AMS

• AMS


  Additional Member System used in elections to the Scottish parliament, Welsh Assembly and Greater London Assembly (GLA)
• How AMS works


  1. Voters have two votes, one for a constituency representative elected using FPTP and another for a party list which uses multi-member regional constituencies, introducing an element of proportional representation

  2. The party list element corrects the constituency element by using the D'Hondt formula to determine how many members a party should be allocated from the lists

  3. Fewer list members than constituency representatives, known as 'additional' or 'top-up' members
• Scottish parliament


  • 73 of the 129 members are elected in single-member constituencies, with the remaining 56 being filled by list members
• AMS was chosen as a compromise that would result in a broadly representative parliament but not involve the radical change of STV, which the Liberal Democrats advocated for, and maintain local representation
• Labour expected AMS would enable it to play a part in government in Scotland and this proved correct until 2007
• After AMS had been agreed for Scotland it was decided to use the same system for Wales, where support for devolution was much weaker and in the Greater London Assembly
• On 26 Apr 2024, the Scottish government, which had been a coalition between the SNP and Greens, broke down after the Greens strongly criticised the SNP for abandoning a key climate change target and pausing the prescription of puberty blockers to new patients at Scotland's only gender services clinic for young people
• As a result, the Greens supported a no confidence motion against Yousaf, who soon after resigned as party leader and First Minister