Suchergebnisse

GIVEN THE UNCERTAINTIES OF A PARLIAMENTARY CAREER IN GREAT BRITAIN, IT IS TO BE EXPECTED THAT MPS SHOULD ACT TO MAINTAIN THEIR INTERESTS AND TO ENSURE THEIR CONTINUED PRESENCE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. THOSE INTERESTS ARE SERVED BY MAXIMIZING THEIR PARTY'S REPRESENTATION IN THE COMMONS AND THEIR OWN CHANCES OF RE-ELECTION. THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE BOUNDARY REVIEW PROCESS. ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES HAVE MUCH TO TELL ABOUT THE PROCESS OF ELECTORAL REDISTRICTING IN GREAT BRITAIN.

A computer program is designed to produce all of the electoral constituencies for an English local authority, within the constraints imposed on the Parliamentary Boundary Commissioners. This builds on the seminal work of Gudgin and Taylor, and introduces size constraints, evaluates shape, and evaluates the electoral consequences of swings in voter opinion.

The rules under which the UK Boundary Commissions operate are imprecise in their wording. An attempt to achieve greater precision through the courts in 1982–83, after the Commissions had completed their Third Periodic Review of all constituencies, produced exactly the opposite outcome with judgements stressing the flexibility which the Commissions are accorded; one aspect of those judgements suggested greater importance for one of the rules (Rule 7) than had previously been assigned to it. The authors compare the outcome of the Third and Fourth Periodic Reviews conducted by the Boundary Commission for England. They find that the major change has been greater attention to electoral equality across all constituencies in the latter of the two—which is exactly what the 1982 court case had sought.

A recent court case has raised a number of issues relating to the nature of representative democracy in Britain. In particular, the importance of equality of electorates among constituencies relative to other criteria employed in the redistricting procedure has been raised. The court findings emphasised the subjectivity inherent at all stages of the redistricting process at present. We describe procedures, combining data analysis and mapping, whereby such subjectivity can be restricted to the later stages, so allowing the final decisions to be made in a fully informed context. Such procedures raise issues relating to public contributions to the various stages of the redistricting process, and a speculative final section to the paper extends the ideas that we outline.