Some Consequences of a Three-Party Split in a UK General Election

Abstract

The British electoral system is unique in Europe in being of the first-past-the-post variety. The apparent emergence of a strong third party renders any prediction exercise a good deal more difficult, although some political commentators appear oblivious to that fact. It would appear that a transition matrix approach is capable of providing the deeper insights needed to explore the consequences of alternative voting-behaviour patterns. Unfortunately data of this form are not currently collected, but it is possible to postulate that transition matrices of a particular form could be of interest to the three parties. By associating such transition probabilities with the 1983 results for each of the 633 mainland constituencies, one can derive interesting relationships between the number of seats secured by each party.

A range of computer analyses was performed, and this article sets out some of the more interesting results, some of which came as something of a surprise.

Keywords:

• elections
• Markov