In Focus: Margins of Victory in 2019
| Author | Benjamin D. Hennig |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820911743 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
22POLITICAL INSIGHT•MARCH 2020
In Focus
Margins of
Victory in 2019
The 2019 General Election
produced the most decisive
result in more than a decade.
It not only left Boris Johnson
with a comfortable majority that
would allow him to finally pass the EU
Withdrawal Agreement, but the scale of the
Conservative victory also gives the prime
minister huge political leeway with another
general election not due until 2024.
The General Election result leaves the
opposition parties – first and foremost
Labour, but also the Liberal Democrats
– with the challenging task of rebuilding
their parties and reworking their policies
if they are to regain voters’ trust in those
constituencies where they lost out, while
not alienating voters that remained
loyal and delivered some sometimes still
convincing majorities for the opposition
benches.
Looking at the different margins
of victory in each of the UK’s 650
constituencies provides a very useful
way of understanding the scale of the
Conservatives’ triumph from both a
political and a geographical perspective. It
also gives some idea of the strategies that
opposition parties might need to employ
in the future if the Conservative majority is
to be seriously challenged.
Under the UK’s first-past-the-post voting
system, elections are traditionally won in
key battleground seats and by targeted
campaigning to make most of the votes
received in individual seats. In December
2019, the Conservatives’ 43.6 per cent
vote share was enough to win an absolute
majority in Parliament with 56 per cent of
the seats. Labour, in contrast, was much
closer at their actual vote share of 32.2
per cent, with 31 per cent of seats in
Parliament.
While the voting system mostly
benefited the Conservatives with
their over-proportional share of seats,
smaller parties suffered most from this
discrepancy. The Liberal Democrats lost
out significantly, having secured 11.5 per
cent of votes which translated into less
than 2 per cent of seats in Parliament. Only
the Scottish National Party also benefited
slightly, securing 3.9 per cent of the overall
vote (despite only standing in Scotland),
but over 7 per cent of seats.
Changing the voting system is unlikely
to be on the new government’s agenda,
as it hardly ever is for a governing party,
since first-past-the-post usually serves
the winning party most. A more detailed
analysis of the majorities where seats
changed hands in 2019 therefore helps to
dissect the winning strategy that helped
the Conservatives win this election so
convincingly.
The large hexagon map is a
representation of these margins of
majority. It shows each parliamentary
constituency represented by a hexagon (for
technical reasons, some minor changes in
constituencies in recent years are reflected
in split and merged hexagons). Each area is
coloured in by the winning party there, and
each hexagon is then resized according to
Benjamin D. Hennig looks beyond the British general election
headlines to map winning margins and turnout where it matters most
– in individual seats.
the overall margin of the party’s majority
compared to the second placed party.
For comparison, a ‘normal’ hexagon map
also shows further details by adding more
information on how each constituency’s
party representation has changed
compared to the 2017 General Election
under Theresa May.
At the 2019 election, seats that changed
hands had an average majority of 6,747
votes, while the average majority between
the victor and second place in seats that
were held was double that figure, at 13,693
votes. These majorities vary significantly,
not only geographically but also between
parties. The Conservatives kept their seats
with an average majority of 16,056 votes,
compared to Labour with 11,782 votes
difference on average in their held seats.
In contrast, where seats changed hands
to the Conservatives, this majority was on
average smaller than the average margin
of majority in those seats (5,867 votes
difference, shown in the map in the very
small blue hexagons), while the 13 seats
that Labour gained were won with an
average majority of 14,473 votes.
While policies do matter, it also is
obvious that the arithmetic of voters and
the scale of defeat will play a crucial role in
Labour’s hope for winning the next general
election. The next election will most likely
not be centred around a divisive issue
such as Brexit which made it easier for the
Conservative party to win a considerable
amount of former Labour seats. A relatively
small swing to Labour would allow it
to regain a number of constituencies
it lost. Similarly, where this time the EU
referendum’s ‘Remain’ voters were deeply
split across a number of parties, the first-
past-the-post system could be helpful for
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