When the Scottish Parliament was created, it was built to be different to Westminster. A system designed to reflect how all Scots voted, not just who comes first in each area.

Scotland uses what is called the Additional Member System. You get two votes. One for a local MSP, decided by First Past the Post – just like down in Westminster. And one for a party, used to top up the result so Parliament better reflects how people voted. As people can feel forced to vote tactically under First Past the Post, the system tries to get parliament to match how people vote in the second, party ballot.

In total, there are 129 MSPs. But here is the key detail: 73 are elected by first past the post, and only 56 from regional lists.

First Past the Post still distorts Scottish politics

First Past the Post is a crude voting system. Candidates can win a seat even if the majority didn’t vote for them. The same share of the vote can see one MP lose their seat while a neighbour celebrates a victory. And millions of votes can end up making no difference at all.

We already see this clearly at Westminster, where the UK-wide Labour party won a landslide (63.2%) of the seats in 2024, on a third of the vote (33.7%). In Scotland, Scottish Labour won 35.3% of the vote and a whopping 64.9% of Scottish MPs.

Thankfully we would never see a result like this in the Scottish Parliament, as the Additional Member System works to even out results that ignore the will of the Scottish people. But here is where the balance matters, because the more seats decided by First Past the Post, the harder it is for the regional lists to correct unfair results.

The Additional Member System can be designed on a spectrum. Do you have two thirds First Past the Post and one third List? Or closer to half and half? The more First Past the Post seats you have, the less proportional the system becomes. The Scottish Parliament’s 73:56 split means the majority of seats are decided with First Past the Post.

When votes and seats don’t quite match

This shows up in real elections like 2011. The SNP won 44% of the list vote and 45% across the constituencies. But this gave them 69 seats in total – 53% of the total. It’s nowhere near a Westminster-style results, but it is still nearly 10 percentage points off.

That is not as wildly disproportionate as First Past the Post alone would have been. The SNP won 53 of the 73 First Past the Post constituencies in this election, nearly three quarters of the available seats on fewer than half the votes.

Smaller parties, meanwhile, rely heavily on the list system to gain representation. And when there are not enough list seats, that representation is squeezed.

In the Lothians, 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 result is a Parliament that is far better at representing voters than Westminster, but still not fully reflective of Scotland.

A simple fix that would make a big difference

While I’ve previously highlighted the problems with the way seats are allocated and the impact of regional rather than national top up lists, the solution to the problem of too many First Past the Post seats is not complicated.

Increase the number of list seats. Reduce the number of first past the post constituencies.

All you need is to shift the balance to closer to half and half, to allow the “top-up” part of the system to actually do its job. You reduce the distortions caused by constituency results, but keep the benefit of each area having a single go-to MSP. And you bring seats closer in line with votes.

Other countries using similar systems already do this. In places like Germany and New Zealand, list seats play a much larger role in balancing the outcome. That is why their parliaments tend to reflect how people vote more closely.

Voters in the 1997 devolution referendum were voting on a promise of a parliament that was not like Westminster. That promise was delivered, but we can shift the balance further towards Scottish voters.

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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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Scotland’s Parliament has always been better at representing the political makeup of Scotland than Westminster. A parliament where votes mattered more, where power was shared, and where the political map reflected how people actually voted.

The regional list system is the way this happens. It balances out the warping effect of the constituency results and corrects the unfairness. But the way we count those regional votes matters just as much as the fact we have them.

Right now, Scotland uses the D’Hondt method to allocate regional seats. There is another option, Sainte-Laguë, that would do a better job of matching seats to votes. For the voter, the process would be exactly the same as it is now, but the results would be a better match to how Scotland voted.

How D’Hondt and Sainte-Laguë work

Named after their inventors, D’Hondt and Sainte-Laguë are ways of sharing out seats between parties. Each region elects a group of representatives. To decide who they are, they count up how many votes each party gets and the party with the most votes gets the first seat. Each time a party wins a seat, its total number of votes is divided by a number. The party with the biggest remaining number gets the next seat, and the process repeats.

The difference is the number we divide by. With D’Hondt, we divide by 1, then 2, then 3, and so on. This means big parties stay near the front of the queue for longer. With Sainte-Laguë, we divide by 1, then 3, then 5, then 7. That gives smaller parties a fairer chance.

D’Hondt’s method favours the biggest parties

While D’Hondt’s method is far fairer than First Past the Post, in practice, D’Hondt often over-rewards parties that have already done well in constituencies. That weakens the purpose of the regional seats, which are meant to balance things out.

You can see this clearly in Scottish Parliament history. In 2011, the SNP won a slim majority on 44% of the vote. That result was driven by constituency success, but D’Hondt limited how much the regional list could correct the imbalance. 

What Sainte-Laguë would change

A change to Sainte-Laguë’s method would spread seats more evenly and makes sure regional votes do what voters expect them to do. Countries like Norway, Sweden and New Zealand use Sainte-Laguë or close versions of it. These are stable democracies with strong parliaments and high public trust.

Sainte-Laguë would mean that the regional lists would do a better job at balancing out the distorting effect of the first Past the Post constituencies, and reduce the gap between the vote share and seat share of the bigger parties.

In 2011, polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice looked at what happened in the West of Scotland region, and what could have happened if we had used Sainte-Lague.

Source: The 2011 Scottish Parliament election In-depth Prof John Curtice & Dr Martin Steven. For the sake of clarity, votes for smaller parties have been excluded.

A small change with a big impact

This is not a radical redesign. It is a technical fix that honours the spirit of devolution.

Scotland chose a proportional parliament because it wanted cooperation, diversity and fairness. The Sainte-Laguë method fits that vision better than D’Hondt ever has.

If we care about making every vote count, we should care about how we count them.

Sometimes democracy improves not through grand reforms, but through getting the details right.

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As we approach the next Scottish parliamentary election, there’s a familiar narrative creeping into the conversation: that the system of proportional representation used in Holyrood is somehow ‘designed to stop a majority.’ It’s a catchy line, but it’s thinking about it upside down.

Saying that Scotland’s parliament is designed to stop a majority is like saying flat shoes are designed to stop you being tall. The shoes don’t subtract inches; they just don’t add them like heels do.

What the system actually does

Scotland uses the Additional Member System, or AMS, a mix of First Past the Post constituencies and regional lists. It’s not about blocking a party from winning outright. Instead, it doesn’t give out the kind of artificial boost that we saw in 2024 in Westminster, where a party with 34 percent of the vote took 63 percent of the seats.

That happens in First Past the Post systems like Westminster, where the rules favour parties that can narrowly win a lot of seats.

It’s important to note, though, that AMS isn’t perfectly neutral. It gives a modest lift to larger parties and those that do best in the constituencies. In 2011, the SNP benefitted from this, turning 44% of the vote into a slim majority at Holyrood. Current polling does show that SNP will benefit even more in 2026 from this winner bonus. This could be addressed with a minor change in the way votes are counted from D’Hondt to Saint Langue and a better balance between the constituency MSPs and regional MSPs.

Inverting the “designed to stop a majority” idea

When we frame Scotland’s AMS as a mechanism to “stop” anything, we misunderstand both its intent and its effect. AMS doesn’t prevent parties from winning if they genuinely earn it. It simply keeps the translation of votes to seats more proportional, more fair, and less chaotic than First Past the Post.

We can watch the results unfold with the knowledge that a majority is never off the table. What matters is how voters show up, which parties connect, and which messages resonate. The system shapes outcomes gently – it doesn’t dictate them.

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