Dodgy Electoral Analysis
Jun. 8th, 2009 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Chatting about the electoral results, I was wondering how much skew was produced by the country being polled in regions, rather than as a whole.
What's interesting is that Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalist party) only got their seat because Wales was polled as a seperate region, and it's clear that this system does allow small regional parties more clout, but minor national parties (the Greens, BNP, English Democrats, Christian People's Alliance and Socialist Labour) do worse out of it.
Not sure how I feel about that...
Edit to Add:
8.5% of people voted for a party that got no MEPs at all. That's a lot of disgruntles people, I'd imagine.
Party | Percentage | Potential MEPs | Actual MEPs | Unearned MEPs |
Conservative | 27.7 | 19.1 | 25 | 5.9 |
UKIP | 16.5 | 11.4 | 13 | 1.6 |
Labour | 15.7 | 10.8 | 13 | 2.2 |
Liberal Democrat | 13.7 | 9.4 | 11 | 1.6 |
Green | 8.6 | 5.9 | 2 | -3.9 |
BNP | 6.2 | 4.3 | 2 | -2.3 |
SNP | 2.1 | 1.4 | 2 | 0.6 |
Plaid Cymru | 0.8 | 0.6 | 1 | 0.4 |
English Democrat | 1.8 | 1.2 | 0 | -1.2 |
Christian | 1.6 | 1.1 | 0 | -1.1 |
Socialist Labour | 1.1 | 0.8 | 0 | -0.8 |
What's interesting is that Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalist party) only got their seat because Wales was polled as a seperate region, and it's clear that this system does allow small regional parties more clout, but minor national parties (the Greens, BNP, English Democrats, Christian People's Alliance and Socialist Labour) do worse out of it.
Not sure how I feel about that...
Edit to Add:
8.5% of people voted for a party that got no MEPs at all. That's a lot of disgruntles people, I'd imagine.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 05:28 pm (UTC)If the old continuity Liberal party didn't exist there in force (on a personal vote for a few of their decent longserving councillors) then I'm pretty sure that a) the LDs would run the council and b) Ben Bradshwaw wouldn't be an MP, let alone the new Culture Minister.
Because if he'd run as an LD, the old Liberal candidate would've got my vote, instead I tended to split and vote for Bradshaw.
@Andrew, I prefer regionalising the lists (if we have to have bloody lists, I blame Blair for that), because it means you have representation from different areas—national lists work OK for smaller countries (especially Sweden where most of the population is very close to Stockholm), but are poor for larger countries, the party liners get more and more power.
In addition, EU rules mean national lists have to have a 5% threshold cutoff, hence your analysis is wrong, you need to remove all the parties listed below the BNP completely.
Which would be wrong, as the SNP, in particular, ought to have MEPs given they're in Govt in your neck of the woods.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:30 pm (UTC)Whilst I think giving Wales/Scotland a chance to get some seats in is obviously a very good idea, I think the smaller national parties will always suffer from *something* on account of being small. If we did the vote nationally, would they be much better off? Wouldn't they still be ridiculously small?
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:37 pm (UTC)And I don't think that that feeling that your vote doesn't lead to some kind of representation is good for politics. I think it leads to voter apathy.
So I'd like to keep it to a minimum - where only people voting for a party that gets less than (say) 1.5% of the national vote are left without anyone standing up for them.
As it is we have 8.5% of the population whose votes meant nothing, and that means a lot of people feeling disillusioned - people who actually bothered to vote.
Single Transferrable Vote would have meant that most of those votes went to someone that they'd then feel represented by.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:34 pm (UTC)Out of interest, how does this system compare to the one in Scotland? I think we vote for local candidates and regional party list (or is it national?). Meaning it should (?!) be more representative of the vote overall. But have never checked in realation to the figures as you have done.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:39 pm (UTC)And the BNP would have got 2 _more_ seats under a fairer system.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 05:30 pm (UTC)But within each region, top up seats are allocated in exactly the same way as for the Euros, divide total votes cast by seats held, then share out the extras, etc.
I really don't like lists, top up or otherwise, but they achieve proportionality, at the cost of voter empowerment, and favour larger parties over independents, etc.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 12:38 pm (UTC)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_999999.stm
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:33 pm (UTC)Here's what the results would look like nationwide according to a d'Hondt simulator. It gives slightly different figures from yours, possibly because d'Hondt isn't simply a matter of "divide the votes by 69 and see what happens".
Also, nationwide you'd probably have some sort of minimum score required (I think many countries use a 5% threshold) to avoid a plethora of tiny parties.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:40 pm (UTC)Regarding these results: Nation-wide votes that distribute seats proportionately tend to also have a minimum percent cutoff (no seats for 4% or less). Really small parties have a hard slog in either model.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:45 pm (UTC)All simplified if Scotland and Wales had independence, of course :->
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 05:37 pm (UTC)But as I said above, cutoff is 5%, for very good psephological reasons. I dislike lists partially because they effectively need to have cutoffs (for reasons why, look at Israel, they keep changing their margin but it never really makes much of a difference).
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:45 pm (UTC)The NDP get fewer seats than their vote percentage says they should, but comparing them to the Bloc is neither fair nor accurate, because the Bloc aren't eligible to receive any votes at all from 2/3 of the country.
Comparing the NDP to the Lib or CPC or Green gives a better idea.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-09 11:19 am (UTC)Each region gets a number of MEPs proportional to their population.
Then use proportional representation within each region to get the overall national result.
I'm not big on politics, but that seems to me to give a balance between regional representation and overall proportional representation.
This is largely beside your specific point, but...
Date: 2009-06-09 09:57 pm (UTC)It *is* difficult to know exactly how to trade off local representation against overall proportionality though...