Developing methods for understanding the nature of voting patterns and party competition in Britain

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This research both develops new methods and expands upon existing methodologies in order to improve our understanding of voting patterns and party competition in Britain. The thesis comprises five sections, each of which relates to a particular research focus. The first and principal section describes the process of determining a new method for decomposing electoral bias for three-party competition under simple plurality rules of voting. The study of electoral bias is important for voting systems that requires periodic boundary reviews intended to equalise electorate and to remove malapportionment. These papers describe both the process for developing the threeparty bias method and later its application to UK general elections from 1983 onwards. The second section uses aggregate data gathered for the elections to the Greater London Authority in order to understand the patterns of electoral support across the capital, particularly support for minor parties. A considerable amount of research effort has been expended upon providing reliable models for electoral forecasting both in the UK and elsewhere. The third section includes a paper that develops a forecast model that utilises aggregate local election data to estimate national vote shares for the three main parties in the UK. A fourth section brings together a series of papers that are linked by the themes of voter behaviour, either in terms of geographical or ballot context. A study of voter turnout in a London borough describes the relationship between proximity to polling station and electoral turnout at different types of election. A 8 number of papers included in this section also detail the effects of candidate ballot order on electoral support. The fifth and final section groups together two papers that using individual-level survey data to describe the pattern of candidate recruitment for local elections in Britain and, specifically, the under-recruitment of both women and Black, Asian and other minority ethnic candidates

Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

Electoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour’s vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings

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Selecting Indexes of Electoral Proportionality: General Properties and Relationships

proportionality indices, electoral outcome, electoral disproportionality, statistical measures, votes, seats, wasted votes,

Voting systems in parallel and the benefits for small parties: an examination of Green Party candidates in London elections

In simple plurality voting systems smaller parties facing resource constraints may struggle to field candidates, particularly when the number of electoral districts is large. In the absence of a strong coordinating party organization, the pattern of contestation may also be sub-optimal – the small party fields candidates where support is minimal, ignoring other electoral districts where voters would support the party if it had stood a candidate. This article considers how and whether the separate operation of an Additional Member voting system running parallel to a simple plurality system assists smaller parties by providing low-cost information about the spatial distribution of voter support. Using aggregate voting data collected at the London ward level for both simple plurality local council elections and the separate mixed-member proportional system used to elect the Greater London Assembly we test whether the Green Party demonstrated an ability to modify and optimize its pattern of contestation. There appears to be little evidence of either a contagion or learning effect in respect of the location of Green candidates, suggesting that a free but valuable data source is unexploited

Changes in the probability of voter turnout when resiting polling stations: a case study in Brent, UK

Recent initiatives for increasing participation in UK elections have yet to replace the traditional method of in-person voting at designated polling stations. Recent research has shown that voter turnout can be sensitive to geographical factors relating to the costs of voting, such as distance travelled to the polling station; government policy has stated that accessibility is a key criterion when siting polling stations. With this paper we directly address these important issues by predicting the probability of electoral turnout to parliamentary, local, and European elections when polling stations are resited to optimal and suboptimal locations based on polling district voter density in the London Borough of Brent. The differences in these predicted probabilities show that, for some polling districts, resiting the polling place could improve the probability of turnout by up to five percentage points. These findings lead to some recommendations for future policy relating to the siting of polling places in the UK

Investigating differences in electoral turnout: the influence of ward-level context on participation in local and parliamentary elections in Britain

Electoral turnout is an important measure of the health of a liberal democracy. Although research identifies factors that affect electoral participation, we still know little about how electors in a specific location respond to opportunities to vote for different kinds of local, national, and supranational institutions. This paper addresses this issue by analysing the relative rates of turnout at local, parliamentary, and European elections within three time periods for the London Borough of Brent. It uses turnout data for individual polling districts to investigate whether relative differences in turnout are sustained across time, whether polling districts perform consistently or not for different types of elections and whether variations in turnout are related to marginality. The results indicate that turnout at different types of elections is not stable even within tightly constrained time periods and that there are statistically significant differences in the relative rates of participation between polling districts. Geographically, the differences in relative rates of turnout appear to be spatially clustered, particularly with respect to local elections and this may reflect an increase in the concentration of party campaigning in marginal wards

Electoral salience and the costs of voting at national, sub-national and supra-national elections in the UK: a case study of Brent, UK

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election – parliamentary, European and local elections – over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap – the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travelling to a polling station to vote in person are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of multi-level models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, marginality as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout, and other spatial and contextual variables, which are stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the siting of polling stations