Coverage of elections down in England can often give the impression that results which are wildly different from the way people vote is just a fact of nature, or at most a strange quirk of the voting system, rather than a political choice.
We saw that with the general election in 2024 and the local elections they have just had. But up here in Scotland, the decision was made at the founding of the Scottish Parliament that Holyrood should be Scotland in miniature, with the share of MSPs a party holds in direct relationship with their share of popular support.
Since its inception, Holyrood has used the Additional Member System (AMS) to elect Members of the Scottish Parliament. Voters get two ballot papers, one for their constituency, which is elected using Westminster’s First Past the Post (FPTP) system, and the other for regional representation, elected using the closed list system. The system is designed to make the final shape of Holyrood broadly mirror the votes cast across the country on the regional ballots.
2026 Holyrood Election Results
As the results show, the SNP are the largest party once again. Their sweep of the First Past the Post constituency seats means that they didn’t need to pick up regional seats. The opposite is true for the Scottish Greens, Scottish Labour, Conservatives and Reform UK, who didn’t do so well in the constituencies and needed regional representation to make their share of MSPs closer to their share of the vote.
But the flaws inherent in First Past the Post that allowed this sweep of the constituency seats on 38.2% of the vote, makes it impossible for the List seats to properly make up the difference.
In fact, the result was the most disproportional in the history of the Scottish Parliament. This can be measured with the political scientists Loosemore and Hanby’s Deviation from Vote score (DV Score): the lower the number, the closer the result to how we voted. This election saw a score of 17.8, while the average across the first 6 Holyrood elections was 10.7.
The election also saw the highest ever over-representation of the largest party. The SNP was over-represented by 17.8 percentage points, while the average over-representation of the largest party across the first 6 Holyrood elections was 8.4 points. This was also the first time only one party had an overall seat share bigger than their List vote share.
Even with these records being broken, the results are still more proportional than every equivalent score at the seven UK General Elections in Scotland held between 2001 & 2024.
As is the norm for the Scottish Parliament, no majority was received by any one party. As a result, it is likely that the SNP will install a minority government and continuously work with opposition MSPs from the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, Scottish Greens, and potentially even the Conservatives to pass key bills.
What if Scotland had First Past the Post?
If the result were decided only using Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system, the SNP would have a huge parliamentary majority. Not because the majority of Scottish voters voted for them but because First Past the Post rewards coming first in enough places rather than winning overall support.
The SNP won 38.2% of the constituency votes, and 78% of constituency seats.
The consequences of this system are playing out in front of us. In Westminster, the Labour government in 2024 received two thirds of the parliamentary seats on only a third of the national vote share. Millions of voters were left without meaningful representation.
As we’ve seen AMS doesn’t eliminate these distorted results entirely – two thirds of the seats at Holyrood are still elected using First Past the Post – but the regional lists act as shock absorbers for these random results produced under First Past the Post.
Minority government is the system working
As mentioned, having ‘no clear majority’ is something not easily understood in Westminster but in Scotland – and Wales – it is the norm. This is because proportional voting systems do not gloss over reality and pretend that the general public are entirely unified in their political opinions.
As Holyrood uses a system that accurately reflects the way people vote, coalition and cooperation agreements in Edinburgh are the norm, and the result is a different kind of politics. Leaders are expected to work with their colleagues across the political spectrum. They negotiate and build agreement.
When compared to the government in Westminster, the difference is noticeable. Whilst the Labour Party won a huge majority, they have always struggled with legitimacy because they did not possess the support of the majority of the nation.
England’s growing mismatch
These results in Scotland are all the more important now as England is changing. The two-party system no longer exists, five-party politics looks to be there to stay. However, the voting system hasn’t caught up.
If we refuse to recognise that First Past the Post cannot keep up with these changes in voting patterns then our parliaments in Westminster will be even more random and governments will rely on even smaller shares of the vote and be even more fragile.
Scotland sets a different standard; voters have a range of views, and their government reflects that diverse range. The responsibility is on the politicians to work together in the best interests of the entire population, not to play one part of the country off another or claim a mandate that was never actually given.
The flaws of Scotland’s voting system make up the entirety of Westminster’s. Scotland’s system isn’t perfect, but it is recognisably fairer than Westminster’s.
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