Dave butler radio11/15/2023 ![]() ![]() The 1906 election was the subject of a Presidential Address to the Royal Statistical Society by Sir Richard Martin. ![]() Unfortunately it suffered from an abstruse mathematical error which the great Maurice Kendall, here at LSE, uncovered in 1950 when I drew his attention to the article. A later piece about the LCC elections of 1897 by my cousin, Francis Edgeworth, was, I think, the first attempt to produce a formula for the relation between votes and seats. Another notable one came in 1896 when J.A Baines contrasted the elections of the 1890s. One was by H.R.Droop, the originator of the ‘Droop quota’. From 1857 onwards half a dozen articles about elections appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. published in 1892.įrom the 1860s Thomas Hare, John Stuart Mill and others explored proportional representation there was also some scholarly writing on the effects of the extension of the franchise. It contrasts interestingly with Joseph Grego’s lively History of ParliamentaryElectioneering from the Stuarts to Queen Victoria. Edmund Green and his colleagues at Newcastle have spent thirty years producing the most monumental collection of election statistics yet seen in Britain. just published but covering the 18 th century? It is the two volume Elections in Metropolitan London 1700-1850 ( ). He recorded every constituency result from 1832 to 1992 with the votes conveniently set out in percentage form.Īs an aside, I would like to applaud a study. Much more recently these statistical chronicles were trumped by that dedicated archivist, Fred Craig. For a while it had a lively rival in the Pall Mall Gazette series. The Times House of Commons was first published in 1885 and, with the exception of 1922-24 it has continued to this day. ![]() The Constitutional Year Book followed suit in 1885, carrying on until 1939. McCalmont’s listing of constituency results started in 1879 and continued until 1918. Also between the Great Reform Act and the Ballot Act of 1872 there was a proliferation of local parliamentary poll books (still only partially mined by historians). The systematic collection of voting statistics goes back, I think, to Samuel Lewis with his mapping of the post-1832 constituencies. So some of what I say will be embarrassingly autobiographical.Īcademically, British electoral studies can be said to have begun with The British General Election of 1945 by Ronald McCallum and Alison Readman. At the moment when psephology was emerging as an academic subject, I was there among those labouring in a field that was virtually untilled. But I happened to be around at the beginning. Over the last sixty years many people, far cleverer than me, have developed the study of elections in ingenious and important ways. This talk is going to sound rather egocentric- but not, I hope, boastful. David’s talk published here was given at a British Government event at the London School of Economics on Thursday 20 March 2014. David is a highly respected colleague and we continue to be grateful for his support of the BES. He is viewed by many as the inspiration for the subsequent study of British elections. David ran the first British Election Study survey in 1964 with Professor Donald Stokes. David Butler is Emeritus Professor at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. ![]()
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