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Paper

Distortion magnified: New Labour and the British Johnston, Ron Rossiter, David Charles, Pattie Dorling, Danny Uploaded 07-26-2001 Keywords electoral bias Britain gerrymander Abstract UK election results show not only the characteristic disproportionality associated with plurality systems but also considerable bias in the allocation of seats relative to votes for the two main political parties (Conservative and Labour). Over the period 1950-1997 (the 1950 election was the first using constituencies defined by independent Boundary Commissions) this bias both increased and shifted from favouring the Conservatives to favouring Labour. By 1997, Labour would have won 82 more seats than Conservative with equal vote shares - the largest bias recorded for the period: and then in 2001 the pro-Labour bias increase to 141. This paper explores the reasons for this shift, using a procedure developed by Brookes for measuring and decomposing bias. Labour benefited because of the geography of iots successful campaigns in 1997 and 2001.

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Paper

A method for measuring and decomposing electoral bias for the three-party case Borisyuk, Galina Johnston, Ron Rallings, Colin Thrasher, Michael Uploaded 03-26-2008 Keywords electoral bias decomposition of bias British parliamentary elections Abstract The paper provides a method for measuring and decomposing electoral bias for the three-party case. It builds on the two-party method first developed by Ralph Brookes in the late 1950s. Modifications to the original Brookes method developed in the early 1990s were designed to capture the third party effect in the overall distribution of bias but that bias continued to be expressed in terms of the two major parties. Recent general election results in Britain continue to show strong voter support for the third party. This new method specifically considers the three party situation and calculates both overall bias and also its decomposition at the 2005 general election. The results from this new method are then compared with those found by the Brookes method for each election held since 1983.