Liberal Democrats slump in polls… but will win more seats

The Liberal Democrats continue to decline in the polls, now down to 15% according to Yougov for The Sun.  This has been interpreted as due to an exodus of left-wing LibDem voters turned-off by the fiscal sanity of the Coalition government, of which the LibDems are a part.

I don’t vote LibDem, I vote Conservative but I want the Coalition to succeed and that requires the LibDems to avoid decimation at future elections.  Whilst it is likely that they will lose seats which they are contesting with Labour, they should hold there own in contests with the Conservatives, although this assumption completely ignores how being in coalition affects this dynamic.

I’m not losing sleep though, because as I describe here and here, the number of LibDem seats is weakly negatively correlated with their share of the vote – i.e. more votes, fewer seats.

Don’t try and change public opinion

In an article mainly about something else, Richard Black of the BBC describes the often frustrated attempts by environmentalists to change public opinion.

Campaigners – and sometimes politicians – spend hour after anguished hour debating how to reach people who are not currently interested in, or aware of, environmental issues…

Environmental groups paint murals, film-makers recount the demise of life in the oceans.

Rock bands develop “lower-carbon” tour plans, wildlife groups encourage us to take the kids out for a day’s nature observing in the countryside (you know, that other place, the one where we don’t live, that has more cows than cars…)

But still – in the campaigners’ world view – the balance weighing public opinion stubbornly refuses to shift.

“Raising awareness” often seems like the last refuge of someone who doesn’t know how to achieve their goals.  You are saying that someone (usually government) should do something about this, whatever “this” is.  Why don’t you do something about it yourself?

If climate change is your enemy, don’t go around moaning about oil companies or buying the Guardian and feeling smug; become an engineer and design a new technology or process that helps.  Too difficult?  Well don’t blame others for not yet succeeding then.  Maybe you are not an engineer, but you have an eye for a good idea, or marketing or something.  New ventures need these skills too, so find an engineer and get on with it.  Or is it just safer and more fun to moan from the sidelines?

Perhaps you are appalled by poverty in the developing world?  Surely a wristband and a Live8 concert will do the trick? Or maybe you will have to find out about microfinance and economics instead, and then work out what action you should take, and take it.  Don’t go on about how other people (government) should be spending other people’s (taxpayers) money, and get on and spend your own damn time and money and effort making a difference.  Oh, and treat people in developing countries as grown-ups, not supplicants for your soul-salving hand-outs of other people’s money.

I know, I know, easier said than done.  And some things, such as injustices caused by bad laws, do need changes in public opinion (or at least the opinion of law-makers) in order to occur.  But always, always, think first: What can I do?  Don’t default to thinking about what other should do.

Disproportional Representation update

I figured you were desperate for me to update the analysis in the last blogpost with the results of the 2010 election, so as it’s you…

This graph shows how the 2010 election results (large blobs) fit into the overall picture.

The next graph shows how the parties did in terms of how many seats they won per % of the vote.

Last time we observed that the winner had always come out on top by this measure.  This time round though, despite the Conservatives ending up as the largest party (albeit without a majority), Labour actually got more seats per % of their vote.  The unfortunate LibDems saw this measure decline for them this time round.  Further, the negative correlation I identified last time has done for them again this time.  Between 2005 and 2010, their share of the vote increased from 22% to 23%; however, they actually lost 5 seats, going from 62 to 57.  Apparently this has caused much upset to Billy Bragg.

Disproportional Representation

In case you didn’t know, there is a general election in the UK tomorrow.  The Liberal Democrats, the third party, have been agitating for a change in the electoral system for some time, because their representation in parliament is consistently much lower than it’s overall share of the vote would suggest is fair.

Without getting into whether or not a change in the voting system is a good idea (personally, I like the current first past the post system), let’s take a look at the figures.  I took the results in terms of seats gained and proportion of the vote won in all general elections between 1983 and 2005.  Early results for the LibDems are actually for the Liberal-SDP alliance, their precursor party.  Data points are colour-coded – blue for Conservative, red for Labour, and yellow for LibDems.

As you can see by the pattern of the data, the parties have to get to 15-20% before they get any seats at all.  Given that this is close to where the LibDems have polled this obviously puts them at a disadvantage.

Another way of showing this disadvantage is by calculating the number of seats won per percentage of the total vote achieved.  For example, if a party won 25% of the vote and got 250 seats, that would be 10 seats per %.

This chart shows two things.  First, it confirms the disadvantage that the LibDems have to fight against.  But more interestingly, at every election the winning party gets more seats relative to thr proportion of their vote than the opposition.  The Conservatives won the 1983 and 1987 elections by large margins, but also got more seats proportional to their actual vote.  The same can be said for Labour in 1997, 2001 and 2005.  The Conservatives very narrowly one 1992, where the proportions for Labour and the Conservatives are almost identical, with the Conservatives just shading it.  It also shows that the increase for Labour of seats in relation to their vote is more or less matched by the LibDems.

Finally, some stats.  The correlation between Conservative seats and vote share is 0.99; that for Labour is 0.96.  This shows an almost perfect positive correlation between vote achieved and seats gained (a perfect positive correlation is 1, a perfect negative correlation is -1, and no pattern at all is 0).  Weirdly, the LibDem correlation comes out as -0.27, that is the bigger share of the vote they get the fewer seats they win.  They really don’t do well under this system do they?  Having said that, looking at the first graph does not really show any such pattern for the LibDems, so it is probably a spurious result.