If all politics is local…

If all politics is local, yesterday brought some very important data. Following a lengthy exercise, Martin Rosenbaum and George Greenwood at the BBC have obtained electoral ward level breakdown of the EU referendum vote for over a thousand electoral divisions across Britain.
With these we can both reconstruct Westminster constituencies, or look at local patterns. The data is a timely reminder that even Brexit heartlands had “Remain” areas, While areas that were solidly Remain also included Eurosceptic patches.
We also learnt, postal voters were more lively to vote Remain than non-postal voters, and in fact may even have voted Remain nationally. But as I explained in my analyis,postal votes (specifically the way they are counted) are also the reason why some of this data needs to be caveated.
This release has got plenty of attention elsewhere – Ian Warren put them into map form and Chris Hanretty has compared them to his constituency-level estimates (spoiler: they were very good).
And since you all love charts, see these from James Kanagasooriam on the demographics of the ward level vote. How the “London versus provinces” pattern interacts with partisanship is particularly interesting.
On the subject of local elections, Wales will be having them everywhere in May, and Roger Scully has written this preview, in which e manages to shoehorn in a reference to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian!
That’s all folk

Get it before it’s on the website – sign up for this briefing:

#mc_embed_signup{background:#eeeeee; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Please send me (select as required):
Email Format





About The Author

Related Posts