Electoral system of Scotland

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The country of Scotland uses different electoral systems for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the UK Parliament and to local councils. A different system was also in use between 1999 and 2019 for United elections to the European Parliament.

Historically, only First Past the Post (FPTP) was used for all elections in Scotland, but this changed in 1999 both with the introduction of D'Hondt elections to the EU Parliament and the inception the same year of the devolved Scottish Parliament.^[1] Two of the devolved legislatures in the United Kingdom - the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd - use the Additional Members System (AMS).^[2] AMS has been used for every Scottish Parliament election since 1999, with the most recent being in 2021. Local council elections were reformed to be held under Single Transferable Vote (STV),^[3] which has proven to be proportional, unlike FPTP. Elections to the UK Parliament are still held under FPTP.^[4] This has led to the Scottish National Party (SNP) dominating Scottish seats in the UK Parliament. The SNP won 48/59 seats in Scotland in 2019, while the Conservative Party won 6 seats, the Liberal Democrats won 4 seats, and Labour won 1 seat.^[5]

The history of using First Past the Post in UK Parliament elections in Scotland means that the development of political parties in Scotland was affected to some extent by Duverger's Law, which causes the agglomeration of related political ideologies into a few large parties with many small parties rarely winning representation, though a four party system did develop in Scotland prior to the introduction of voting reform.