Another Game with Nature: An Ecological Regression Model of the British Two-Party Vote Ratio in 1970

Abstract

This article develops a number of themes first raised in an earlier paper where we attempted to publicize the existence of Census data based, for the first time, on British parliamentary constituencies, and where we briefly described the potential and limits of a variety of available statistical techniques of analysis. Until the earlier paper was published, studies of British electoral behaviour using aggregate data were largely historical, generally used only the simplest statistical techniques such as cross-tabulations, and usually proceeded blithely unaware of the snares of ecological inference. A small number of more advanced analyses had appeared but none focused on Britain or even on England as a whole. Since our earlier article appeared, there have been two attempts to construct predictive models of Labour support by applying multivariate statistical analysis to aggregate-level data. As we show in this paper, both Barnett and Rasmussen produce models that are statistically less powerful than our own and are subject to various weaknesses, of which the most important is the failure to tackle the problem of ecological inference.