Disproportionality and Bias in the Results of the 2005 General Election in Great Britain: Evaluating the Electoral System’s Impact

MPs' Responses to a Proposed New Constituency Map: Electoral Prospects, Community Ties and Party Organisation

“…was also much more favourably treated than the Conservatives would have been with the same vote shares (Johnston et al, 2001(Johnston et al, ,2006. This pro-Labour bias resultedfroma number of components of which one -although not the most important (Johnston et al, 2001;Rallings et al, 2008;Borisyuk et al, 2010;Thrasher et al, 2011) -was differences in constituency electorates.…”

Representing People and Representing Places: Community, Continuity and the Current Redistribution of Parliamentary Constituencies in the UK

“…This combined two sets of proposals: the first established a binding referendum on whether the voting system for elections to the House of Commons should be changed from first-past-the-post (single-member plurality) to the alternative vote (a slight Conservative concession to the Liberal Democrats' desire for electoral reform); the second changed the procedures for the reviews of Parliamentary constituencies (Johnston and Pattie, 2012). The latter was the outcome of growing Conservative concern that the current system led to results that were biased against them (something well-established by academic research since Labour's 1997 landslide election victory: Johnston et al, 2001Johnston et al, , 2006Borisyuk et al, 2010b;Thrasher et al, 2011) and that variations in constituency electorates -seats won by Conservatives tend to be substantially larger than those won by Labour (Johnston and Pattie, 2012) -were a major cause of this 5 Somewhat paradoxically, the shift to larger, multi-member electoral divisions when STV was introduced for local government elections in Northern Ireland meant that the wards prescribed in the legislation were no longer used for electoral purposes.…”

Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

“…From the 1970s on, analysts noted that the various British parties were not treated equally in the translation of votes into seats (the classic work is Gudgin and Taylor, 1979; see also Johnston et al, 2001): with the same share of the votes cast one party would obtain a larger share of the seats than its opponents. This became particularly clear at the 1997, 2001 and 2005 general elections when it is estimated that the Labour party won 82, 141, and 111 more seats than the Conservatives would have done with the same vote shares at those three contests (Johnston et al 2006). This pro-Labour bias was evaluated using a method developed for analysing bias in two-party systems, as discussed below, but became less valid to the evolving three-party situation: this was eventually addressed by extending the method so that it could be used for threeparty systems, with analyses of bias focussing upon the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties (see C ' recent extension (2015) G T that three-party situation).…”