Sue O'Mahony wrote: > Something similar has been done before: > http://markreckons.blogspot.com/2009/05/has-our-electoral-system-contributed-to.html > Perhaps useful for cross checking results?
Sadly he has used the incorrect starting point that majority is the same as "safety", when it's clearly not as I explain below; he also seems to think there are 647 MPs when there are 646 (645 currently in fact), and I'm not even going into the selection bias. :) Some of the comments on http://markreckons.blogspot.com/2009/05/mps-expenses-and-safe-seats-correlation.html point things like this out. Ah, statistics, such a tricky field... ATB, Matthew > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Matthew Somerville <[email protected]> > To: "mySociety public, general purpose discussion list" > <[email protected]> > Sent: Thursday, 3 September, 2009 9:10:18 > Subject: Re: [mySociety:public] Constituency majority data? > > Juliet Samuel wrote: >> I was wondering if the following lists of data are downloadable in .csv >> format from mysociety: > > They're available from the API at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/ - > not in CSV format, but it would be easy to convert the output. > >> A list of mps, constituencies and the majority of each (so that one >> could sort by how safe a seat is) > > Absolute majority isn't a good measure of seat safety - it depends how > many votes were cast as well (a majority of 100 with 150 votes cast is > much safer than a majority of 100 with 15,000 votes cast). The ranking > we give on the site is based on the percentage swing to lose the seat. > >> A list of MPs and how much the total they claimed on expenses or their >> ranking on this compared to all others MPs. > > Yes, all this is available. You need to call getMPs to get a list of > current person IDs, then use that to call getMPsInfo, with fields like > the following: majority_in_seat, swing_to_lose_seat_today, > swing_to_lose_seat_today_rank, expenses2008_total, and > expenses2008_total_rank. _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
