“Better than Westminster” is still not proper democracy

Today, millions of Scots go to the polls to elect our new Scottish Parliament. The polls are still varying quite wildly, and we’re not taking a side on any particular party (though see our Magazine article last week for some of the Common Weal ideas that have made it into the manifestos).

We do, however, encourage you to vote and have your say. Even an amusingly voided ballot paper is still a valid vote (just don’t end up accidentally casting a valid one that you didn’t mean to!)

One thing does concern us in this election, though, and that’s the number of seats the largest parties stand to gain in relation to their actual vote share.

We all know the argument against the voting system in the UK elections. The First Past the Post system means that a candidate can win a seat based not on winning a majority of votes but merely more votes than any other candidate, and a seat has the same amount of power if won by a margin of one vote as if won by a margin of ten thousand. The smallest vote share that resulted in an MP being elected in recent history was just 24.5%, a record set in 2015. Keir Starmer won an absolutely thumping near-supermajority of 63% of the seats in Westminster based on just 33.7% of the total number of votes cast. An absolute travesty of democracy.

But while the Scottish Additional Member System of voting is better than Westminster’s, it still cannot be said to be “good”. The main debate in the last few weeks has been whether the SNP will win a majority of seats in Parliament. However, the polls have consistently put their vote share well below the 50% of votes required to achieve this in a fully proportional and fair system. For example, in one recent poll, it is projected that the SNP would win 62 seats based on 39% of the vote, but a more proportional calculation would suggest that the vote share would return just 41 seats based on that share of the vote.

The result is that the SNP are likely to win more power than they are due based on their vote share, and many or perhaps all of the other parties will see their power diminished despite their share.

This is largely the result of the details of the system, where more than half of the seats in the Scottish Parliament are, like Westminster, determined by that same First Past The Post system that returns the unfair results down south, which means that the List seats cannot adequately correct for the skew in proportionality that the FPTP seats create.

This could be fixed. The Scottish Government could reform itself to be more democratically sound.

One thing it probably can’t do without permission from Westminster is change the system overall. Moving to the Single Transferable Vote system that Wales has moved to would likely require amendments to the Scotland Act. But we shouldn’t do that in any case. STV is fairer than FPTP, but it still favours larger parties. Without going into too much detail, if your STV ward has, say, three seats in it, that system will tend to favour the three largest parties while locking out everyone else. Scotland has more than three substantial political parties and many more smaller ones.

So if we limit ourselves merely to reforms of the AMS system, we could instead take inspiration from the similar system used in German Federal Elections.

The voting system in Germany is essentially the same as Scotland, but several different choices are made that make their system much fairer.

The first is that more List seats are elected than FPTP seats, so that the Bundestag is already much more fairly balanced, but they used to go beyond this, too. Until last year, the number of List politicians elected wasn’t fixed, but was actively expanded so that the proportionality is maintained. This did have the effect of finely balanced elections, resulting in a large number of additional politicians (over 100 “overhang” politicians were added in 2021, and they ran out of room in the Chamber for them all, which led to the recent reforms). Just because it no longer worked for Germany, though, doesn’t mean this isn’t an option for Scotland.

Another smaller change is in the system by which List seats are applied. Again, without going into the maths of the d’Hondt Method vs the Sainte-Laguë Method, the short way to think about it is that in a finely balanced election, Scotland would favour giving the final seat to a large party and Germany to a small one.

One thing we wouldn’t change, though, is Scotland’s lack of a threshold. In Germany, if you win 5% of the vote, you get 5% of the seats. But if you get 4.9% of the vote, you win zero seats.

Scotland doesn’t have a formal threshold, but our small electoral regions with just seven seats each mean that there is an effective threshold – parties typically need to win between 5% and 7% of the vote in a region to win a seat. Scotland could therefore consider combining all of our Regions into a single national list vote, which would allow smaller parties to get enough votes to win a seat. There are 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament so it stands to reason that if a candidate or party can win even a little under 1% of the votes nationally, they should earn representation in our Parliament.

That last change in particular would dramatically open up options for Scotland. Many more candidates and parties could stand without voters being told or deciding that their vote would be “wasted”, and the even higher chance of minority or coalition governments would mean a Parliament that needs to work together collegiately rather than confrontationally, as Holyrood has increasingly devolved into.

This election, make sure you cast your vote as best as you are able. By next week, we’ll know what shape the Government will be in for the next five years, and we’ll start to have an idea of what it will do for the people of Scotland. Here at Common Weal, our work will begin to make sure that the Government works for All of Us.