Dodgy Electoral Analysis

[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.

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Heh, I think I was only aware of the other one through an LJ comment, possibly directed at you. :D

[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.