One view of the Scottish Parliament elections is that anyone with the chutzpah to persuade the Electoral Commission to head the party listing on every single ballot paper with their own name ‘Alex Salmond for first minister’ deserved to win.
However, Mr Salmond’s nerve posed at least two embarrassing questions for the ‘independent’ Electoral Commission inquiry. Why, from several possible party designations, did the commission see fit to select one highlighting the alphabetically-advantageous name of the man who was not only party leader, but a constituency and regional list candidate? Second, why, in the specially-commissioned ‘research’ on the ballot paper design, was no mention whatever made of the increasingly acknowledged good practice of rotating the alphabetical order of parties and candidates on ballot listings?
Still, credit where it’s due. For all its administrative defects, the Holyrood electoral system did get the big picture right. The double-vote additional member system, designed to produce results reasonably close to proportional representation, did just that – although to the evident bewilderment of much of the national media.
Some of those used to reporting Westminster politics, where a leading party with about one-third of the vote gains a comfortable overall majority, were clearly bemused by the options facing Mr Salmond and his SNP, whose 31% of the party vote earned them no more than a 36% share of seats – 47 of the 129, against Labour’s 46.
In fact, they only need to have glanced over the border for, nowadays, hung councils are almost as widespread in English local government as they will be in Scotland.
According to Keith Edkins’ invaluable records of councils’ political compositions (www.gwydir.demon.co.uk), 125 English councils – almost one-third – were arithmetically hung prior to May’s elections.
However, in the Scottish context of greater interest is the huge range of responses to hungness – particularly given the early assumption that, with so low a percentage of seats, the SNP must surely go for some, or any, kind of coalition rather than minority government. The split among English authorities in recent years has been that roughly one-third have had single-party minority administrations, while in two-thirds, there has been some form of two or multi-party power-sharing arrangement.
The arithmetic is obviously important but far from all-important, and any political economists suggesting that the size of the ‘minimum winning coalition’ is the key factor can forget it. Local political history, policy and personality are all likely to be better guides.
Prior to 3 May, the most numerous partnerships, unsurprisingly, involved the Conservatives – with Lib Dems (16), Independents/Greens (14), or both (17). Some of these – notably where Labour was the largest party (eg, Birmingham, Leeds, Southwark and Cumbria) – were apparently forms of anti-Labour coalitions.
Times change, and Labour were also involved in 18 of these power shares, most frequently with the Lib Dems (Waltham Forest, Charnwood, Harlow and Warwick), but in several cases, with Conservatives as well (Sefton, Wirral, Ipswich and Redditch).
For the SNP, once a formal coalition with the Lib Dems was ruled out, it became important to establish some kind of understanding with the Greens. Although only a two-member group, their ‘confidence and supply’ agreement – to support an SNP budget and oppose any ‘no confidence’ votes – gives the minority SNP executive a potential overall majority, with either the Lib Dems (16 seats) or the Conservatives (17) on any given issue.
With disciplined voting, the SNP’s actual percentage of seats is relatively immaterial and there are plenty of examples of minority administrations getting by on under 40% of seats. The Conservatives in Kirklees may hold the recent record, with 21 out of 69 (30.4%), but Southampton’s Lib Dems had exactly one-third of an intriguing 16/16/16 three-party split, and Labour ran Bolton with 23 out of 60 (38%). Mr Salmond will have problems, but not concluding a coalition with an antipathetic Lib Dem group for the sake of numbers is unlikely to be the most burdensome.
Chris Game is honorary senior lecturer at INLOGOV
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