[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Coveting the crown (click to view)
Date: May 7, 2010
So Britain's big election yesterday yielded the inconclusive results everyone anticipated. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party fell from first to second place in the parliamentary seat count, displaced by David Cameron's Conservatives. But the Conservatives didn't win a majority either, and according to British parliamentary customs (which are distinct from Canadian customs, see my blog post below) that means Brown gets to stay on — providing he can meet some preconditions.

The main precondition comes in the form of Nicholas Clegg and his Liberal-Democrats, the third-biggest party in parliament. If Brown can win him over, he's golden. But! In theory Clegg could just as easily support Cameron, so basically whatever party he backs will wind up in power, and he's already entered into negotiations with both leaders.

Though he may playing kingmaker now, Clegg was by far the biggest disappointment of the entire election. While his party received an enormous amount of positive media coverage and he was widely considered to have won Britain's first-ever prime ministerial debates, the Lib-Dems actually ending up loosing seats rather than making any sort of breakthrough.

It thus must be more than a tad degrading for the leaders of parties who won five times as many seats as this guy, who can't even win 60, to go around begging for his support.

Check out the full results on BBC.com.

[Thanos]

George Galloway finally lost his seat. And the party leader of Galloway's pro-terrorist fringist party didn't even gain one. The neo-Nazis in the BNP also took a major thumping as well. Decent people everywhere should be rejoicing over those particular results alone.

[hoshie]

Hey JJ!

Its great to see you back cartooning. I also like the new blog as well. You have captured the gist of the election aftermath well.

However using the results as they currently stand, Labour and the Lib Dems can't govern alone by themselves as a majority. If you put their seat totals together, they have 315 seats, 11 short of a majority (326 being required). The only way I can see Lab and the Lib Dems governing is with the help of the regional parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Here are some scenarios I've come up with since the results came in showing how the Conservatives or Labour can govern:

#1: Conservatives form a minority: 307 seats
#2: Conservatives and Lib Dems together: 364 seats
#3: Conservatives with support from DUP: 315 seats
#4: Labour and Lib Dems form a minority: 315 seats
#5: Labour and Lib Dem with support from N. Ireland parties: 327
#6: Labour and Lib Dem with support from Scottish/Welsh nationalists: 324

These numbers assume that an undecided constituency in Yorkshire votes Conservative at the end of this month. The election in one constituency was postponed because one of the candidates died during the campaign.

Keep up the good work JJ!

[KyleEverett]

I think the biggest reason I dislike the first past the post system is that a political party that has 23% support across the nation only has 8.77% of the representation. Its a shame that a viable third party is so limited. Or worse that a party that only 40% of the population supports is able to win an overwhelming majority of seats.

FPTP I feel works rather well in a 2 party system, but once you have more than 3 viable parties it really starts to show its weakness.

The only reason the Labour and Conservative parties are so resistant to it, is because they now their representation will drop.

And if Brits are worried about the nutjob parties such as the BNP set a rather high threshold, like 8% or something.

Oh, am I the only one amused that the Monster Raving Looney William Hill Party polled better than the BNP in some constituencies?

[Kjorteo]

The Liberal Democrats turned 23% of the popular vote into 57 seats, while Labour turned 29% into 258. I'm told that LD has election/representation/how-votes-turn-into-seats reform as one of its major issues, and I'm now beginning to understand why.

I'm mostly just amused at the difference at how Canada and UK treat "no one party has more seats than everyone else combined" scenarios. Canadians go through minority governments all the time, and many actually seem to prefer them (it's sort of a check against the Prime Minister being able to do absolutely whatever he wants, after all,) whereas the gist I got from the BBC's helpful "what does a hung parliament mean?" side information articles in their coverage leading up to the election was "we're all doomed."

[martin14]

Brown has already announced his resignation:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/poli ... 672859.stm




It's perfectly normal for the party to engage in some political dealmaking
to arrange a coalition.

Still can't see a Tory - Libdem agreement, just too far away on policies.


But, at least Brown is out.

[Marcus_Ozius]

I understand that in Westminster style systems there is often some rather bizarre math that comes into play to determine representation, however, not being in a Westminster system most of the time, I am uncertain as to the actual numbers and rules. Does anybody know the way it works in the UK and how it differs from that in Canada? I believe that most countries do it their own way and have threshold limits based on how many tiny third parties they want to allow in, but, again, I'm uncertain, and this is really basic anyway.
Any assistance?

[Quantum_Wizard]

Marcus_Ozius, I don't think there's any bizarre math at least in the parliamentary elections. MPs are elected from single member districts with First Past the Post. Isn't it the same for Canada?

[Kjorteo]

It appears that there is now indeed a Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition government.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/poli ... 676216.stm

I must say I'm surprised, as they're... not very idealogically similar. I'm tempted to say it's a smart move for Clegg, though, as I'm sure that electoral reform had to have been one of the big carrots Cameron must have pulled out to actually convince Clegg to join him (martin14's article about Brown stepping down mentions that both sides were trying to woo the LD with an alternate vote system.) I just don't think a Conservative/LD coalition is stable enough to last very long, but if they can get AV in before the coalition goes down in flames, then LD could position themselves to do well in the inevitable followup election.

