On Friday, Alex Salmond, the former Scottish National Party Leader and First Minister of Scotland, announced that he was launching a new pro-independence political party, to be called the Alba Party (“Alba” being the Gaelic word for Scotland). The announcement comes just weeks ahead of a general election to the Scottish Parliament, and days after a long-running row between Mr. Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, his successor as SNP Leader and First Minister, came to its climax.
If this new party is driven by the row between the two leaders, it’s not showing on the new party’s website. Rather, the party appears to be focusing on complementing the SNP, and using the electoral system in Scotland to create a “supermajority” of independence-supporting members in the Scottish Parliament on the election due to be held on 6 May.
But how would this work? And could it plausibly produce the results that they are looking for?
The Electoral System
Scotland uses the Additional Member System (also known as Mixed Member Proportional Representation) to elect 129 Members to the Scottish Parliament. It involves voters casting two votes:
- The first “constituency” vote is for an MSP to represent one of the 73 constituencies, with the candidate who wins a plurality of the constituency votes winning that seat.
- The second “regional” vote is for a list of up to seven MSPs to represent one of the eight regions, with regional seats allocated to the parties so that the combined total of constituency and regional MSPs from a region is as close to proportional as possible to the share of the regional vote.
Theoretically, this should produce a Parliament where the share of the seats is roughly proportional to the share of the regional votes. Given that proportionality is done by region and not across the nation as a whole, larger parties will still have slightly more seats than they might otherwise, as smaller parties would not get enough votes in any one region to get any regional seats. However, such a boost is still smaller than what would happen under the First Past The Post method used for electing the UK Parliament.
The Party’s Strategy
The Alba Party says that AMS leads to “almost one of two pro-independence votes [going] to waste”, because parties that are successful in winning constituency seats are far less successful in winning regional seats. To counter this, they say that they will not be nominating candidates for any constituency seats, instead putting forward only regional lists. They call on supporters of Scottish independence to vote for the SNP on their constituency votes and for the Alba Party on their regional votes, with the expectation that there will be no constituency success to weigh down a high regional vote.
On the face of it, there is some merit to this theory. Of the 63 seats that the SNP won in the 2016 election, only four seats were from the regional lists, despite a 42% share of the regional vote. In six of the eight regions, they won no regional seats at all, having won a significant majority of constituency seats in those regions. If the regional seats were allocated strictly proportionally, without regard to constituency seats, the SNP would have won 28 of the 56 regional seats; it is these seats that the Alba Party will be looking to pick up from other parties at the upcoming election.
Can It Lead to a “Supermajority”?
It’s too early to know how many SNP supporters would be willing to give a regional vote to the Alba Party, as no opinion polls have been published since the launch. To demonstrate the impact that this new party could have, we’ll look at what the 2016 result could have looked like if SNP voters had gone for a different party on the regional vote, while sticking with the SNP on the constituency vote.
In the most optimistic scenario for the Alba Party, having all SNP voters switch over to the Alba Party for their regional vote would be enough to earn them 34 out of 56 regional seats. Of those, four seats would be at the expense of the SNP, and five would be at the expense of the pro-independence Scottish Green Party, resulting in a net swing of 25 seats from pro-union to pro-independence parties. It would mean that pro-independence parties would have won a combined 73% of the seats in Parliament, despite winning only 48% of the regional vote between them.
Of course, it would be unrealistic to assume that the Alba Party can get all SNP regional votes, given how divided the party currently appears to be over the Sturgeon-Salmond row. Broadly, though, there appears to be a roughly-linear correlation between the share of the regional vote that the Alba Party can get and the total number of pro-independence MSPs in Parliament. Only around one in five SNP voters switching to Alba would start to have an impact in increasing the total pro-independence representation in Parliament.
What is needed to get a “supermajority” depends on how you define the term. If a supermajority means 60% of seats, that can be done with one in three SNP voters switching to Alba; if it means two-thirds of seats, then two in three SNP voters would need to switch. As previously mentioned, though, we don’t have any polling data to give us any hints about how big of a shift there might be, so it’s still difficult to say whether such a supermajority can be realistically reached.
Can It Lead to Independence?
Under the devolution settlement, constitutional matters are still reserved to the UK Parliament at Westminster, and thus any referendum would require the consent of the UK Government in order to legally proceed.
Even if this strategy does produce the “supermajority” that the Alba Party wants, it still gives both sides of the referendum debate something to point at to bolster their argument about whether or not there is a mandate for it. Supporters of a second referendum would point to any supermajority of pro-independence MSPs as a clear mandate to hold this referendum, while opponents would point to any non-majority of pro-independence votes as a clear rejection of this referendum.
Therefore, for the strategy to succeed in getting another referendum called, the SNP and Alba Party will need to work together to convince more voters to come into the pro-referendum tent. Simply moving voters around who are already in the tent will probably not be enough to get the referendum they want.
