REFORM UK would be Scotland’s second largest party behind the SNP while Labour and the Greens tied for third if the Scottish election system perfectly reflected how people voted, polling expert Professor John Curtice has said.
The University of Strathclyde professor has produced a projection of how the new Scottish parliament would look if the voting system had been truly proportionally representative – meaning that each party’s share of seats in the parliament would mirror, as closely as possible, its share of the national vote.
Curtice said that the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections have produced the “biggest discrepancy yet” between how people voted and the numbers of MSPs returned.
Writing on the UK Election Analysis website, he said: “Between them the SNP and the Greens won 73 seats, 57% of all MSPs. It is the largest ever contingent of pro-independence MSPs at Holyrood.
“Yet between them the two parties won just 41% of the regional list vote. The avowed aim of the parliament’s mixed member proportional electoral system is to produce a distribution of seats proportional to each party’s share of the list vote.
“However, this is not the first time disproportionality has benefitted the party of government and its potential allies. However, it is the biggest discrepancy yet, even greater than that which favoured the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition at the first two Holyrood elections.”
Curtice said that the reason the 2026 election outcome was “so disproportional” was due to the constituencies. The SNP won 57 of the 73 constituency votes, the LibDems won seven, the Tories four, Labour three, the Greens two, and Reform UK zero.
Curtice said that the SNP’s 19-point lead over the closest rival nationwide in the constituency vote meant the party was set to win the majority of the contests. “Only those where one of its opponents was especially strong locally were likely to avoid its grasp,” he said.
He went on: “In short, the gains and losses of constituency seats that arose as a consequence of locally exceptional party performance reduced the total tally of pro-independence MSPs by two – and thus helped to reduce the scale of the disproportionality in favour of pro-independence MSPs.”
Curtice noted that the SNP’s share of the regional list vote “was a record 11 points below that in the constituencies, which “served to increase the pro-independence disproportionality”.
He said that if every Holyrood seat had been allocated on a completely proportional representative system – as happens under the new electoral system in Wales – then the SNP would have won 18 fewer seats.
According to Curtice’s calculations, a fully proportionally representative Scottish Parliament election would have resulted in:
- 40 SNP MSPs (-18)
- 24 Reform UK MSPs (+7)
- 20 Green MSPs (+5)
- 20 Labour MSPs (+3)
- 14 Tory MSPs (+2)
- 11 LibDem MSPs (+1)
As such, the combined tally of SNP and Green seats would have been 60, 13 down on their actual total and five short of a majority.
There would be 69 pro-Union MSPs, four above the 65 needed for a majority.
However, divisions in the Unionist side, such as a Labour refusal to back a Reform UK first minister, would likely have seen John Swinney remain in power leading a smaller minority government.
Curtice concluded: “Holyrood’s electoral system was devised by Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Initially it served their interests well.
“However, after landing the SNP a majority in 2011 on just 44% of the vote, it has now, on the same tally, given the SNP and the Greens the largest ever majority of pro-independence MSPs.
“The first law of politics is the law of unintended consequences.”
