Currently, a variety of electoral systems operate in the United Kingdom. The best known, First-past-the-post (FPTP), is used for parliamentary elections to Westminster and for local elections in England. However, the Scottish and Welsh parliaments use different mechanisms, which I thought were worth exploring.
Scotland uses an Additional Member system, resulting in a mixture of constituency MSPs and ‘additional members’. The constituency MSPs initially covered the same area as a Westminster MP, but this changed in 2005 when the number of seats in the United Kingdom Parliament from Scotland was cut from 73 to 59 as a result of boundary reforms. Scotland wanted to keep 73 MSPs, so the constituencies ceased to overlap. These seats return MSPs on the basis of a FPTP system.
However, on top of the 73 constituency MSPs, there are 56 additional members who are elected on a regional basis. Thus, each elector has two votes, one for a constituency and the other for a region. For this purpose, Scotland, is divided into eight regions, each of which returns seven additional members.
In the constituency seats, voters select an individual who represents a party (Independents can stand, but have not normally been successful). In the regional vote, people vote exclusively for a party which will have an advertised list of candidates for all the places available. Constituency candidates may also be on the regional list, so parties can ensure that their favoured people have a high chance of being elected. The additional members are determined by the D’Hondt system of proportional representation.
Victor D’Hondt, who devised this eponymous system, was a Belgian lawyer, so perhaps, other than Hercule Poirot and Tintin, the most famous Belgian. He developed it to deal with political instability and perceived unfairness in the Belgian electoral process. FPTP was favouring the Catholic and Conservative Party against the liberals and emerging socialists, while also distorting the balance between Belgian’s different linguistic communities. His proposals were not implemented immediately - he devised them in 1878, but they were only accepted in the two years before his death in 1901.
D’Hondt, while a proportional system, still favours larger parties to some degree, but it usually makes it hard for a single party to win an outright majority. In the case of Scotland, the SNP is usually in coalition with the Greens, although historically it has also shared power with the Lib Dems and even won outright at its high point of popularity.
