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

[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.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely better than FPTP. Not as good as STV though.