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Thomas Lundberg critically examines the claim that party list-elected members of Britain's devolved assemblies are somehow 'second-class' representatives. Empirical evidence compares British representatives to their miced-member proportional (MMP) counterparts in Germany and New Zealand

Both Scotland and New Zealand, small nations with a British political heritage, implemented mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral systems in the 1990s. Minority government characterises most of the New Zealand experience since the introduction of MMP in 1996, while Scotland's only such experience occurred between 2007 and 2011. The Scottish experience differed significantly from that of New Zealand because Scotland has a different party system (characterised by two major cleavages) and exists in a system of multi-level governance, resulting in a more conflict-laden relationship between parties. The centre-periphery cleavage in the Scottish case results from being part of the United Kingdom, while New Zealand is an independent state. Both nations introduced MMP as part of an effort to bring about a 'new politics', but the impact of institutional engineering upon the behaviour of politicians has been limited. Adapted from the source document.

Both Scotland and New Zealand, small nations with a British political heritage, implemented mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral systems in the 1990s. Minority government characterises most of the New Zealand experience since the introduction of MMP in 1996, while Scotland's only such experience occurred between 2007 and 2011. The Scottish experience differed significantly from that of New Zealand because Scotland has a different party system (characterised by two major cleavages) and exists in a system of multi-level governance, resulting in a more conflict-laden relationship between parties. The centre-periphery cleavage in the Scottish case results from being part of the United Kingdom, while New Zealand is an independent state. Both nations introduced MMP as part of an effort to bring about a 'new politics', but the impact of institutional engineering upon the behaviour of politicians has been limited.

The May 2007 Scottish Parliament election used a different ballot format from the one used in the previous elections, one that combined the regional and constituency votes onto one ballot paper (two separate papers were used before). Because there were many more invalid votes in 2007, the problem was blamed on the two‐vote ballot paper, which was recommended by the Arbuthnott Commission to prevent misunderstandings about what the two votes were for. Other places that use the mixed‐member proportional (MMP) electoral system tend to use a two‐vote ballot paper, with Germany and New Zealand seeing low levels of invalid votes. While the decision to revert to two separate papers in future Scottish Parliament elections might reduce the number of invalid votes, the price could be more confusion about the proportional nature of the electoral system unless public education improves significantly.

AbstractThis article compares the use of people outside government to consider electoral reform in three countries using the single-member plurality electoral system. The composition of electoral reform bodies, ranging from commissions of experts (New Zealand) and ex-politicians (Britain) to assemblies of randomly selected citizens (British Columbia), appears to have influenced how well their recommendations were received by the public. Governments should be careful not to assume that they can retain control of the electoral reform process once they let it out of their hands, as the cases of New Zealand and British Columbia show, where majorities of the voters chose reform.