In search of Britain’s Muslim ghettoes

The local media have recently carried a number of stories suggesting that Muslim ghettoes are developing in British cities – a claim also made about European cities more generally. Analysis of data from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses of England and Wales suggests that these representations are journalistic hyperbole: most British Muslims live in small city blocks where they form only a minority of the local population. </jats:p

Uncovering interactions in multivariate contingency tables:a multi-level modelling exploratory approach

Much quantitative behavioural social science – a great deal of it exploratory in nature – involves the analysis of multivariate contingency tables, usually deploying logistic binomial and multinomial regression models with no exploration of interaction effects, despite arguments that this should be a crucial element of the analysis. This article builds on suggestions that the search for interaction effects should employ multi-level modelling strategies and outlines a procedure for modelling patterns in data sets with small numbers of observations in many, if not all, of their multivariate contingency table cells; all expected cells must be non-zero. The procedure produces precision-weighted estimates of the observed:expected rates for each and every cell, together with associated Bayesian credible intervals, and is illustrated using a large survey data set relating voting (and abstaining) at the 2015 UK general election to age, sex and educational qualifications. Crucially, while fine detail can be explored in the analysis, unreliable rates for particular subgroups are automatically down-weighted to what is happening generally. The identification of reliable differential rates then allows a simpler hybrid model that captures the main trends to be fitted and interpreted. </jats:p

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

Exploring constituency-level estimates for the 2017 British general election

Most opinion polls conducted during British general election campaigns report on each party’s estimated national vote share. Although of considerable interest, these data do not put the spotlight on the marginal seats, the constituencies targeted by the parties for intensive canvassing; these are where the contest for a majority in the House of Commons is won and lost. There have been some polls covering those constituencies as a whole, but very few of individual constituencies so there was very little reporting of the outcome for each party in those individual constituencies. That changed with the 2017 general election, when three analysts published estimates on the internet of each party’s vote share separately for each constituency and with those data predicted which party would win each seat. This paper explores the veracity of those estimates, finding that although in general terms they accurately represented the relative position of each constituency in the share of each party’s votes, nevertheless their estimates of which marginal seats would be won by each were not as accurate. The implications of such polls, especially as their predictive ability is improved, is discussed