Steven E. Galatas, "Electing the First Parliament: Party Competition and Voter Participation in Scotland," Party Politics, 10 (March 2004), 213-233.

First Paragraph:
In 1999, Scottish voters went to the polls for the first time to elect a Scottish Parliament. Although Scotland had a legislative body prior to the Treaty of Union of 1707, the new Parliament created in 1999 was the first democratically elected Scottish Parliament. Elections to the Scottish Parliament featured a deviation from the single-member district-plurality system (SMD-P) familiar to Scottish voters from other electoral contests. Instead, voters selected Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) using an additional member system (AMS). Because AMS tends to deny any party an overall majority of seats in a legislature, the selection of AMS for the Scottish Parliament reflected an attempt to induce an era of coalition government andconsensus policy-making in Scotland to contrast with the confrontation style prevalent at Westminster (Myles, 1999). Moreover, the choice of AMS reflects, according to Myles, recognition of the degree of multiparty competition that existed in Scottish local elections and in Scottish constituencies for the British Parliament. The AMS was designed to induce proportionality in the vote-to-seat ratio of Scottish Parliament elections.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Party composition of the Scottish Parliament, 1999
Table 2. Voter turnout by region, Scottish Parliament election, 1999
Table 3. Correlation between closeness and turnout, Scottish Parliament, 1999
Table 4. Effective number of parties, single-member district seats, Scottish Parliament, 1999
Table 5. Relationship between closeness measures and turnout, Scottish Parliament, 1999
Table 6. Turnout and closeness - First and Second ballots, Scottish Parliament, 1999
Table 7. Turnout and closeness - competitiveness index - 1st and 2nd ballots, Scottish Parliament, 1999
Table 8. Summary statistics

Last Paragraph:
Ultimately, the findings presented here establish that the theoretical literature linking closeness to voter turnout holds for a multiparty, hybrid electoral system. Using measures of closeness appropriate for multiparty settings, the findings help to explain turnout in the Scottish Parliament election. The finding suggests that a non-linear measure of turnout offers another step toward improved measurement of closeness and the linkage between turnout in two-party, single member district systems on the one hand, and multiparty, hybrid systems on the other.