Every now and then a petition to the UK government takes off and becomes a news story. The current one against President Trump’s state visit to the UK has just hit a million signatures.
As always, bear in mind that petitions are not censuses or surveys, this is one side of the argument, so the absolute number of signatures doesn’t necessarily tell us much. But in relative terms it is interesting, because we can look at percentage support for the petition in different constituencies.
Trump petition hits a million signatures. Some huge geographic variation, with support from over 5 per cent of constituents in some seats pic.twitter.com/ouOosnTOR0
— NumbrCrunchrPolitics (@NCPoliticsUK) January 30, 2017
The top 20 by percentage of December 2015 constituents (source: ONS) is dominated by culturally liberal bastions, particularly in London and university towns and topped by Green-held Brighton Pavilion:
The bottom 20 is led by Northern Ireland. Perhaps they’re too busy with their legislative election next month? But Brexit-supporting constituencies in Great Britain feature too, with Boston and Skegness the third highest outside of NI:
We need to be wary of the ecological fallacy here – for example, just because areas with lots of students are signing the petition, it isn’t necessarily the case that it’s the students themselves signing it, even though that may well be the case.
I’ll post more detailed analysis by politics and demographics later – sign up to get the link by email when it’s out.
See also: Trump petition has a 91 per cent correlation with second EU referendum signature constituencies.
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