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

[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.

[andrewducker]

I'd be against minimum cut-offs above 1.5%, precisely because Plaid Cymru and the SNP deserve to represent their constituents.

All simplified if Scotland and Wales had independence, of course :->

[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).

[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.