Entry tags:

politics

European election numbers, part II
So, a little more numbercrunching; more to follow later.

Lets divide the parties into three not-quite-arbitrary groups. Firstly, there's the major parties - the ones people tend to think of as "the real parties", Conservative, Labour, & the Liberal Democrats. Then, there's the mid-rank parties (UKIP, Green, BNP, SNP, Plaid) - these have all at least had seats somewhere, and in some cases such as UKIP or the SNP are major powers in their own small niches. Lastly, the minor parties, everyone else. The outstanding oddity is Respect, who got a quarter of a million votes in 2004 - more than the SNP! - and then vanished; we'll call them mid-rank. UKIP, whilst steadily growing in stature in the European elections, are still really a mid-rank party. Finally, to be tidy, I've combined the "main" and Scottish Green Parties in both elections, and lumped the various Christian Party factions together.

The three majors all lost votes, in absolute terms. The Conservatives managed an increase in vote share, a couple of percentage points, but dropped 200,000 votes; Labour lost six points and 1,350,000 votes; the Liberals lost half a point and 350,000 votes. Oddly, this is pretty much the same as the reduction in overall votes - 1,900,000 votes lost to the majors.

The second-rank parties did pretty well. UKIP picked up a point but lost 150,000 votes; the Greens picked up two points and 190,000 votes; the BNP picked up a point and a half and 135,000 votes; the SNP picked up three-quarters of a point and 90,000 votes; Plaid kept the same share but dropped 35,000 votes. Respect basically ceased to exist, unsurprisingly. Net change for the group as a whole, in real terms: almost nothing. Note also the interesting correspondence between UKIP's vote reduction and the BNP's vote increase...

"Protest votes", well. 1,250,000 in 2005, 1,280,000 in 2009. The distribution's changed wildly, though; before, you had one party at 0.75% (English Democrat), a couple around half a point (Liberal, Christian Vote), and dropping steadily from there. Now, there's four parties we'd class as protest votes with more than 1% of the electorate (English Democrat, Christian Party, Socialist Labour, NO2EU), and three more with about half a point each (Jury Team, UK First, Libertas).

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There's something faintly bizzare about that, isn't there? The top tier of parties lost a huge swathe of votes; the absolute numbers voting for the established third parties remained constant, and the absolute numbers voting for the "protest parties" remained constant. It's far too convenient and glib to be able to say "well, it was only mainstream-party voters who stayed home", but... well, it's seeming a more tempting inference. The increased bunching in the bottom tier is also interesting - are we seeing the nuclei of any new third parties here?

Two further bits of research I want to do here - track this back and see what the "blocs" look like in the 1999 and 1994 elections; and compare the voting patterns of the regions between 2004 and 2009. Otherwise, any thoughts? I'm not arguing this is a desperately meaningful way of looking at things, but it's certainly interesting.