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

[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?

[andrewducker]

If I was a member of the Christian People's Alliance then I'd currrently feel unrepresented in Europe.

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.