Paul's Pictoral Parliament Predictor

[ciphergoth]

The position on the diagram indicates the proportion of votes cast; the colour of the circle indicates composition of the resulting parliament. The hollow circles indicate hung parliaments, and the ones with white dots indicate a 3/5ths majority.

The white triangle indicates the region where no party has a majority of the votes, with the subdivisions showing which has plurality, so the point where the three lines meet is the point at which all three have equally many votes.

Updated to use labels Three points on the diagram are labelled; one marks the results of the 2005 general election from which the entire diagram was extrapolated, and two of them mark results from recent polling data and what sort of Commons this model predicts from that data.

The means of extrapolation is pretty ropey - I'd be interested to know where to look to find better ones.

This is of course a work in progress.

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Is the resemblance to a woman's bikini region my own sordid invention, or a cunning part of your plan? :)

[postmodern-minx.livejournal.com]

So clever, i really enjoyed your historical version that includes a time axis also.

pm

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

My own bias of course means I'm more interested in the spread of seats within a parliament rather than just which is the largest party. That said, I do like how your triangle neatly shows how much the current system favours Labour - to the degree where a Lib Dem national vote share over 50% produces an overall majority for Labour (or even for a couple of dots with a majority for the Conservatives).

Would I be right in thinking that a line from the last result to the current polling prediction would map the currently indicated swing - and how much of that swing would lead to a hung parliament rather than majority?

I'd also be interested to see previous GE results plotted on the chart, for all that boundary changes have subtly altered the figures. Speaking of which - are your calculations based on the 2005 seats or the predicted 2009/10?

[silverclear.livejournal.com]

I really want to understand what this shows, it looks fascinating, but I don't know what it's trying to represent! Can you explain first of all what one dot means? And what does the whole picture represent? Am I being dumb?!

[sibelian.livejournal.com]

These days, of course, if you showed this diagram to any ordinary member of the general public they'd run away in fear and swear never to vote again because it's too complicated.