Democracy is the right for people to decide how the place where they live is run. But too few people now believe that this right is being honoured, too few believe that they decide and too many believe they are powerless.

That Scotland’s local democracy needs to be renewed is a fact agreed upon by parties and campaigners from right across the political spectrum. ERS Scotland, often as part of the Our Democracy coalition, has long been working toward a local democracy for Scotland worthy of the name ‘local’. For the next stage of this work, in advance of this year’s Scottish council elections, ERS Scotland director Willie Sullivan and James Mitchell, professor of public policy at the University of Edinburgh, co-authored a pamphlet By us and for us: How Scottish local democracy can build and strengthen community.

This pamphlet sets out a vision of how we can revive local democracy in Scotland. Informed by what people have told ERS Scotland about how they want to participate in their local democracy, the authors re-imagine what a truly local, participatory and powerful democracy could look like. The pamphlet builds on deep research and work with voters in Scotland about ways to meaningfully involve them in the vital decisions that affect them and their communities. There is also concerning new polling that suggests people feel less and less that they have meaningful influence over the decisions that affect them – 1 in 5 people in Scotland think party donors are the most influential force when it comes to shaping public policy.

Given we are living in a time when people are becoming more divided politically and socially, Sullivan and Mitchell identify that continuing with the current status quo carries many more risks for democracy than even big changes. The systems of governance we have in place are not good enough for enough of us, and are not up to the challenges and complexity of the 21^st century. In line with the Declaration on Local Democracy as agreed at the Democracy21 conference, any upgrading of these systems must involve citizens and communities themselves.

The onus is now on communities and political leaders to change the momentum and nurture democratic initiatives and institutions that connect people and give them a sense of empowerment. This can take a number of forms, such as selecting people by sortition to sit on citizens assemblies where they debate local policy in depth and feed into local councils’ decision-making. These short roles would be paid and people selected in a way that represented all sections of the community. In time, these and other democratic bodies and initiatives could create a ‘honeycomb’ of democratic layers that give communities a continued and meaningful say over the decisions that affect them.

We have learned the lesson of our last hundred years; it is not enough that the future is built, it must be built for us. We must now learn a lesson for our next hundred years; it is not enough that the future is built for us, it must be built by us. We call for a new democracy which is ready to help us build for a hundred years to come.

Read the new pamphlet, By Us and For Us

It is now 15 years since Scotland abandoned First Past the Post for local government elections and adopted the Single Transferable Vote form of proportional representation. What many will have seen as a small shift in process has led to a sea-change in local politics, an end to ‘one party states’, and more power for voters. Within that decade and a half we have grown to understand what other countries like Ireland knew already: with fair votes comes better democracy.

I have worked for ERS Scotland since 2016, but back in 2007 I was a volunteer for the Society, spending six months talking to voters about the new system, and attending an election count as an observer. From what I saw on the ground, it took parties slightly longer than the electorate to realise that this change to the voting system also meant a whole new way of doing politics. Now every vote would count – and parties would have to act differently.

Since then, competitive local elections have helped to refresh local democracy across Scotland. I would still like to see more cooperation between parties at a council level, but within our multi-member wards, councillors generally have very good relations regardless of affiliation. Councils across Scotland have experienced power-sharing, with a wider range of parties working together in local government.

STV allows voters to not only express their preferences between parties but also within them, this means that councillors no longer have the option to be distant and unaccountable without consequences.

There are still a few who miss the old way of doing things though – I’ve occasionally heard councillors complain that they have to work harder under the new system. But I have never once heard a voter make the same complaint!

Solely changing the voting system has not been a cure-all: Scotland’s local government is still too centralised and top-down. There are too few councillors, and Scotland has one of the lowest rates of local representation in Europe. That’s why ERS Scotland has been playing a leadership role in the Our Democracy coalition; the campaign for a truly powerful and participatory local democracy.

Because of our increasingly long experience of proportional systems as a nation (15 years for local government and 23 years for Holyrood), when we now come to use Westminster’s one-person-takes-all system, it seems perverse and unwieldly. Westminster-style voting systems are shown up as the blunt instrument they are – unable to turn a multitude of your hopes into a binary choice.

That’s why the people of Scotland are well placed to say to their English and Welsh neighbours that there is a better way of doing democracy, and we have the proof.

STV means an end to wasted votes. For those looking for advice on using the full power of that vote, read Phil’s blog on it. You can read more about PR in Scotland.

Sign our petition to upgrade local elections in England and Wales

On Thursday 5 May, 2022, voters will go to the polls to elect councillors for each of Scotland’s 32 local authorities. This will be the fourth time that Scottish councils will be elected using a proportional system, the Single Transferable Vote (STV). As STV is a ‘preferential’ voting system, voters have the option of showing a preference between all the candidates by ranking as many of the candidates as they wish: 1 for their favourite, 2 for their second, 3 for third and so on. But how many should you rank?

Should I just rank the candidates from my favourite party?

There can be inaccurate information spread around elections, and the purpose of this blog is to debunk the myth that there is any advantage at all in not ranking a candidate in an STV election.

