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Simulating Post-War Elections Under the Single Transferable Vote

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Simulating Post-War Elections Under the Single Transferable Vote SIMULATING POST-WAR ELECTIONS UNDER THE SINGLE TRANSFERABLE VOTE Dylan Difford Spring 2021 The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is one of the most popular voting systems among electoral reformers in the UK, favoured for its ability to produce broadly proportional outcomes while retaining fairly localised constituencies, as well as its maximisation of voter choice and election of all members on the same footing. But STV is no straight-proportional system. As a preferential-proportional system, it isn’t as simple as X percent of votes will lead to X percent of seats. Voters are free to allow their vote to be transferred between parties in accordance with their preferences, preventing wasted ballots and affecting the allocation of some seats. In order to analyse the potential effects of STV on the British party system, the Electoral Reform Society has, for each recent general election, created a model of how the vote may have gone under STV – using specially commissioned polls to see how voters would cast their votes on a preferential ballot paper and then projecting this onto a system of 3-6-member constituencies. Building on this work, I have gone back and projected every post-war general election result under the same system, utilising high-quality data on voter’s preferences from the British Election Studies. Additionally, to provide us with a non-preferential control, I have modelled each election under the Droop-LR variant of Party List PR – the closest non-preferential proportional system to STV. And have performed similar simulations on the five most recent European Parliament elections, as if they were general elections, to examine the effects of STV on more multi-party elections. In all, we hope that this can give us a strong indication of the potential effects of STV if it were to be introduced for British general elections. CONTENTS SUMMARY .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Methodology ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Health Warnings, Caveats and Provisos ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 6 Headline Tables ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8 Main Findings ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 12 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 24 1945 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 25 1950 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 27 1951 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 29 1955 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 31 1959 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 33 1964 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 34 1966 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 36 1970 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 38 February 1974 General Election .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 40 October 1974 General Election........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 42 1979 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 44 1983 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 46 1987 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 48 1992 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 50 1997 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 52 2001 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 54 2005 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 56 2010 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 58 2015 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 60 2017 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 62 2019 General Election ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 64 1999 European Election ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 68 2004 European Election ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 70 2009 European Election ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 72 2014 European Election ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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