Psephology.AI

    Party Performance Over Time

    Pick a party and see every election it has fought, across the UK or in any place.

    Work out what covers the area: For the chosen area, find the results held inside it, the seats that overlap it, and the larger areas that contain it. Each is labelled so you always know which one a line is drawn from.

    Count the votes once: List elections, such as the European and regional top-up votes, record the same list total against every candidate on the list. Only the list total is counted, never the repeats.

    Level the local rounds: Local votes are divided by the number of seats contested before shares are worked out, so a three-seat round doesn't dwarf a one-seat round.

    Draw one timeline: Each election type becomes its own line on a shared time axis. Gaps are left as gaps — nothing is filled in for years when that election was not held.

    All insights

    Insight 7

    Party Performance Over Time

    Pick a party and see every election it has fought, across the UK or in any place.

    Live, all years

    Choose a party and its UK-wide vote share appears straight away for every kind of election: parliamentary, local, devolved, mayoral, police and crime commissioner, and European up to 2019. Then narrow the period, drill into any place, compare parties or places, and see where the party does best, worst, and is rising or falling fastest.

    Choose a party, then explore where

    The chart shows the whole UK straight away. Narrow the period, add parties to compare, or pick a place.

    1. Party
    2. Period
    3. Where
    Reading every election in the United Kingdom…

    How to read this chart

    • One line per election type, party or place. With one party and one place, each line is a different kind of election. When you compare parties or places, the chart switches to a single election type so the lines are like-for-like.
    • Share of the vote, not seats. The vertical axis is the party's percentage of votes cast in that area. Seats won can move very differently.
    • Dots are the real figures. Each dot is one election that actually took place. The line simply joins a party's dots in order — no value is invented for the years in between.
    • Borrowed areas are labelled. Where an area has no boundary of its own for an election, the chart says which larger or overlapping area the figure came from.

    What the report does

    An explorer, not a fixed report. Choose a party and get one combined chart of vote share for the whole UK across every election type; then optionally pick a place, compare parties or places, or open the league table of best, worst, rising and falling places, with a plain sentence for each line saying what moved and by how much, and an explicit note wherever a figure had to be borrowed from a larger or overlapping area.

    How it's built

    1. 1

      Work out what covers the area

      For the chosen area, find the results held inside it, the seats that overlap it, and the larger areas that contain it. Each is labelled so you always know which one a line is drawn from.

    2. 2

      Count the votes once

      List elections, such as the European and regional top-up votes, record the same list total against every candidate on the list. Only the list total is counted, never the repeats.

    3. 3

      Level the local rounds

      Local votes are divided by the number of seats contested before shares are worked out, so a three-seat round doesn't dwarf a one-seat round.

    4. 4

      Draw one timeline

      Each election type becomes its own line on a shared time axis. Gaps are left as gaps — nothing is filled in for years when that election was not held.

    How to read it (and how not to)

    • • The lines are not comparable with each other. A general election and a council election draw different voters on different questions; only compare a line with itself over time.
    • • Parliamentary results exist only by constituency. There is no ward-level parliamentary figure, and none is invented here.
    • • Where a small area has no boundary of its own for an election, the figure shown belongs to a larger area and is labelled as such.
    • • A fall can mean a party lost support or simply that it stood fewer candidates that year.
    • • Northern Ireland and elections before 2005 are excluded by design.

    What it reads

    • • Every recorded result in the platform from 2005 onwards, across all six election types
    • • The area hierarchy: country, region, county, council, ward, constituency
    • • Ward-to-constituency and area-to-region mappings, for areas with no boundary of their own
    • • Seats-up counts, so multi-seat local rounds compare fairly

    What you get back

    • • A combined chart of vote share across every election type held in the area
    • • A plain sentence per election type: direction, size of change, first and last year
    • • An explicit note wherever a figure comes from a wider or overlapping area
    • • Drill-down from country to region to council to ward, keeping the same party
    • • A statement of what does not exist — there is no ward-level parliamentary result

    Readiness

    • Results across all election types

      Queried live, so new imports appear immediately.

    • Area and region mappings

      Used to label borrowed figures rather than hide them.