Abstract
One feature of the result of the 2015 British general election was the reduction, to a level lower than at any time since 1945, in the number of marginal constituencies. This paper shows that the main reason for this was the change in the level and pattern of support then for the country’s smaller parties, compared to the previous election in 2010. Although support for the two largest parties—Conservative and Labour—changed very little, the 2015 result nevertheless meant that each had fewer marginal seats to defend and more safe seats where its continued incumbency was virtually assured. After the 2015 election, Labour’s chances of becoming the largest, let alone the majority, party in the House of Commons were slight unless it achieves a swing of some six percentage points.
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Notes
The Speaker’s seat is by convention not contested by the Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats; he won in Buckingham by more than 20 points in both 2010 and 2015.
See, for example, J. Blumenau and S. Hix, ‘Britain’s evolving multi-party systems’, LSE British Politics and Policy Blog, 31 March 2015, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/britains-evolving-multi-party-systems/. Accessed 1 Dec 2016.
A Chi-square test on the raw data showed a statistically significant difference (p < 0.001) between the two distributions: Liberal Democrat voters in 2010 were more likely to switch their support to Labour if they lived in a Labour-held marginal constituency than if they lived in one that was Conservative-held.
Curtice et al. (2015, p. 418) also show that several of the seats that Labour won from the Conservatives in 2015 had large Black and Minority Ethnic populations: in four the mean percentage White was 94 per cent; in the other six it was 64%.
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Johnston, R., Pattie, C. & Rossiter, D. A re-dividing nation? A newly polarised electoral geography of Great Britain. Br Polit 12, 521–535 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0052-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0052-x