Quentin Langley read Politics under Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher at the University of Plymouth and now teaches Public Relations and Political Communications at Cardiff University.
There is a widespread belief that the Conservatives must achieve an enormous swing at the next election to win a majority – much bigger than at any election other than 1997. It has been widely reported in the media that the Conservatives would need to be 10 points ahead of Labour to win a majority, whereas Labour won a comfortable majority in 2005 with a three point lead.
Such reports are taken seriously, as though there was some precise relationship between the aggregate vote a party wins and the number of seats it wins: plug in the overall numbers and you immediately get the results for most constituencies, all except a handful that are too close to call. This is all myth.
The relationship between aggregate votes and seats won under the first past the post system is tenuous at best, and degrades rapidly as more parties enter the equation.
Cast your minds back to 1987 – if, that is, you are old enough. The BBC predicted – oh, sorry, projected – that the Conservatives would win with a majority of 26 when it turned out to be 102. This was based, recall, not on poor opinion poll data, but on actual early election results. They got the votes right, but the seats badly wrong. The margin of 11 points delivered a very healthy Parliamentary majority, though much smaller than the margin of 12 points earned for Tony Blair a decade later.
The media explanation for the difference between the ’87 and ’97 outturns is that the system is biased in favour of Labour. It is a neat narrative. Both sides can take some comfort: Labour supporters are reassured and Conservatives get to feel hard done by. But why is it, if the system is inherently biased towards Labour, that the BBC got the result of the 1987 election so badly wrong? Certainly some things – including constituency boundaries – have changed since then. But to switch from an unanticipated bias to the Conservatives to an even bigger bias to Labour in so short a period is astonishing. There is also no evidence at all for the proposition.
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