Questions about past British elections...

[TheElectoralBoobyPrize]

Note: I have noticed this subforum is full of discussions about FUTURE elections..if you want to move my thread, that's fine by me.

1. How is it Labour managed to get a parliamentary majority in 2005 even though they only won the popular vote by 3 percentage points? The Conservatives won it by 7 points in 2010, and they STILL COULDN'T GET a majority. They also got a slightly higher percentage of the overall vote (36% versus 35%). Obviously, the districts were biased towards Labour, but why was this the case?

2. Why did Black Wednesday in 1992 hurt the Conservatives' popularity so much when it didn't cause a recession or anything?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

1. Efficient vote distribution, that's all. You can find far more extreme examples further back: e.g. the Conservatives won an overall majority in 1951 despite actually trailing Labour in terms of votes and won a very large majority in 1959 (one hundred seats!) with only a 5pt popular vote win. The critical thing in 2005 was that Labour was still popular with swing voters (and so held up very well in provincial and outer-suburban marginals) but polled historically poor results in many urban constituencies, largely due to the Iraq War. The latter didn't actually cost many seats (because they had such large majorities in 2001) but it put a big dent in Labour's national percentage. Conversely in 2010, the Conservatives failed to win a majority because the Liberal Democrats won a large number of constituencies that, prior to 1997,* had been 'automatically' in the Conservative column. Constituency boundaries had very little to do with anything.

2. Because it shattered their reputation for economic competence amongst swing voters who had, up until that moment, done very well out of the Thatcher-Major governments. People without firm partisan loyalty (a growing share of the electorate since the 1970s and not at all distributed evenly in geographical terms) who vote for you because you promise to make them richer tend to be a little bit pissed off when they suddenly find themselves grimly familiar with hitherto arcane terms such as 'negative equity'. The same people turned very sharply against Labour after the financial crisis, of course.

_{*And in 2015 and 2017...}

[Hydera]

Note: I have noticed this subforum is full of discussions about FUTURE elections..if you want to move my thread, that's fine by me.

1. How is it Labour managed to get a parliamentary majority in 2005 even though they only won the popular vote by 3 percentage points? The Conservatives won it by 7 points in 2010, and they STILL COULDN'T GET a majority. They also got a slightly higher percentage of the overall vote (36% versus 35%). Obviously, the districts were biased towards Labour, but why was this the case?

2. Why did Black Wednesday in 1992 hurt the Conservatives' popularity so much when it didn't cause a recession or anything?

Actually it did cause a recession.



The jobs created after the early 1980s recession was wiped out and it took several years to reach the peak in 1992.

[Lord Halifax]

1. Efficient vote distribution, that's all. You can find far more extreme examples further back: e.g. the Conservatives won an overall majority in 1950 despite actually trailing Labour in terms of votes and won a very large majority in 1959 (one hundred seats!) with only a 5pt popular vote win.

Labour won by 2.7 points and 17 seats in 1950, you must be thinking of 1951.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

1. Efficient vote distribution, that's all. You can find far more extreme examples further back: e.g. the Conservatives won an overall majority in 1950 despite actually trailing Labour in terms of votes and won a very large majority in 1959 (one hundred seats!) with only a 5pt popular vote win.

Labour won by 2.7 points and 17 seats in 1950, you must be thinking of 1951.

Typo corrected lol. But the point stands.

[TheElectoralBoobyPrize]

Note: I have noticed this subforum is full of discussions about FUTURE elections..if you want to move my thread, that's fine by me.

1. How is it Labour managed to get a parliamentary majority in 2005 even though they only won the popular vote by 3 percentage points? The Conservatives won it by 7 points in 2010, and they STILL COULDN'T GET a majority. They also got a slightly higher percentage of the overall vote (36% versus 35%). Obviously, the districts were biased towards Labour, but why was this the case?

2. Why did Black Wednesday in 1992 hurt the Conservatives' popularity so much when it didn't cause a recession or anything?

Actually it did cause a recession.



The jobs created after the early 1980s recession was wiped out and it took several years to reach the peak in 1992.

My understanding, though it's not easy to tell from that graph, is that the recession was in 90-91 just like in the U.S. so Black Wednesday came afterwards (92), but the economy grew after that.

I could've phrased my question differently...what effect did Black Wednesday have on the average British voter? Were they just mad that the Tories had raised interest rates so much trying to keep the pound in the ERM?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Answered already, see above.