andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
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.
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.

Date: 2009-06-08 12:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] meihua.livejournal.com
Small clarification, I think you mean Liberal Democrats rather than this lot?

Date: 2009-06-08 12:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] meihua.livejournal.com
Heh, I think I was only aware of the other one through an LJ comment, possibly directed at you. :D

Date: 2009-06-08 05:28 pm (UTC)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)
From: [personal profile] matgb
Possibly from me—I lived in Exeter while I did my degree, sat on the Lib Dem exec there for a bit.

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.

Date: 2009-06-08 12:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] likeneontubing.livejournal.com
You raise a very interesting question there I think, to what extent should region and regional representation matter in these things?

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?

Date: 2009-06-08 12:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] e-halmac.livejournal.com
Hmmm yeah that is a little odd. And worrying but I'm only saying that because it seems to have enabled the BNP to get seats and I think they are bad news.

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.

Date: 2009-06-08 05:30 pm (UTC)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)
From: [personal profile] matgb
Scottish Parliament for Holyrood uses AMS, and it's regional.

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.

Date: 2009-06-08 02:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] skington.livejournal.com
Far fewer disgruntled people than if we'd been using first past the post, though.

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.

Date: 2009-06-08 02:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lpetrazickis.livejournal.com
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian. We have First Past the Post. Bloc Quebecois invariably gets 1/2 the votes but 2x the seats of the New Democratic Party.

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.

Date: 2009-06-08 05:37 pm (UTC)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)
From: [personal profile] matgb
And immediately either leaves, the total number of MEPs they get goes up substantially.

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).

Date: 2009-06-08 03:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] theweaselking.livejournal.com
In their defense, the Bloc get a *much* higer percentage of *all votes they are eligible to get* than the NDP do.

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.

Date: 2009-06-09 11:19 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] red-phil.livejournal.com
Perhaps the answer is to divide the country onto large regions. Say 6.
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.
From: [identity profile] 0olong.livejournal.com
It really disturbs me that Labour gets less than twice the votes of the Greens, and more than six times the seats. While the BNP getting less representation is a pleasing side-product of this bizarre way of doing it, the overall result strikes me as spectacularly undemocratic.

It *is* difficult to know exactly how to trade off local representation against overall proportionality though...

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