Another World is Inevitable: Mapping UK General Elections

Danny Dorling, Oxford UniversityA talk that concentrates on the very recent past and especially in 2015. There will also be speculation about what the future may hold, not just in terms of new political mapping techniques but in the much wider range of possible electoral outcomes we should consider as being plausible.

Rather like meteorologists, political scientists have a tendency to use recent events to predict the political weather. However, if and when the climate changes, what was once thought to be impossible becomes reality. From choosing which colours to use to depict a growing range of parties on the map, through to how we might depict uncertainly in our predictions, we have choices to make.

Are we ready to entertain the possibility of rapid change? Eventually everything always changes. At some times change comes quickly

It was life’s losers and the old who disproportionately voted to leave the EU in June 2016. Losers can be found everywhere, especially among the middle classes, and most in the south…..

Some lovely mapping before the election

This map appeared in the Guardian in April 2015.

I guess hand-drawn.Using poll data it suggested

Liberals could still win in the SW of England

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng- interactive/2015/apr/20/election-2015-constituency-map

The BBC put animations over Lancashire

Population proportional to volume?

Sadly the flying graphics fell out of favour

James Jacob Gilchrist Berry held #13

The BBC set – HEXAGONS! & Emily Maitlis – almost too

much…

The Telegraph were quick but crude with the

actual result

Oxford East gains neighbour…

Actual ResultApril

Poll

The Observer was garish

But the polls were not

that far out when it

came to the map

Ben Hennig started mapping while on holiday (Lancashire again)

The Guardian started

mapping vote

shares.

Oxford East is a rabbit?

Ben mapping from the air

Using an algorithm first generated to show US election maps and used by

Mark Newman and colleagues

US election winners – 2012 election (democrat = blue, republican = red)

Or show vote shares with many shades of purple

To end with… Ben’s maps:to begin – who came

2nd?

A quick key map…

The UK is looking more like the USA.

Just 25% of the electorate canget a majority.

But unlike the US we no longer have two major

parties even though the third was decimated

Compare the LiberalsTo UKIP.

Libs do well near to where UKIP poll low

The SNP have most support in cities.

Plaid is more rural

The cartograms of change may tell you most you

need to know.

Slowly spatial divisions are splitting the UK apart

ever wider…

Poverty and wealth remain

the best predictors of who

wins where…

Conclusion (1)With the first election of 2015 one simple graph

might tell us more -

The second election result was

revealedon September 12th

2015

Showing swings now

needs a tetrahedron!

So what about the future?

Conclusion (2) People are learnt not to tell pollsters the truth and how to ignore them.• We must learn to stop suggesting that elections are forgone conclusions,

especially years before they are held – unless we have other motives• The Richmond by election is to be held on Thursday – will voters learn from

Chester and Sheffield Hallam in 2015 and vote tactically?• We need to start to accept that many parties and a highly divided

electorate make predicting the outcome harder under first past-the-post• The 2015 election was the most geographically segregated election in all of

UK history – that suggests that we are at a potential turning point• It is not due to the SNP but their showing was the best for a third party

since Sinn Féin’s 73 seats win of Ireland in 1918. There is little that unites this kingdom today

• The young are the voters who are new. Almost half will have massive student debt by 2020, many of the rest have been sanctioned, forced to pay higher and/or higher rents

The young are key and unpredictable, almost a majority stopped voting after the 1990s poll tax

Conclusion (3 and final): There are no forgone conclusions – to be expert is to say you don’t know what will happen and why you don’t know

• The Conservatives will find it hard to win if the young choose to vote at the next election

• Many efforts have been made to stop them registering to vote and most rent privately now

• If and when the new constituencies are introduced the redrawing of boundaries mainly effects Labour areas which means re-selection

• The last time that housing prices fell – in the early 1990s, the Conservatives lost control of many outer London boroughs. Prices never rise forever

• We like to tell ourselves stories that make us believe that we understand what is going on in the world. We like to hear that the future is predictable

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A final map – England with counties sized by the fall in the value of housing in the summer of 2016 – since the housing prices are said to have stabilized, but in the three months to November 2016 Zoopla recorded only 7,000 sales in London, half the number compared to the three months before, which was half the number in the six months before that….

Another World is

Inevitable

Thank you!