ELECTORAL SYSTEMS IN DEVOLUTION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

In the 1997 referendum, the Welsh and the Scots voted in favour of the creation of devolved institutions. Thus, in 1998, The Government of Wales Act and The Scotland Act were introduced by the Labour Government and Parliament. These two separate acts, reiterating most of the 1978 proposals which had been written hastily under political pressure, were to shape devolution in the late 1990s. To put it in a nutshell, devolution in Scotland offered primary legislation, i.e. the legislative power of drafting laws, whereas its Welsh counterpart enjoyed secondary legislation, i.e. only powers of law enforcement, that is to say executive powers. In this paper, we shall investigate what distinguishes the electoral system relative to the elections in the devolved bodies from that used in general elections in Britain. To do so, we shall first examine proportional representation, henceforth referred to as PR, and more precisely the Additional Member System, or AMS, that has been in operation in the elections to the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament since 1999. After paying attention to the composition of the regional institutions created, we shall look in detail at what happens, under AMS, on polling day. After highlighting the aspects in which AMS differs from other PR systems in the world, we shall finally try and sum up the advantages and potential flaws of this electoral system.

First of all, proportional representation was unanimously recommended by the Kilbrandon Commission on the Constitution, which had released its report in late October 1973. Indeed, it had found out that PR would be the best system for the elections to take place in the devolved bodies. Moreover, the importance of the electoral system is not to be underestimated since, it has to be kept in mind, one of the reasons why the 1979 referendum failed is that people feared that the First Past The Post system, or FPTP, would result in