SECOND TIME LUCKY? THE CONTINUING ADAPTATION OF VOTERS AND PARTIES TO THE SINGLE TRANSFERABLE VOTE IN SCOTLAND

Abstract

The 2012 round of Scottish local elections, held as a stand-alone contest, under STV provides a clearer indication of how STV has impacted on political behaviour than the previous round in 2007 which was held concurrently with elections to the Scottish parliament. Utilising aggregate ward-level data, this article presents a preliminary analysis of how parties and voters have adapted to the new system. It finds that voters have adapted well to STV, and that party loyalties remain important under the new system even if voters have considerably more choice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Buzzeo for his invaluable work in collecting and inputting the not inconsiderable amounts of data that have contributed to this article. I am also grateful to the Newcastle University School of Geography, Politics and Sociology research committee for funding this research assistance and to participants at the 2012 PSA Territorial Politics Group conference for their helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

Scotland now has four different electoral systems for elections to different institutions: first past the post for Westminster, MMP for the Scottish parliament, closed list PR for European elections and from 2007, STV for council contests. For details on the process of introducing STV in Scotland, see Bennie (2006) and Gilmour (2007).

Regularly referred to as the additional member system (AMS) in Scotland.

Not including the multi-national European Parliament elections in 2014.

For further discussion of this measure and thinking behind it, see Dunleavy and Margetts (2004: 319).

An accurate and up-to-date analysis will have to await the release of data from the 2011 census which was unavailable at the time of writing.

Another way of looking at this is to examine the wards where parties offered more than two candidates and also achieved more than quota to assess how far over quota the combined team of candidates were. Doing so confirms this general picture. Where Labour offered two or more candidates, they achieved on average 1.34 quotas, while in the equivalent wards SNP candidates achieved 1.23 quotas.

These large numbers of rejected ballots were a consequence of changes to the Scottish parliament ballot paper in 2007.

This analysis is based on preference summary report data from 328 wards. At the time of writing, data was not available from Argyll and Bute, Inverclyde, and Stirling councils, and Fortissat, Kilbrine and Beith and Thurso wards.