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

All in the family: partisan disagreement and electoral mobilization in intimate networks—a spillover experiment

We advance the debate about the impact of political disagreement in social networks on electoral participation by addressing issues of causal inference common in network studies, focusing on voters' most important context of interpersonal influence: the household. We leverage a randomly assigned spillover experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, combined with a detailed database of pretreatment party preferences and public turnout records, to identify social influence within heterogeneous and homogeneous partisan households. Our results show that intrahousehold mobilization effects are larger as a result of campaign contact in heterogeneous than in homogeneous partisan households, and larger still when the partisan intensity of the message is exogenously increased, suggesting discussion rather than behavioral contagion as a mechanism. Our results qualify findings from influential observational studies and suggest that within intimate social networks, negative correlations between political heterogeneity and electoral participation are unlikely to result from political disagreement

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

Rare and low-frequency coding variants alter human adult height

Height is a highly heritable, classic polygenic trait with ~700 common associated variants identified so far through genome - wide association studies . Here , we report 83 height - associated coding variants with lower minor allele frequenc ies ( range of 0.1 - 4.8% ) and effects of up to 2 16 cm /allele ( e.g. in IHH , STC2 , AR and CRISPLD2 ) , >10 times the average effect of common variants . In functional follow - up studies, rare height - increasing alleles of STC2 (+1 - 2 cm/allele) compromise d proteolytic inhibition of PAPP - A and increased cleavage of IGFBP - 4 in vitro , resulting in higher bioavailability of insulin - like growth factors . The se 83 height - associated variants overlap genes mutated in monogenic growth disorders and highlight new biological candidates ( e.g. ADAMTS3, IL11RA, NOX4 ) and pathways ( e.g . proteoglycan/ glycosaminoglycan synthesis ) involved in growth . Our results demonstrate that sufficiently large sample sizes can uncover rare and low - frequency variants of moderate to large effect associated with polygenic human phenotypes , and that these variants implicate relevant genes and pathways

The motivations for the adoption of management innovation by local governments and its performance effects

This article analyses the economic, political and institutional antecedents and performance effects of the adoption of shared Senior Management Teams (SMTs) – a management innovation (MI) that occurs when a team of senior managers oversees two or more public organizations. Findings from statistical analysis of 201 English local governments and interviews with organizational leaders reveal that shared SMTs are adopted to develop organisational capacity in resource‐challenged, politically risk‐averse governments, and in response to coercive and mimetic institutional pressures. Importantly, sharing SMTs may reduce rather than enhance efficiency and effectiveness due to redundancy costs and the political transaction costs associated with diverting resources away from a high‐performing partner to support their lower‐performing counterpart

Electoral participation and political context: the turnout – marginality paradox at the 2001 British General Election

Constituency-level analyses of electoral turnout commonly uncover a correlation between the marginality of a seat and the level of electoral participation in the seat: the closer the local contest, the greater the rate of participation in the election. However, repeated efforts to assess the impact of constituency marginality on the propensity of individual electors to participate have met with failure. The 2001 British General Election was no exception to either result. This presence of an ecological aggregate-level relationship which is not replicated at the level of individual voters is paradoxical. However, the paradox can be resolved when two analytical steps are combined. First, nonvoters are classified into two groups according to their reasons for abstention: those who abstain on purpose (‘voluntary abstainers’), and those who fail to vote for reasons largely beyond their control (‘involuntary abstainers’). Second, attention is paid not only to actual marginality but also to perceived marginality. Individuals who think their constituency is competitive are less likely to abstain deliberately than individuals who think their constituency is safe.