Freeborn Adam

Musing over the last few days following the electoral results, I’ve formed a hypothesis. I’m not a political analyst, so it might not be a new hypothesis, but it certainly seems to be one that is testable to a degree, so I thought it worth pursuing.

My first question was, if the Liberal Democrats seemed so popular in the polls, how come they consistently do so bad in the elections? We all know that they will, we knew that they would though the degree to which they did came as even more of a shocker than usual. I saw the popular support for them dwindle in the polls after the first Leader’s Debate and it was often presented in political commentary as if a childish fascination with Nick Clegg’s presentation skills was somehow giving way to the more traditional, sensible views of the two main parties. I think this is utterly and unspeakably wrong. My sense was that basically people who wanted a change started to bottle it as the election approached because they know that the Liberal Democrats could not get elected, so fell back into traditional patterns of voting against the party they didn’t want rather than for the part they did want.

My second question lead on from this. If people resorted to voting against the party they didn’t want (and here I refer to a battle between the Conservatives and New Labour), how did this result in a voting pattern that resulted in distorted seats for each of the two main contenders and significant loss of seats for the other parties? What is it about voting patterns across the country that resulted in Labour getting 29% of the vote and 39.7% of the seats, while Liberal Democrat get 23% of the vote and 8.8% of the seats? (I’d like to add here that I have no party political axe to grind on behalf of the Liberal Democrat Party. They are simply the best example to use to demonstrate the dis-proportionality of the system).

The only pattern I can think of that can result in such an outcome is one where Labour and Tory votes are heavily clustered, while Liberal Democrat votes are far more evenly spread. Clustering votes in regions will, in a first past the post system, give advantage to those parties who cluster and disadvantage those parties whose support is uniformly spread. This is pretty well understood, old news I know. It’s why we refer to the Labour and Tory “safe seats”. It’s why the Liberal Democrats cannot readily increase their women MPs in the same way as Labour because having no “safe seats” denies them the strategic opportunities that Labour have. I wanted a clearer confirmation though. So I took a spreadsheet of every constituency and votes within that constituency. I removed, for clarity, all those constituencies that did not have either a Labour, Tory or Liberal Democrat ppc, and then I looked at the standard deviation of the percentage votes for each party across all remaining constituencies.

It has been a long time since I have done any maths involving this sort of statistics, but to a statistician it is pretty basic stuff, only one step up from averages. If you don’t know, the standard deviation is (in lay terms) a measure of how wildly a set of numbers deviate from the average or central point. So, if one particular party got very low votes in some areas, but very high ones in other areas, I would expect to see a standard deviation that was quite high. If they got a similar proportion of votes in each area, the standard deviation would be low.

That is indeed what happens. Labour and Conservative get pretty much the same deviation,14.6 and 15.9 respectively. The Liberal Democrat Party however, get a significantly lower figure, 10.5. (I attach the spreadsheet in case anyone should be geeky enough to want to check the figures).

It is interesting that Labour and Conservative get similar figures. It is what I would expect, since areas that have high Labour support tend to have lower Conservative support and vice versa (a pattern pretty much born out by re-ordering the spreadsheet and glancing down the columns).

I would venture to suggest that this is still a traditional class battle played out over decades. This clustering is representative of local cultural values that go back to the height of Britain’s industrial age. Voters’ response to Toryism and Labour is a visceral response, often rooted in local community memory and or aspiration. The Liberal Democrat Party appeal is very much more philosophical. Take the opening paragraph from “Its_About_Freedom“, the definitive statement of the philosophy and beliefs that underpin the Liberal Democrat party.

The core of the Liberal Democrat intellectual inheritance is Liberalism. We start from the autonomy and worth of the individual. Any interference with the freedom of the individual to live as he or she chooses requires to be justified, if it can be, by reference to a system of values drawn from that primary recognition of individual freedom.

Such an intellectual position, rather than a class value based one, is going to have a much broader base of appeal, much more evenly spread through communities. It can be agreed with and ardently believed in by those from disenfranchised communities struggling with poverty and the closure of industry as readily as it can be by those in city business communities, though it is frequently characterized as the province of the middle classes.

It is a truism, I think, that one remains most strongly attached to that against which one struggles most violently. I don’t see that we have much chance in this country of transcending class distinctions and the privilege based system it brings until we move beyond a First Past The Post voting system and re-enfranchise those individuals, those beliefs and values that look beyond simply seeing another party as an enemy to be defeated in the polling station or on the benches of parliament.