Differential Party Votes in Multi-Member Electoral Divisions
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1975.tb00085.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1975 |
| Date | 01 December 1975 |
| Author | D. T. Denver,H. T. G. Hands |
| Subject Matter | Article |
DIFFERENTIAL PARTY VOTES IN MULTI-
MEMBER ELECTORAL DIVISIONS
D. T. DENVER and H.
T.
G.
HANDS
University
of
Luncaster
IN arecent article, ‘The Importance of Positionalvoting Bias in British Elections,’
G.
J.
G.
Upton and
D.
Brook presented evidence from local and general elections
which suggested that a candidate’s position on the ballot paper can have a signifi-
cant effect upon the number of votes that he receives. This effect, they said, helps
to account for the fact that in multi-member electoral divisions, candidates
representing the same party usually receive different numbers of votes. Before the
significance
of
‘positional voting bias’ can be properly assessed, however, the
whole question of why candidates of the same party receive different numbers of
votes needs to be considered in a more general way.
In this note we explore the sources of differential party votes in multi-member
electoral divisions, illustrating
our
argument from the results
of
the
1973
elections
for the fourteen new District Councils in Lancashire.
It
is worth noting at the outset that the question only arises because party voting
is the norm. We know that the great majority of electors vote
for
candidates
because they represent a particular party and not because of their personalities,
policy positions or whatever. We expect that in
a
multi-member division, there-
fore, supporters of a party will vote for every one of that party’s candidates.
As
we shall see, one of the most striking aspects of our evidence is the extent
to which it confirms this expectation.
In
all cases, however, candidates of the same
party receive different numbers of votes and in some cases the differences are
large. We have measured the spread of votes for candidates of the same party by
an index
of
vote ‘dispersion’, which we define as the standard deviation of the
votes for
a
party’s candidates as a percentage
of
the mean number of votes
received by the same candidates. Because most voters are party voters we would
expect the dispersion of party votes to be relatively small.
In
the Lancashire
elections this is certainly the case.
In
multi-member divisions, where there was a
full slate of Labour candidates
(138
cases) the mean dispersion of the Labour
vote was
5.9
per cent and for Conservative full slates
(149
cases) the mean was
7.0
per cent.
How then does this dispersion occur? There are two possible
sources
of differen-
tial party votes. The first might be called ‘unused votes’. In multi-member divisions
electors have as many votes as there are seats to be filled and if they do not use all
of
them, this may give rise to candidates of the same party having different vote
totals. The second source is ‘cross-voting’, where electors vote for candidates of
different parties. We shall deal with each of these sources of differential party
votes in turn.
UNUSED
VOTES
It
is
fairly easy to measure the percentage of votes which is unused in a multi-
’
G.
J.
G.
Upton and
D.
Brook,
‘The Importance
of
Positional Voting bias
in
British
Elections’,
Political Studies,
June
1974, pp.
118-90.
Political
Stodics.
Vol.
Xxm,
No. 4
(486-490)
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