Top 20 Blogs

Iain Dale is going to do his list of the top 100 political blogs again. Unlike last year where it was decided by a benevolent/malevolent dictator (depending where people ended up) this year there is going to be some interaction with the reading public, as should be expected from this interactive medium.

We are being asked to list our favourites in order of preference, this means that it is not a simple first past the post system as used in our electoral system and could well be something more like Single Transferable Vote or one of the other proportional representation systems. The most know PR system is the Party list used in the European elections. This system has the dubious honour of being one of the few that is worse at keeping our elected representatives in line with the wishes of those they represent than even the first past the post system.

Under the current First Past the Post voting system there was on average a change of:
55 Conservative seats
56 Labour seats
7 Liberal seats

Due to the nature of the First Past the Post system this will not exactly corelate with the percentages of the vote they got.
Conservative vote percentage standard deviation = 6.43
Labour vote percentage standard deviation = 5.76
Liberal vote percentage standard deviation = 6.6

This means that under a party list system on average there would be a change of:
37 Conservative Seats
41 Labour Seats
42 Liberal Seats

So under a First Past the post system on average there have been 18 Conservative and 15 Labour MPs or candidates worried about there jobs, and therefore more eager to please the voters that they rely on for their jobs, than there would have been under a Party List system. This makes a parliament under first past the post that bit more keen to represent their constituents well under a first past the post system because more MPs jobs are likely to change at the next election if they are not seen to do good job. However both of these system would be worse than a Single Transferable Vote system, like Ian may well be using for his list, where every single MP can loose their seat if they are not seen by the voters to be doing a good job, and therefore every single MP (not just the unlucky few) has to work hard to please their constituents, which is how it should be.