No, It’s Not Tactical

Understanding Scotland’s Green Vote Part 2

“The SNP’s Gardening Wing”

Since the Scottish Parliament voting system has two votes, and Greens focus on the List portion (the so-called“second vote”), they are often said to benefit from tactical and/or pity votes from SNP voters. Ahead of the 2016 election, with the SNP riding high in the polls and AMS being a slightly weird electoral system, social media was awash with chat about tactical voting on the list to maximise the number of pro-Independence MSPs.

This was based on the notion the SNP would win so many constituencies they wouldn’t be eligible for list seats. The most commonly encountered argument was to vote Green, though it’s important to note the party itself never bought into that strategy, despite popular perception.

The argument that this was the root of Green success comes from both sides of the constitutional divide. For those who support the Union, being able make the Greens look in some way illegitimate is a good strategy for painting Independence as a path to eternal SNP dominance, if not dictatorship.

For those who support the SNP as the main route to Independence, threatening to withdraw their “second vote” from the Greens is supposed to keep the party in line and voting with the SNP. Apart from almost always having a #BothVotesSNP tweet on their profile from 2016, its mathematically impossible for all of those people to have actually voted Green…

In order to believe that the Scottish Greens owe their entire existence to the SNP, there would have to have been no elections to Holyrood before 2016, and indeed no elections to any other body before or since.

Elections Weren’t Invented in 2016

The most basic argument against these claims is that Greens have been in the Scottish Parliament since 1999. At that first election, the Greens scored a surprise MSP in the Lothians, alongside an equally surprising Scottish Socialist Party MSP in Glasgow. PR had been intended to make things fairer, but to empower non-Westminster parties? That was a shock.

Famously, 2003 saw the “Rainbow Parliament” where the Greens surged to 7 MSPs, the SSP to 6, there were 3 Independent MSPs and even an MSP for the Scottish Senior Citizen’s Unity Party. That diversity has never been repeated, but unlike the SSP and the SSCUP, the Greens remained in Holyrood, winning 2 seats in both 2007 and 2011.

At not a single one of those elections was there any reason for anyone to suggest people should vote Green since the SNP couldn’t win list seats. From 1999 to 2007, the SNP won list seats in every region. In their shock majority in 2011, they won list seats everywhere except Lothian. No one was thinking before the 2014 Independence referendum in the terms the social media bubble was afterwards. Clearly, therefore, the Greens had their own pre-existing support base, or they wouldn’t have had MSPs before 2016.

Not a Smoking Gun, but an SNP Misfire

Ah well, even accepting the above, it could still be true that the Greens owe their 2016 growth to tactical SNP support, some argue. They sometimes even point to the overall list vote shares, which show the Greens as +2.2% and the SNP as -2.3%. That shows a clear, direct transfer between the parties, right?

Well, no. You can’t look at national results like that, as they disguise more local variations. In Glasgow, the Greens were +3.5% versus 2011, and the SNP +4.9%. By contrast, whilst the Greens were +1% in the North East, the SNP were -8.1%. It’s obvious then that the national figures look opposite-but-equal by sheer coincidence.

When you look across all regions, the story is that the SNP’s voter base was beginning a realignment that’d become painfully clear for them in both of the 2017 elections. They were gaining votes in the West Central Belt, but not to a level that made up for losses elsewhere, particularly in their historic strongholds in the North East and Highlands & Islands regions.

Grounds for Genuine Growth

The Greens grew in every region, but that growth had very little correlation with the SNP’s declines. It’s very likely that some SNP voters did give the Greens a tactical vote, but most voters don’t live on social media, and are totally unaware of silly attempts to game AMS. The answer for most of the growth is simple: more people were convinced to vote Green.

This shouldn’t be a controversial assertion. Remember, the party had ballooned from 1500 members before the referendum to 9000 members afterwards. It had spent more time in the public eye between 2011 and 2014 than it had in the first 12 years of Devolution. It was better equipped in terms of activists and resources to fight an election than ever before, and voters were more aware of its existence.

