Thread by @democlub

Good evening Twitter, it’s election day tomorrow!

As a special treat, we’ve had a dig into our candidate database and put together some unique insights into the 21,000 candidates who are contesting seats across England, Scotland and Wales. 🧵

#LocalElections2022 #le2022

To recap: 200 councils are holding elections, including all councils in Scotland, Wales and London.

6,872 principal council seats are up for election - that’s 6,819 ‘scheduled’, plus 53 additional English by-elections.

(See our summaries for more detail)
democracyclub.org.uk/blog/2022/04/0…

136 political parties are standing candidates across Great Britain - 79% are from the ‘big four’ parties.

(fun fact: there are 399 political parties total registered in GB).

For context, here’s graph of major party local election candidates in England since 2016.

2022 is largely as we would expect, although the Greens are slightly down as compared with previous years.

(Note: 2019 saw an unusually large number of seats up for election).

However, one clear shift is the collapse of UKIP. The party is down to 28 candidates, from over a thousand as recently as 2019.

Using our candidate database, we’ve identified 130 former UKIP candidates (2016-2021) who are standing for a different party this year.

Moving on, a perennial favourite: the longest ballot paper.

The winner this year is Carthays, in Cardiff, with 20 candidates vying for the ward’s four seats.

Meanwhile the ballot with the most parties on it is Leith Walk, Edinburgh – 12 different options in total!

The ward with the most candidates *per seat* is Kingstone, in Barnsley, with eight.

But the ‘busiest’ council overall is Southend-on-Sea, which sees a whopping 5.4 candidates per seat, the result of a strong showing by a new local group.

On the other hand, voters in some councils will have very little choice.

499 ballot papers in England and Wales have only two party options on them. Some don't even have that – 97 seats have already been won uncontested.

We also see ‘undercontested’ seats - that is, places where there are fewer than 2 candidates per seat in a multi-member ward.

In Barking & Dagenham, for example, the lack of opposition candidates means that Labour are already guaranteed 15 seats in ‘undercontested’ wards.

Combined with uncontested, this means that 165 seats (2.4%) are already guaranteed to a party before any ballot has been cast.

Here’s a lovely map of the uncontested & undercontested wards in Wales!

(we're very proud of this one)

Now, the grand finale: party switchers.

As already mentioned, our database links current candidates with their past election history. This data goes back to 2016 and is now quite a substantial archive.

With it we’re able to do things like compare party affiliation over time.

You’ve already seen one example, that of the former UKIP candidates, above. But why not try it with all parties?

We had a go with Wales, Scotland and London.

⚠️ Sankeys ahead!⚠️

We’ve found 142 Welsh candidates who are standing for a different party tomorrow than they did in the last election (2017 is on the left, 2022 on the right)...

...99 candidates in Scotland (2017-2022)...

...and 72 in London (2018-2022)!

Get the full details (and see the lovely interactive @f_l_o_u_r_i_s_h graphs) on our latest blog!

democracyclub.org.uk/blog/2022/05/0…

And find out who’s on your ballot at WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk!

Direct links to the interactive Sankey diagrams:

Scotland: public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…

Wales: public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…

London: public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…