As the name suggests, you have a single vote that is transferable. The power of that vote starts at the candidate you put first, and only moves down to the second preference candidate if the candidate you ranked first has either been elected, or is in last place and stands no hope of being elected. This applies to the rest of your preferences too.

So there is no risk that your vote will help a lower-ranked candidate get elected over one of your higher ranked candidates. And who wouldn’t want to have a say in exactly which councillors will be elected? That’s the beauty of STV – unlike the winner-takes-all FPTP voting system that is used for elections to Westminster, you don’t have to consider using your one vote tactically for the candidate that you think might have a chance of winning. There is no need to hold your nose while voting for someone you dislike but who is not quite as bad as the alternative. With the STV system used for Scottish local government elections, you can never hurt your favourite candidates by numbering further candidates.

What does ‘vote till you boak’ mean?

At the last Scottish local elections, in 2017, the slogan ‘vote til you boak’ gained some traction, implying that you should rank the candidates until you end up at one that is so unappealing you can go no further. While this is a useful way to snappily get the main message across, it doesn’t quite tell the full story, because it implies only voting for all those you like or feel relatively neutral about. Whereas, with STV you can influence the election of all the candidates you put a number next to.

Should I rank candidates from parties I don’t like?

If there is a candidate from a party you disagree with, but who is polite to their opponents, you might want to give them a higher preference than someone with who you both disagree and consider incredibly rude. That low number you give them might be the thing that ensures the worse candidate is defeated.

If you see any encouragement to only vote for a certain party, or candidates with a particular viewpoint, that is equivalent to saying you should give up control of who else might get elected. Certainly, if you want one party to get as many councillors as possible, make sure you give their candidates your top preferences, but feel free to carry on numbering the rest of the candidates – it can help to determine who will (and won’t!) sit alongside your most favoured party, in the local council chamber.

So, what about the question ‘should I rank all the candidates?’ It is of course up to each voter to decide how to use the power of their transferable vote. However, if you want to maximise your impact on the election outcome, it makes sense to keep voting until you genuinely have no preferences between the candidates left on the ballot paper.

In the run up to the COP26 climate change conference, a coalition of leading democracy organisations joined together on a campaign to put strong democracy at the heart of any response. The campaign’s message was clear; we cannot tackle climate change without changing the ways we are governed. If we want to decarbonise, we must democratise. 

80% of people understand the climate crisis to be a global emergency caused by human activity (Ipsos Mori), yet our ability to hold politicians to account is constrained by a voting system that we use roughly once every 4 years. If we want to ensure climate action we need to redesign our democracy. Working collaboratively, Compass, the Electoral Reform Society, Make Votes Matter, Sortition Foundation and Unlock Democracy launched a joint petition demanding a binding Citizens’ Assembly that would bring together people from all walks of life to redesign British democracy from the bottom up. 

Citizens’ Assemblies bring together a representative group of the public, to listen to experts, discuss their views and decide on action. By addressing the out of date democratic system across the UK, we can build a democracy that is fit to tackle the emergencies of today.

This wasn’t just an online campaign though, on the global Day of Action we took our message to the streets of Glasgow and London. We talked to hundreds of people, distributed (eco-printed) leaflets and hosted an event in the heart of Glasgow, spreading the message that to solve the climate crisis we must change our democracy from the ground up. The response from the people we spoke to was that they’re fed up with political inaction on climate change, losing faith in the democratic system and want reforms that hold politicians to account and deliver a sustainable and just change for people and the planet. 

The lesson is clear, if we want to save the planet we must transform democracy. Only by doing this can we make our voices heard, avert disaster and have a just transition to sustainable societies.  

Phil Connor, Electoral Reform Society Scotland
Will Stringer, Sortition Foundation

Sign the petition to Democratise to Decarbonise

The pandemic has given us a fresh insight into what we already knew about Scotland’s communities; people will sacrifice their time and resources to aid their neighbours. But that sense of community cannot be taken for granted. That is why now, more than ever, we need to revitalise and remake our local democracy.

If democracy is about anything it is about us running our own affairs. That’s why this Holyrood election, as part of the Our Democracy coalition, we are calling for parties to enshrine a principle of local community power. By signing up to the Declaration on Local Democracy you can send a message that we must move power from distant cities and dusty chambers and into our neighbourhoods.

Scotland has some of the largest, most distant councils in Europe and we want genuine local democracy to be on the agenda this election. Following recent calls from the Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland to let people decide how they are governed locally, Our Democracy are calling for new powers for local communities to set up Citizens’ Assemblies, to regularly hold their councils to account – not just at election time.

ERS Scotland recently commissioned polling and it confirms that while our communities have the confidence and commitment to be fully involved in rebuilding coming out of the pandemic, they are currently being denied that ability by structures that get in the way of local initiative. Over two thirds of people surveyed feel they have little or no influence over decisions that affect their local community. But 80% of respondents think that citizens’ assemblies could be effective in deciding on local community priorities, and half that number would be willing to give up sizable amounts of time for free to help make decisions on issues that affect their local area.

