7,000 votes from oblivion:4,500 votes from 'success'? The Scottish Greens, 2011 Scottish Parliament elections and AMS.

Electable?

The 2011 Scottish Election produced and will be remember for the extraordinary majority gained by the SNP. The damp squib that was the Scottish Green Party's result was only remarkable for the fact they managed to stay exactly still on 2 MSPs in spite of expectations that the party would double or triple it's representation.

While some have discussed the possible failings of the campaign (http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2011/07/scottish-greens-2011-election-review/) this is personally beyond my judgemennt. What I'm really interested in is the peculiarities of our electoral system that that while far more proportional than FPTP and what that means for small parties. Below is a simple graph showing how many votes each party achieves divided by their seats in Holyrood.

In 2007 the Greens scraped back into parliament with 2 MSPs (just). This time round things were a bit more secure. Patrick Harvie was elected with a margin of 2,100 votes and Alison Johnston with approximately 5,000 votes to spare. So that's ~7,100 votes from electoral oblivion.

So let's look the other way. Eleanor Scott lost out on a seat by 378 votes, while Mark Ruskell & Martin Ford were 2,000 votes off.  In the end the Greens were less than 4,500 votes off what many would have considered a 'respectable' showing. Was the result disappointing? Of course. A disaster? No. Proof that there is no future for the Greens in Scotland? No. 

Did the SNP break AMS?

Many Nats quite reasonably point out how some commentators are now considering the idea of electoral reform at Holyrood following the unprecedented SNP majority, is this really much different to the majority commanded by Labour and the Lib Dems in from 1999-2007?

	1999 (Lib/Lab)	2003 (Lib/Lab)	2011 (SNP)
Constituency	38.8 + 14.1 = 52.9%	34.6 + 15.3 = 49.9%	45.5%
List	33.3 + 12.4 = 45.7%	29.3 + 11.8 = 41.1%	44%
Combined	49.3%	45.5%	44.75%

 Looking at the majority Governments we've had previously we can see that they have all commanded less than 50% of the popular vote, although the SNP has a fractionally lower share than the 2003 Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition. 

For an essay I had to work out how proportional a result different electoral systems produce. I quickly added in a rough score for the 2011 Scottish Election and as we can see it would have appeared to have risen to a devolution high. (I used the simplest method, there are other variants to this.)

Deviation from Proportionality (DV)
2011	9.7
2007	6.35
2003	9.35
1999	5.5

In summary the SNP did not 'break' AMS they simply managed to get a higher percentage of the vote than any party before them. This thanks to the bias towards large parties, at the expense of the small, pushed them over half the available seats.

EDIT: This post was written last year and meant to be longer..