Very cool, if true

Likelyhood of voting "YES" is correlated with education, socio-economic status, and inversely with age.

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pseudomonas

I have horrible (and admittedly selfish) fear that Scottish independence will saddle the rest of the UK with the Tories for good :-/

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pseudomonas

(Well, realistically it'd just slide everything to the right as the weighted centre shifts. But still)

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draigwen

At which point I'll be campaigning for Welsh independence and never stepping foot back in England!

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purpletigron

Scottish politics is going to be very interesting for the next few years!

Am also relieved that election is over - important, yes, but now we can go back to more important things :-)

PS Where's the best place to look for the distribution of AV voting?

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I used this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/av-referendum/8495493/AV-Referendum-results-map.html

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Are you primarily a Lib-Dem or a believer in PR?

Do the Lib-Dems (and, perhaps others) now have to "shut up" about PR for a generation?

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Well, they won't be holding another referendum on AV in the coming few governments, so they at least have to shut up about that. A referendum on proper PR might happen - but only if Labour convert, which isn't likely (unless Scotland goes independent, in which case it'll be their only hope).

And I'm primarily a believer in fairness and freedom. PR is one form of that, and I lean towards the LibDems because they come closer to my ideas than most do. If there was a viable party that was closer to my ideas then I'd switch, obviously.

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I asked because parties entail compromise compared to positions.

It's one of the great failings of Charter 88, IMO: In the 1830s/40s the original Chartists failed whereas the Anti-Corn Law League succeeded, in part because the Chartists had too many issues whereas the ACLL were focused on a single issue.

Viability trumps idealism - perhaps this would mean not voting Lib-Dem in the future, if that means dividing the anti-Con vote? Assuming your preference is a fairness-based one of anybody but them.

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Absolutely. My regional vote is likely to stay Lib-Dem, but having seen the results for Edinburgh-East this time around, voting Lib-Dem is pointless for the local seat, and so I will be voting SNP at the next election (unless they do something so awful that I consider worse than Labour. Like invading Iceland).

But this is also why I'd like to have had AV, so that I could vote for my 1st preference, then my 2nd, etc.

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Presumably they (SNP) couldn't invade Iceland as that will be a reserved matter / power?

And Airstrip 51 won't invade Iceland unless the US does so. So Bjorkland is safe.

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Well, not until we have independence.

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I sometimes think the UK should invade the Isle of Man. Start a propaganda campaign: These people have mutant cats, they have anti-gay laws. Easy win.

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Or, indeed, their national symbol is basically a swastika, later used by Terre Blanche.

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Or you can now vote for independence, with Scotland already having a PR system? Leave the English to their Conservative FPTP dominance?

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I look forward to the Independence referendum. I shall be voting for Independence. I shall probably be campaigning actively for Independence. I do not want to be ruled by Home Counties Tories. I’m not keen on being governed by Glasgow Labourites but as the SNP have proven that this is not necessarily the case I’m all for Independence. It can’t come too soon.

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skington.livejournal.com

The LibDems had no chance in my constituency (their candidate is 21 or something, and hasn't graduated yet - president of the Glasgow Uni LibDems, and clearly using this as a trial run), but I was certainly not going to vote Labour, I wasn't impressed enough with the SNP to warrant voting for them, and fuck me if I'm ever voting for the Tories.

So I voted for the LibDems, as an indication of the baseline level of support in the constituency, if nothing else. (Which, at 833 votes IIRC, is fuck all.)

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I also voted LibDem as an indication of baseline support. But with the tiny levels of support locally, I'll almost certainly vote SNP next time.

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So... as an... experiment... into how AV works IN PRACTICE, in the UK... d'you think we could weasel our way to running OUR parliamentary elections under AV? mmm...

(thought not)

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I think that would definitely be a step back from AMS...

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AMS?

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The system we use in Scotland?

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Oh right! Yes. I think it probably would be.

(sorry, I'm in Cambridge and was thinking about us. Maybe I should move North before ya'll declare independence and bugger off to be sane without us)

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Aaah!

Yes, sorry.

It would be great if the locals could choose which election system to use. That way it could spread from place to place, until the whole country was infected with proportionality!

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Maybe it's CATCHING.

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skington.livejournal.com

I get really frustrated with the Scottish electoral system this time around.

Both involve second-guessing: the constituency FPTP part requires you to have some idea of local opinion polls before voting, and the regional list has the same spoiler problem that FPTP does. The LibDems didn't get a regional list seat in Glasgow; while I appreciate that part of voting involves your candidate not getting elected, I would have liked to have said "OK, if not my favoured candidate, how about this one?"

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Why does the regional list have a spoiler problem? Isn't that the proportionalizing part of the system?

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Kinda.

If you think that the SNP are going to win 6 seats in the Lothians, and their share of the regional vote isn't going to be high enough to get them even more seats then it makes sense to vote for say, the Greens, in the regional list, so that your vote counts towards an SNP MSP and a Green MSP, rather than just the SNP MSP.

Personally, I think I'd go for something like AMS, but with the constituency vote through AV, and the regional vote being based on the first preference.

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I do think our system in Scotland has many of the flaws of FPTP what with it being an X-system.

I wanted to vote Green. There was no Green candidate in my constituency. They don’t stand because they would lose their deposit (probably).

The more I thought about it during the AV Campaign (and I thought about it a lot) the more convinced I became that preference voting is far, far superior to X voting.

