*** This post is not yet complete. However you will find a link to the data near the bottom and a link to a twitter thread for some of the images ***
Within the next 10 days, the House of Commons will get a second Meaningful Vote on the Withdrawal Agreement which could be followed by 2 more significant votes on No-Deal and Article 50 Extension. I have been tracking how MPs have voted on the first Meaningful Vote and subsequent Amendments which I summarised in two posts “Find your way out of the Brexit Maze in 57 days and 43 days.” Following further amendments at the end of February and with no more amendments planned before the next meaningful vote, I have redone my cluster analysis to predict what the outcome of these votes might be. As far as possible, I am trying to base my predictions on what MPs have done rather than what they say but I will compare my analysis with that of Election Maps who have been tracking MP’s statements.
The voting records of each MP in the House of Commons is recorded by Hansard and they have an extremely useful facility that allows you to download the voting data into a spreadsheet. I have used this to download the data for the Meaningful Vote on 15th January, the 7 Amendments considered on 29th January 2019, the 3 Amendments on 14th February 2019 and the final 3 Amendments on 27th February. I collated all these votes for the 637 MPs who will be able to determine the outcome over the next 2 months and you can download a spreadsheet with this data and my analysis using this link –
Previously I created 5 voting blocks based on the January votes and expanded this to 7 voting blocks based on the Valentine votes. With the additional February votes there are now a total of 1 Meaningful vote and 13 amendments that can be used to segment MPs. I have chosen to use the Meaningful Vote and 9 key amendments to carry out my cluster analysis and I have again ended up with 7 voting blocks. These were created using manual cluster analysis but I did initially use AHC (Agglomerative Hierarchal Clustering) to create a dendrogram which was a useful starting point and I will expand on that at the end of this post.
The breakdown of the 7 voting blocks is shown below. For each block I have also recorded how many MPs are an exact match for the block and how many are approximate matches.
*** To be uploaded. Please see my twitter thread for images ***
I have also used some MPs (usually a party leader) as representatives of each block below. The graphic also lists how many MPs are representing Leave vote seats which are based on my own estimates of the Leave vote.
*** To be uploaded. Please see my twitter thread for images ***
You can download all the data here MPs votes on Brexit v3.0. Please read the HELP sheet for guidance but you will find my voting blocks in column W of the sheet DATA.
For information on how I estimated the Leave vote in each seat, please read this post.