This polling shows why we need to make sure communities are at the heart of a people-powered recovery. Communities coming together to make decisions for themselves not only makes for better decisions but these very acts strengthen the bonds of care and support. This is ‘strength training’ for Scotland’s democratic muscle. Strong, supportive, democratic communities are the only foundation on which to rebuild Scotland – A Future Built By Us And For Us.

Sign the Declaration on Local Democracy

It is now 13 years since Scotland abandoned First Past the Post for local government elections and adopted the Single Transferrable Vote form of proportional representation.

What many will have seen as a small shift in process has led to a sea-change in local politics, an end to ‘one party states’, and more power for voters.

Within the 13 years we have grown to understand what other countries like Ireland knew already: with fair votes comes better democracy.

I have only worked for ERS Scotland since 2016, but back in 2007 I was a volunteer for the Society, spending six months talking to voters about the new system, and attending an election count as an observer.

From what I saw on the ground, it took parties slightly longer than the electorate to realise that this change to the voting system also meant a whole new way of doing politics. Now every vote would count – and parties would act differently.

Since then, competitive local elections have helped to refresh local democracy across Scotland. I would still like to see more cooperation between parties at a council level, but within our multi-member wards, councillors generally have very good relations regardless of affiliation. Councils across Scotland have experienced power-sharing, with a wider range of parties working together in local government.

STV allows voters to not only express their preferences between parties but also within them, this means that councillors no longer have the option to be distant and unaccountable without consequences.

Solely changing the voting system has not been a cure-all: Scotland’s local government is still too centralised and top down. There are too few councillors, and Scotland has one of the lowest rates of local representation in Europe.

That’s why ERS Scotland has been playing a key role in the Democracy Matters consultation, through Our Democracy, the campaign for a truly powerful and participatory local democracy. There are still a few who miss the old way of doing things too – I’ve occasionally heard councillors complain that they have to work harder under the new system. But I have never once heard a voter make the same complaint!

Because of our increasingly long experience of proportional systems as a nation (13 years for local government and 21 years for Holyrood), when we now come to use Westminster’s one-person-takes-all system, it seems perverse and unwieldly.

Westminster-style voting systems are shown up as the blunt instrument they are – unable to turn a multitude of your hopes into a binary choice.

That’s why the people of Scotland are well placed to say to their English and Welsh neighbours that there is a better way of doing democracy, and we have the proof.

At the final set of council elections under the old First Past the Post system in 2003, 61 councillors were elected unopposed in Scotland, without a vote. It was simply not worth standing opposing candidates as the system made it so hard for voters to kick out the incumbents. But in the first proportional election of 2007 there was not one uncontested seat. Read more about PR in Scotland here.

Phil Connor is ERS Scotland’s Campaigns Officer, and wrote this piece on 9th April.

See also: A tale of two by-elections: How STV produces fairer outcomes

Sign our petition for fair local elections across the whole UK

On Sunday at SNP spring conference, delegates showed their interest in a deliberative and local democracy by packing out 2 events hosted by ERS Scotland.

The first, a discussion around the merits of citizens’ assemblies, followed the announcement in the week that the Scottish Government intends to hold a citizens’ assembly ahead of a fresh independence vote.

The audience heard from experts and campaigners, with Willie Sullivan, ERS Scotland director, outlining how innovations such as citizens’ assemblies are a vital way to upgrade and return legitimacy to our broken politics. He praised the fact that there is the political will to hold them, saying that the public must now be exposed to how they work. “The more people who go through and understand participative democratic processes, the more active citizens become”.

Also on the panel was Joanna Cherry QC MP, who spoke of her reasons behind tabling a motion at conference for a citizens’ assembly, to look at policy and constitutional issues as part of a national debate. She felt that people should be allowed to inform big decisions on Scotland’s future and given the tools and space in which to do so.

If anyone went into the conference not knowing what a citizens’ assembly was then they couldn’t have avoided finding out, with citizen-led decision making being brought up again and again in fringes as well as on the conference floor. The common theme was of people saying that representative forms of government are not enough for democracy to flourish, people must be trusted to make decisions for themselves.

The second fringe event, in partnership with Our Democracy and Common Weal, looked at how to get real power to communities. As has often been pointed out but never fails to amaze those hearing it for the first time; Scotland’s local democracy is hugely out of step with the rest of Europe when it comes to how many councillors there are per elector and the geographical size of councils. Research has shown that Scotland’s ‘local’ democracy is anything but.

Aileen Campbell, cabinet secretary for communities and local government, is part of the Scottish Government’s own Democracy Matters consultation on local governance reform. She was on the panel to hear from a range of contributors that modern democracies build their success on people making decisions about the places they live.

Multiple community councillors and activists outlined how current structures can often disempower communities. Many felt that this review can potentially lead to an overhaul of an overcentralised local democracy – but it must be radical.

Bringing these sessions together was a realisation that it is not good enough to try to democratise Scotland project by project: we need a culture shift. There are hopeful signs it is starting to happen.