Psephology for beginners
Here's some data from the Scottish Elections:
As you can see, tactical voting meant that for the constituency vote the larger parties were given a boost of a few percent. The Greens were the only party with successful candidates who actually got a boost in the Proportional part of the vote. In addition 11% of the population "wasted" their vote by voting for a party that didn't get any representatives at all. In fact as the total on the far right shows, 13 seats "should" have gone to other parties such as the Scottish Socialists, British Nationalists or Scottish Christians.
The system clearly favours the large parties. I'd be interested to know how the lists would have come out if they were country-wide rather than regional. I _think_ the end result would be more proportional, but I have other things to do tonight. Of course, depending on your opinions you might think that keeping the SSP,BNP, etc. out of government was a feature rather than a bug...
| Constituency% | List% | Difference% | Predicted seats (from list vote) |
Actual seats | Difference | |
| SNP | 32.9 | 31.0 | -1.9 | 40 | 47 | 7 |
| Labour | 32.2 | 29.2 | -3.0 | 38 | 46 | 8 |
| Conservatives | 16.6 | 13.9 | -2.7 | 18 | 17 | -1 |
| Lib Dem | 16.2 | 11.3 | -4.9 | 15 | 16 | 1 |
| Green | 0.2 | 4 | 3.8 | 5 | 2 | -3 |
| Total | 98.1 | 89.4 | -8.7 | 115 | 128 | 13 |
As you can see, tactical voting meant that for the constituency vote the larger parties were given a boost of a few percent. The Greens were the only party with successful candidates who actually got a boost in the Proportional part of the vote. In addition 11% of the population "wasted" their vote by voting for a party that didn't get any representatives at all. In fact as the total on the far right shows, 13 seats "should" have gone to other parties such as the Scottish Socialists, British Nationalists or Scottish Christians.
The system clearly favours the large parties. I'd be interested to know how the lists would have come out if they were country-wide rather than regional. I _think_ the end result would be more proportional, but I have other things to do tonight. Of course, depending on your opinions you might think that keeping the SSP,BNP, etc. out of government was a feature rather than a bug...