Key electoral concepts

Key electoral concepts

1. SWING

   • The term means the number of votes that a party needs to win from othe party to win a constituency or an election
     • EG: A labour candidate has an advantage of 10% more votes than the conservative party. This means that at the next election, the conservative candidate will need to swing by 10%. Boosting their vote by 5% and reducing Labour by 5%

2. VOLATILITY

   • The term volatility means that the electorate is more likely to change their opinion by the next election
     • From previos elections we can see that the British electorate is fairly stable - The cons have one 4 (1979-1992) and Labour have one 3 (1997-2005)

3. CHURN

   • Even when the swing is small and voting appears to be stable, there may still be underlying volatility.
     • Large members of voters may be switching their loyalty between parties bot the overall impact evens itslef out and the headline statistics remains broadly the same