I myself was an SNP member in 2011, albeit a highly inactive one — I did one leaflet run for Anne McLaughlin in Provan that year. By 2013 I’d joined the Greens, gotten very active, and got to vote Green on both ballots in Kelvin as my genuine party of choice. I’d also been selected as a Council candidate for 2017, so I really can’t be said to have been some kind of tactical SNP voter!

Additionally, there were seven whole years of new, young voters on the electoral register. Not only did we have the usual folk who’d turned 18 since the last election, but this was the first Holyrood election with Votes at 16, adding another two years to the voter pool. A constant for Greens the world over is that they garner their most support from young voters. Many of these first time voters would have been genuinely enthused by the Greens.

Councils Exist Too, You Know

Moving onto elections to other bodies, if Greens only won seats due to “second votes”, the party shouldn’t have councillors. The notional SNP voter who would give the Greens a tactical list vote would not give them a first preference for Council elections, and I can personally attest that second preferences do not suffice to elect a councillor. Yet, the Greens won 8 councillors in 2007 (the first elections by the partly-proportional STV system), 14 in 2012, and would then win 19 in 2017.

In fact, the Green vote between 2016 and 2017 was roughly as consistent as the SNP’s vote, where it is possible to directly compare the two elections. We can (mostly) match up 162 Council wards with 39 Holyrood constituencies, where the Greens were an option for every voter in both years.

In terms of the actual number of voters who turned out to vote, the 2017 Green vote across these 39 constituencies was 65% of what it had been in 2016. But the SNP were barely any better in those areas, holding onto 68% of their votes. That doesn’t really suggest the mass “return” of Green voters to the SNP you’d expect if 2016 had seen loads of tactical votes.

Indeed, what’s clear in that chart is that in the places where the Greens had councillors in 2012, and thus a more consistent presence, they held onto more votes, most notably in Edinburgh, where they proved much more resilient than the SNP did. Again, that speaks to an obvious aspect of elections, which is the more present a party is in an area, the better it will do.

The Proof is in the Proportional Representation

Basically, what most strongly defines Green performance in Scotland is whether the vote is proportional or not. Although I believe the dominance of the FPTP mindset has a deflationary effect on the Green vote for all elections, there is still a huge difference between Westminster and every other vote. If we look at Edinburgh, the only part of Scotland where the Greens stood a full slate of candidates in the 2019 UK election, we can see that.

The difference here, in the Greens’ strongest area, is massive. Even at their worst PR election, the 2017 council elections, their vote share of 12.4% is four times higher than the 2019 Westminster vote of 3.1%. Holyrood’s 12.9% and the Europeans 13.9% is even higher. Lest you think that shows a collapse in support by late 2019, we can look at Glasgow, which last had a full Westminster slate in 2015.

Again, the differences here are huge, though the Glasgow Greens are less consistent than their Edinburgh counterparts. But in 2015’s UK election (2.8%), they had less than a third the vote share of the 2017 Council Elections (8.7%), again the weakest PR vote, below Holyrood (10.2%) and the Europeans (12.1%).

These are all elections with very different turnouts, so we can look at Green votes as a share of the electorate instead to smooth out that difference.

Even by this measure, the difference is stark, with a Council vs Westminster difference of roughly three times (6.2% vs 2.1%) in Edinburgh and double (3.3% vs 1.7%) in Glasgow. It looks like voters are a lot more comfortable with a Green vote in elections they think the party can win, than at Westminster where they clearly can’t.

The Greens are Here to Stay

From all of this, we can conclude that although the party is still small, the Scottish Greens possess a genuine and substantial voter base of their own. Tens of thousands of Scots have come to view the Greens as their primary vote at all elections except Westminster, with its antiquated and unfair FPTP voting system.

However excited the social media bubble may get about tactical voting, it simply isn’t the key driver of Green successes in Scotland. The Greens don’t owe their existence to the SNP any more than they do to the Conservatives.