• Blog home
  • Elections
  • Polling
  • Sport
  • Weather
  • Forecasting
  • Diversity
  • Stats Training
  • Misc
  • Archive
  • Twitter
  • Back to Marriott Statistical Consulting

Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

You are here: Home / Elections / EU Referendum 2016 #2 – Did your constituency vote Remain or Leave?

EU Referendum 2016 #2 – Did your constituency vote Remain or Leave?

February 19, 2017 By Nigel

NOTE 19/2/16: This post is not yet complete.  I will do my best to complete it soon as possible.  Since I started writing this post, additional data has been made available and I now think that 400 out of 650 seats voted Leave.  You can see an outline of my older model in my YouTube clip published in November 2016.

For those used to staying up for election night, the BBC coverage of the EU Referendum on 23rd June 2016 must have been disconcerting. Where were the figures showing how many seats Leave & Remain had won? Unlike a general election where the winner is the party with the largest number of seats, the referendum was decided by a popular vote with Leave winning with 17,410,742 votes to Remain’s 16,141,241 votes.

Also different was that the results were declared for the 399 counting areas (CA) used in EU elections rather than the more familiar 650 parliamentary constituencies. Of the 399 CAs, Leave won a majority in 270 CAs as shown in figure 1. However, the counting areas vary enormously in size from 1,799 eligible voters for the Isles of Scilly to 707,293 eligible voters for the city of Birmingham which makes it difficult to compare CAs. The apparently overwhelming victory for Leave in terms of CAs could be a statistical mirage with Leave winning small CAs and Remain winning large CAs.

With a possible General election looming with Brexit at the heart of the debate, politicians and voters will want to know if their seats voted Remain or Leave.  The only way to answer this question is to build a statistical model that extrapolates the results for the 399 CAs to the 650 parliamentary seats.  I have done this using a method called principal components regression and I estimate that Leave won by a landslide with 403 seats out of 650.

I am not the only person to make such an estimate.  The first person to do so was Chris Hanretty of the University of East Anglia and he estimates that 410 out of 650 seats voted Leave.  His model uses the 2011 census whereas my model uses the 2015 general election results to estimate the Leave vote in each seat.  Specifically, I used two derived variables for each of the 650 seats to predict the Leave vote share:

  • GREEN KIPPER = UKIP vote share in 2015 minus the Green vote share in 2015.
  • ENGAGEMENT = average of % turnout in 2010 & 2015 minus the BNP vote share in 2010.

TO BE CONTINUED – Please see my YouTube clip of November 2016 for an outline of the basics.

Filed Under: Elections Tagged With: Brexit, EU Referendum, Principal Components Modelling

Search this site

More blogs

UK Weather Tracker #72 – January 2023

Did you know it was the 3rd sunniest January on record in the UK?  Neither did I but it was the only … [Read More...] about UK Weather Tracker #72 – January 2023

Pay Gap Data #6 – Where can I find gender pay gap data for 2022?

This post was updated on 2nd February 2023 with the latest data The government requires all … [Read More...] about Pay Gap Data #6 – Where can I find gender pay gap data for 2022?

UK Weather Trends #24 – Annual Temperatures in 2022

The 2022 calendar year was the hottest year on record in the UK beating the previous high recorded … [Read More...] about UK Weather Trends #24 – Annual Temperatures in 2022

UK Weather Tracker #71 – December 2022

After an entire meteorological year where the temperature above the median for ever single month, … [Read More...] about UK Weather Tracker #71 – December 2022

Cricket #1 – Sir Donald Bradman, the 9 Sigma GOAT

Sir Donald Bradman is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of sporting GOATs.  All cricket lovers accept … [Read More...] about Cricket #1 – Sir Donald Bradman, the 9 Sigma GOAT

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Join our newsletter mailing list

Receive latest news, articles and offers

Select the categories of interest:

We are GDPR compliant. Read our privacy and Cookie policy for more info.

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Copyright © 2023 ·Registered in England, Company No. 5577275, VAT No. 883304029. Registered Office – 65 Bristol Road, Keynsham, Bristol, BS31 1EG