After repeating the mantra that local elections are local, the overall performances of the main parties at local elections are often discussed by journalists and others. This commentary tends to focus on the numbers of seats and councils won and lost by each party. But these can be hard to interpret given the very different numbers of seats up for grabs each year and their different profiles at different points in the cycle. Continue reading Local Elections Vote Shares: the BBC PNS and Rallings & Thrasher NEV compared →

This is quite hard to tell the pattern of vote switching from one party to another from the aggregate ward-level data alone because of the well known ecological inference problem, but some insights can be gleaned from the pattern of correlations in the changes in party shares. Continue reading English Local Elections 2012: Who won votes from whom? →

In yesterday’s Scottish local elections, both Labour and the SNP were up and the Tories and Lib Dems were down relative to when they were last run in 2007. Continue reading Scottish Local Elections 2012 →