Despite the hung parliament, who wins the election matters

Another one from "the other place" so, again, apologies about charts not quite fitting. This is about the potential legitimacy crisis that we're heading for if the party that 'loses' the election forms the government. In practice, I suspect that Conservative supporting newspapers will support any arrangement that puts the Conservatives back in office as just and proper while any arrangement that puts Labour in will be a stitch-up or a coup. Similarly for the Labour supporting papers.

Here's the actual post and I've added a few more comments at the end.

Most sensible predictions for the election are that, barring a late swing one way or the other, Britain will elect another hung parliament in May. Whether the Conservatives or Labour are the largest party varies between forecasts but, either way, on May 8th David Cameron and Ed Miliband will be scrambling around trying to put together a deal with the other parties to form a majority in the House of Commons.

In 2010 the fact that the parliamentary arithmetic so favoured a Conservative-Lib Dem deal meant that we didn’t face the issue of the party that ‘won’ the election not forming the government. That is much more of a possibility in 2015 and any government that emerges could face a crisis of legitimacy, regardless of what is constitutionally proper.

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Local vs. national issues

Again, we're into election season so most of my work is happening on the work site. I've reproduced one of the things I found more interesting below. Apologies in advance for the messy pictures.

When people talk about 2015 being the least predictable election of modern times they’re usually referring to seats each party will have in the House of Commons in the new parliament.

They have to be because the national share of the vote remains largely unchanged as it has done for the last few weeks. The two big parties are tied on 34% with UKIP in the mid-teens and the Greens and Liberal Democrats scrapping for fourth place.

George Osborne has an opportunity in the next few weeks to try to shake up that status quo but for this week we've decided to look at some of the other issues that might affect voters' decisions. People are notoriously bad judges of what motivates them to vote the way that they do so with that caveat in mind, this week’s poll looked at what voters thought about the different issues facing the country.

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