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UK election charts

To properly show the state of play between the three main parties in the UK, the simple two-way swingometer is inadequate. How would simultaneous swings from Labour to both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats affect the result?

The plots here show at a glance the state of play. Each point corresponds to a constituency. If it's in the Labour corner, Labour holds that seat; if it's in the Conservative corner, the Conservatives hold that seat; if it's in the LibDem corner then the Liberal Democrats hold that seat.

A national swing, if it's replicated across all constituencies, would have the effect of moving all points by the same amount in the same direction. This lets us see at a glance which seats are vulnerable, and how big a swing is needed to change the overall result.

The charts are in Adobe Acrobat format. The constituency names are printed very very small; use the Search facility in Acrobat to find your constituency.

General Election 2010

See separate page.

General Election 2005

[share of vote, and swing] [share of vote, by region] [swing, by region]
The swing from Labour to Conservatives at the constituency level mirrored that nationwide. However, in Labour/LibDem contests the swing to the LibDems was much stronger than nationwide, and in Conservative/LibDem contests there was no swing at all.

General Election 2001

[share of vote, and swing]
This was a dull election. There was little swing nationwide, and only a handful of seats changed hands.

General Election 1997

[share of vote, and swing]
The blue lines in this chart indicate seats that the Conservatives lost. This is what a rout looks like.

Resources

The historial data comes from Electoral Calculus by Martin Baxter, with figures for Northern Ireland from Richard Kimber. 2005 data comes from the BBC. The analysis is in R.

For code, see [analysis.R], [readdata.R], [utils.R]. Data files come from Electoral Calculus, and also use [2001.csv] and [regions.csv], [2005const.csv], [2005turnout.csv], [2005cand.csv].

D.Wischikatcs.ucl.ac.uk