Sunday 9 May 2010
Electoral Statistics
The first General Election in my lifetime was in 1945. I was nearly seven years old at the time and so remember it well, though at the time I didn’t understand many of the details.
I remember being told that our bit of Leicester was part of the Melton constituency and that our MP was Anthony Nutting. I also remember that Winston Churchill, at the time considered that national saviour, was defeated as Prime Minister in favour of someone I‘d never heard of, but that Churchill was still a member of Parliament.
I later discovered that 1945 was a spectacular defeat for the Conservatives, who received only 39.7% of the total vote. A humiliation indeed !!
In the recent General Election the Conservatives won, or at least came nearer to winning than anyone else. They received 36.2 % of the total vote, so they’ve lost another 3.5% in the 65 years since 1945, yet they still seem to feel hard done by because they have no overall majority in the Commons. That is because they compare this election with the last, in which 35.3% of the vote gave Labour a working majority.
Funny things, British General Elections.
(I’ve taken percentages from the BBC web site. Wikipedia gives different figures but their percentages for 1945 don’t add up to 100. I wonder if they have a well paid vacancy for a statistical consultant ?)
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3 comments :
Following this election, media attention has focussed on FPTP vs PR. More information about the relevant statistics might help the argument but little of relevance has been published on the internet so far.
The average constituency was contested by 6-7 candidates so my 'gut feel' is that PR would result in a hung parliament every time instead of once every 30-odd years.
This would benefit parties coming third or fourth but few others.
Perhaps other matters are deserving of more attention at this time?
Welcome to this blog Stacey :-)
I think no proportional system would be likely to give a single party a majority, but see that as an advantage.
Government policies are usually compromises between different groups, but under the present system much of the negotiation is conducted in private between different factions of the ruling party.
When parties negotiate before forming a coalition, it is at least obvious that negotiation is taking place, and the electorate can determine the relative strengths of the parties negotiating more easily than it can determine the strengths of the various factions within a single party.
The present system allows parties with a minority of the vote to take turns enacting controversial measures of their own, and undoing those of their opponents. Coalition governments might avoid doing what will later need to be undone.
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