Edit: And here is a page discussing various alternate voting models and how they would have affected the 2010 parliamentary election results. Again, it's a fair guess that one of these is actually going to happen for the Liberal Democrats to have agreed to join the Conservatives.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/poli ... 644480.stm

[martin14]

Looks like the Tories had to commit to a 4 year term,

and a tax break for married couples and inheritance will be stopped.


They havent confirmed many details yet,

looks like Clegg will be Deputy Prime Minister.



But look at it this way.

In a year, the economy will be better. If this deal does start to fall apart,
the Tories can pile the blame on the Libdems and go for their own majority.

If it doesnt fall apart, the Tories can continue.

[JJ]

Marcus_Ozius wrote:

I understand that in Westminster style systems there is often some rather bizarre math that comes into play to determine representation, however, not being in a Westminster system most of the time, I am uncertain as to the actual numbers and rules. Does anybody know the way it works in the UK and how it differs from that in Canada? I believe that most countries do it their own way and have threshold limits based on how many tiny third parties they want to allow in, but, again, I'm uncertain, and this is really basic anyway.
Any assistance?

You seem to be thinking about a country with a "proportional representation" based electoral system, where seats are distributed according to a party's share of the popular vote. Neither Canada nor the UK have such an electoral system, though the Lib-Dems want it, as mentioned above.

Canada, the UK, and the US all use the same elect-one-member-from-a-geographically-defined-electoral-district electoral system, which makes them increasingly unique among western democracies, most of which use the proportional system. It's less of an issue in the US, because the House of Representatives does not pick the president, so it's a purely a state-representative body.

Do they even keep stats regarding the national "popular vote" of congressional elections? It doesn't seem particularly relevant information.

[hoshie]

Hey JJ!

The US Federal Election Commission has kept nationwide tallies of House and Senate elections since 2000. See their library page here. Look for documents that start with "Federal Elections".

[Psudo]

JJ wrote:

Do they even keep stats regarding the national "popular vote" of congressional elections? It doesn't seem particularly relevant information.

Anytime you say "Do they keep stats?" the answer is always "Some stats-obsessed nerd somewhere surely must."

I'm sure you personally, JJ, know most of this already, but I'm going into depth in case others might not and because I enjoy doing so.

On the specific issue of national senate popular vote, there's no way to get a true national popular vote from one election because only a third of senators (called a "class" of senators, and numbered I through III) are elected every two years. There's no reason to believe the sum of elections of senators in any given election year would be representative of national sentiment in any reasonable or useful way, and national sentiment would, of course, change a lot over six years.

BUT! If you tracked the popular votes for the individual classes of senators separately, you could probably create a graph of party fellowship that fairly reasonably tracked the national reality. It's not the raw popular votes, mind you, but the change in popular vote over time that is relevant. Think of Ted Kennedy's four thousand consecutive election victories; he always won, but not always by the same margin. That he won is virtually irrelevant (as there are no changes to track), but doing better or worse in different elections is. Summing such differences for elections across the country and comparing them only apples to apples and oranges to oranges (either by class or by state) would be substantially informative.

My inner stats-obsessed nerd is all excited by the very idea of such an analysis. ^_^ =] !!

In any case, The Office of the Clerk of the US House of Representatives keeps stats on popular vote in senatorial elections by state since 1920. Senators were not elected by popular vote before 1920; rather, they were elected in a manner chosen by the individual state, usually by a vote of members of the state House of Representatives or some other indirect democratic method. Wikipedia has pages for some senatorial election years (such as this one for 1998) that include the national sum totals for all senatorial elections, but not for the full range back to 1920.

Between 1996 and today (the range for which Wikipedia has the sum totals), Republicans only beat Democrats in popular vote for senate races once, in 2002. Even when Republicans gained seats, they still got less total popular vote nation-wide. Presumably this is because solid Democrat-for-Senate states win by much larger margins than solid Republican-for-Senate states Democrats tend to carry large population states and Republicans smaller ones.

[Edited because QW's argument is better than mine.]

[Quantum_Wizard]

Psudo wrote:

Between 1996 and today (the range for which Wikipedia has the sum totals), Republicans only beat Democrats in popular vote for senate races once, in 2002. Even when Republicans gained seats, they still got less total popular vote nation-wide. Presumably this is because solid Democrat-for-Senate states win by much larger margins than solid Republican-for-Senate states.

Other important reason is probably malapportionment. The number of senators doesn't correspond to state population. I'm under the impression that Republicans are, on the average, stronger in smaller states. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Marcus_Ozius]

Republicans tend to do very well in the sparsely populated western states, Montana, the Dakotas, and others in that region. Essentially, there are only a few states between the Mississippi river and the solidly Democratic pacific coast that are ever contested and this is more a result of a migration to that region by retirees. What interests me in the next election is seeing the impact of the flight from the sunbelt of the demographics (latinos excluded) which were starting to turn them democratic. Fill up Arizona with a few thousand retired teachers and a few thousand more yuppies and it may go blue, nowadays when both of those groups are having a hard holding on to what they've got? It should be interesting.