That being said I do like the system we have quite a lot. We’ve managed to have a majority government when 3 of the 4 main options have been seen to be taking the Michael in some way. This majority government is very rare. That is a good thing. We can get more Green representation in Scotland than England can manage (and the Greens are disappointed with how many seats they won. They were talking 8 seats at one point). Even the socialist left could muster a few MSP’s if they got their act together and had one party instead of the three they have plus one or two independents. We also have an Independent.

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Part of the problem I think is that your MMP/AMS system is, while PR, still pretty coarse-grained about it. Fewer than half the seats are list seats, and those are further divided into 8 regions. So a party needs 1/7th of the support in a region, rather than 1/56th of the votes across Scotland. Both that and the particular choice of PR allocation math bias against very small parties, which is probably how the SNP ended up with a seat majority despite only getting 45% of the votes.

I have noted the oddity of all the existing MMP systems using plurality voting for the constituency rep, rather than some majoritarian system like, runoff, approval, or IRV, but if the list compensation were finer grained I think that would matter less.

Wales MMP has similar problems: 4 regions, only 5 MAs per region, totalling 1/3 of the Assembly.

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As I note elsewhere, the current system was specifically chosen by the Labour Party to avoid the SNP getting a majority government and launching an Independence referendum.

It does bias against very small parties. This is not necessarily a flaw. I note the example of Israel where a couple of percent of the vote buys you the right to make the whole country follow your Zionist ideal. The German system also has formal hurdle rates on vote share. At the last election the SNP minority government could have been in all sorts of dilemmas if it had hooked up with a small party.

In Scotland we’ve managed to return 2 Greens (1 Glasgow, 1 Edinburgh and Lothians) and an Independent (Edinburgh and Lothians). Not a bad result for smaller parties. We’ve also had members of the Socialist Party elected. The system works okay. It would work better if the constituency vote was preferential.

I think the regional tie is important. I like a link between representation and geographic community. I think this link works better at Regional level than it does at Constituency level. I live in Edinburgh Southern / Edinburgh South. Most of my issues are national or on an Edinburgh and the Lothians sized footprint. Very few issues debated at Holyrood or Westminster affect just Edinburgh southerly. For those that do I have the local council. I’d personally prefer the kind of geographic link you produced with STV to the link you produce through FPTP.

One of the key things I love about our system is that it forces consensus and forces our Committee structure to work well.

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Well, they could have tried harder to prevent majorities. :)

Yeah, I did note that while the Greens got fewer seats than they deserve by the vote, they still got a couple of seats despite having less than 5% of the vote, so some purer but thresholded systems wouldn't let them in.

What do you mean by "all sorts of dilemmas"?

I'd have thought party list could accomodate regionalism better than usually thought, through regional parties, or better yet via an open list system where you vote for a candidate. A list would have lots of people, but some of them would be focusing on Your Area, and conversely after the election they'd know where their votes came from, so where to pay back attention. And if they didn't, well, there'd be 55 other list MSPs to compete for your vote.

I haven't thought about how to use open list with MMP, though. Closest was an idea that you could use open list with regional ballots to give the benefits of MMP without the decoy party problem.

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Aye, as a plan it only worked for 12 years before being busted wide open. Who saw that coming? Well no one to be honest. I think even the Maximum Eck is surprised.

I’m thinking specifically of the Green groups dislike for some of the candidates for Transport Minister and the Green group’s opposition to the Forth Road Bridge Replacement Crossing (opposition for which I have some sympathy but which is politically unacceptable). Those are two more or less real examples. Now, you could argue that a coalition partner should have some input over Ministers and Big Policy but an effective veto over ministerial appointments for two seats is maybe (maybe) too much influence (and I speak as a Green voter). I could manufacture others of a more potential type (say an Orange Order candidate getting elected in Glasgow).

A whole nation party list might do and it might not. One of my concerns about devolution before it happened and Independence when it happens is that the whole of Scotland is run, badly, by the Central Belt. I like the fact that the Regional Party lists mean that some MSP’s have an eye on their and my backgarden. No system is perfect and quite a lot comes out in the way things are operated. The software is as important as the hardware.

I'm not against a national list but the current set up works okay.

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You don't want AV, you want PR.
And Clegg selling out for the sake of this referendum is rubbish, given how widespread PR already is in the UK:
Scottish Parliament: MMP/AMS PR
Welsh Assembly: MMP
London Assembly: MMP
Northern Ireland: STV PR

Everyone in the UK except English not in London already get to use some form of PR -- not counting the party list (I think) PR elections for European Parliament.

But Clegg went in for:
~~PR, like the rest of the UK uses and which the Lib Dems need~~
~~a referendum on PR~~
~~AV, which might help slightly though probably not~~
a referendum on AV

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AV is off the table, probably for ever. Not a bad thing. Electoral reform and wider constitutional reform is still on the table and still on my agenda. The fact that the No campaign lied and shifted the debate to partisan issues means that rather than the Yes campaign thinking “We tried but people having thought about wanted to stay with the way we currently do things” the Yes campaign are thinking “Dirty, lying cheats.” We didn’t have a debate, so we haven’t settled the issue.

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It occurred to me that the West Lothian Question seems usable by PR advocates. If power devolves to England, it can get MMP too, leaving Westminster as a vestigial organ, or encouraging it to finally change with the times...

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