The servant of two masters: Electoral incentives in the Scottish Parliament

ABSTRACT

Scholars have pointed out the potential impact of different electoral systems on the incentives for representatives to cultivate personal versus party reputations. The mixed-member proportional system (MMP) allows us to examine the effects of electoral systems on legislators’ incentives. Scholars have argued that MMP may be the ‘best of both worlds’; however, MMP may lead to competing demands on list representatives if they are also allowed to run as constituency candidates, as happens in the Scottish Parliament. I show that this leads to different levels of committee activity—which I use as a surrogate for party activity—from constituency Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs), pure-list MSPs (who are elected via the party list and do not run in constituencies), and dual-candidate list MSPs (list MSPs who also run in constituencies), and that the proximity of elections also affects committee activity for those who run in constituencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral systems
• representation
• personal vote
• personalization of politics
• mixed-member system
• Scottish Parliament

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank James Clinger, Chris Den Hartog, Meg Rincker, Ryan Vander Wielen, and the editors and reviewers at Regional and Federal Studies for their help and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I did estimate a penalized likelihood model (the Firth method) and compared this to a simple logistic regression, and the differences were insignificant—see Online Appendix Table1.

2 Other values have been used, and these lead to no substantive differences in the results (see Online Appendix Table 2).