate those seats while taking the constituency results into account. That does mean when the SNP wins all 8 Glasgow constituencies it does not gain any regional seats, but those are still more than its regional share.
15. Not sure whether those designing this system were aware of the fact that it does retain a non-trivial majoritarian element, by rewarding a large party when this party is facing fragmented opposition.
16. When that happens in Germany, the size of parliament gets blown out of proportions. If it happens in Scotland, the electoral system instead has a good chance to manufacture a majority out of a plurality.
