Research on UK General Election 2015

[Darat]

Been reading a really interesting bit of research on the last general election here in the UK. http://www.ippr.org/juncture/learning-the-right-lessons-from-labours-2015-defeat

It looks at many of the different factors that determined the eventual votes, obviously a bit of hindsight creeps into it but they do seem to have done an interesting piece of research.

One thing stuck out to me that may be of special interest here - where we've had several discussions about Labour moving to the left/right and whether a movement to the left wing/right wing influenced the last election:

...snip...

The second red herring is Labour’s left–right position – that is, the question of whether Labour was either overly or insufficiently left-wing. Generally, our data shows that people were more likely to vote Labour in 2015 when they thought the party was more left-wing, and less likely to vote Labour when they thought it was centrist.


...snip...

This suggests there is very little to the argument that Labour was too left-wing to attract voters. At the same time there is not much to support the argument that Labour was not left-wing enough. There was very little difference in the likelihood of voting Labour between someone who thought Labour sat at the left-most end of the scale (0) and someone who saw it as just left of centre (4) – it is only when people saw Labour as sitting to the right of this point that support really drops off

...snip...

(Please do read that entire section if you want to discuss it - the two quotes I give above are only to whet the appetite rather than the represent the entire content or conclusions.)

As ever it appears in the real world things are never as simple as we'd like them to be!

 

[uk_dave]

It is an interesting read....haven't got through all of it yet, but was curious about how the Lib Dems collapse played out in the increase of Labour votes....

To understand Labour’s gains better, figure 3 shows the inflow to and outflow from each party between 2010 and 2015 (post-election data). Note that this data has not yet been corrected for the overestimation of Labour support, while further investigations are completed.

There is a lot of detail to digest in this chart, but three points are important to note. The first is that the Conservative-to-Labour flow is roughly equal to the Labour-to-Conservative flow. So we need to better understand where Labour and the Conservatives won and lost support from other parties in order to understand the overall outcome. The second point to note is the much greater successes Labour had among former Lib-Dem voters compared to the Conservatives: Labour won about the same proportion of former Lib-Dems as the Conservatives, Greens and Ukip put together. The third is that the Conservatives lost much more support to Ukip than Labour did.

 

[malicus]

It is an interesting read....haven't got through all of it yet, but was curious about how the Lib Dems collapse played out in the increase of Labour votes....

There were seven seats where the flow of Lib Dem votes to Labour allowed Con gains. Seven. In a twelve seat Con majority parliament. The reader is invited to do their own math. Of course, had the Lib Dems kept those seats a re-coalition (is that a word?) would likely have been on the cards.

I have been trying unsuccessfully to find a quote I read many moons ago from a political strategist, which was along the lines of "It only takes forty thousand votes to win an election in the UK, and I know where those forty thousand votes are."