[caption id="attachment_13132" align="alignleft" width="408"] Lord Salisbury on the drawbacks of universal suffrage. Cited in David Marquand, Britain since 1918, p. 54[/caption] MP, Peer, Secretary of State for India, Foreign Secretary, Leader of the Opposition, thrice Prime Minister of Britain, architect of the Empire and arch-Conservative. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury and colloquially known as…
The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants’ support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual’s support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters’ choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.
Colleagues/friends Matt Goodwin and Jocelyn Evans have created quite a stir with their report on the attitudes of BNP and UKIP supporters/voters. Obviously, UKIP is not happy at all about being lumped together with what remains of Nick Griffin’s party. Being introduced as a ‘polite alternative’ to the BNP (albeit with a rhetorical question mark)…
Being a political scientist is not considered an exciting occupation by people who have a life, and as party conversation topics go, electoral systems are pretty lousy. But with LibDem support somewhere in the high 20s (if the polls are to be believed), normal people start to wonder why 26% of the vote should give…
As a light-hearted follow-up to my post on the growth of the database state in the UK, here is a link to boing-boings [caption id="" align="alignright" width="426" caption="Well done, junior!"][/caption] “remix the British Transport Police’s paranoid turn-in your neighbour posters” campaign. Most of the pictures sent in are really good, and many of them look…
No western democracy has more surveillance cameras per citizen than the UK, and few European countries are collecting data on their citizens on such an Orwellian scale. The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has assessed 46 major government databases, and the result is devastating. About a quarter is almost certainly unlawful.
MLwiN, multi-level modelling granddaddy, is now freely available for British academics thanks to the ESRC funded Lemma program.
He can explain to a lay public why a spade in knife-crime is not totally unlikely and does not necessarily indicate an increase in the murder rate
Weird, sad but apparently true: at Nottingham University, a PhD student who works on islamic terrorism and an administrator were arrested (though released without charges) because they were in possession of an al-Qaeda manual downloaded from the internet. The twist: the manual was part of an MA dissertation and had been re-submitted as part of…