afleitch
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Atlas Star
Posts: 29,865
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« on: February 15, 2023, 03:42:47 PM » |
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You may remember I gave this a shot, right back to 1974, a while ago.
Well I wasn't happy. I had set off far too reluctant to commit to local election results and far more reliant on simple regression. I also 'did my own' thing rather than consider the work done before, particularly from the teams that complied the 'official' notionals.
So I looked right back, waded through decades worth of voting behaviour papers (thanks Internet Archive) and carried out a slow, town by town, revision.
Principles
1. Align with 'official' notionals. Yes there's a few well known 'misses' built in, but overall the 1979 and 1992 sets weren't too bad.
2. 1992 Notionals used the 1994 Regionals as a base and I have too, with a slight twist....
3. Communities. Regression is quite good for socio-economic derived results, but it does strain when dealing with a four party system. Using 1981 and 1991 Census data, I allowed each officially defined 'populated area'(settlement) of over 10000 to be treated as one unit and using the 1994 local results as the base as would have been the case in the 'official' notionals. In urban (and partisan) District Councils this allowed for neat division with little left over 'rurality.'
The 1995 Unitary elections were held in wards (mostly) collapsable into the 1994 Electoral Divisions. The national results and the local pattern was broadly similar to the elections in 1994 so allowed for a subdivision of any larger ED's to create 'communities.'
In rural District Councils where there were partisan elections, towns over 10k could be defined as a separate communities (St Andrews, Elgin, Peterhead, Perth etc). How important smaller rural towns were to their respective hinterlands is of course not necessarily based on population size but on accessibility and industry. I used the official Travel to Work areas based on 1981 and 1991 Census definitions in these areas giving prominence to centres such as Oban, Huntly and the fishing towns in Grampian.
5. In rural Regions where District Council areas were defined as mostly non partisan (see Denver, Bochel etc), the Districts themselves were mostly used as blocs due to lack of results/contested wards within them. When the Districts were created, they were often created on the basis of established community ties and Travel to Work Areas.
Even with this you will still see local patterns of support at the time (SNP in Wigtown, Labour in Lochaber etc). The exception to this was the town of Inverness which was sizable enough to be treated distinctly.
6. Cities. In the four main cities, consideration was given the the type of housing tenure/stock. So post-war estates were sizeable enough to be considered as separate and growing (or in most cases, contracting) communities. More historic and established parts of cities both middle class and working class would have had a more established voting tradition.
This will be more evident the further back you go (as is the previously discussed phenomenon of New Town politics in the 1970's/1980s.)
7. Islands. Still a bugbear. Very small wards, with very local issues. There was some partisan voting in more 'urban' areas within them, but they remain the least reliable of the estimates.
As with last time, 1992 is the base. And as with last time, the colour scheme isn't the gap between the winning party and who came second, but the overall vote share of the party that won.
1992
Also new this time, is a party share map; so starting off with the winners, Scottish Labour
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Rather than talk at you, I'm happy to take any comments or questions to help explain any patterns that you find.
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