Weber Shandwick today launches the updated version of www.scotlandvotes.com in advance of the campaign for the 2011 Scottish Parliament election.

The main change to the website is the addition of the new constituency boundaries and notional results based on the last election in 2007.  Now with this information uploaded to the site you can use our election predictor to enter potential results for the forthcoming election and see what the resulting Parliament might look like in terms of political representation.

The new data in ScotlandVotes.com is  based on the notional results produced by Professor David Denver of Lancaster University.  However, the website shows that the Tories look set to already lose one seat – before the election even begins.

Moray Macdonald, Deputy Managing Director of Weber Shandwick comments:  “Using the excellent work by Professor Denver as a base to the website we can now see how the next Scottish Parliament might look under the new constituency boundaries.

“Professor Denver’s work showed that the Tories would gain three seats in the new Parliament if votes were cast the same as in 2007.  Unfortunately for the Tories, according to Weber Shandwick, there was a minor error in the South of Scotland calculations and they now lose one seat to take their new notional number of MSPs to 19 rather than 20.

“Since we launched ScotlandVotes in 2007 for the previous Holyrood elections the site has become Scotland’s leading seat predictor tool giving everyone from parliamentarians to political pundits accurate analysis of what seats are changing hands and when.

“As Scotland’s leading public affairs agency Weber Shandwick has been at the cutting edge of politics and lobbying since devolution.  ScotlandVotes is another example of how we continue to lead the way with a more interactive format featuring regular blogs and video postings from an array of Scottish politicians and commentators.”

Background to the Changes

The May 2011 Scottish Parliament elections will be fought under new constituency and regional boundaries.  Many of the changes to constituency seats are substantial.  Different results in the constituencies have an impact on who gets elected off the regional lists – the boundaries for which are themselves altered for the 2011 election.

This means that the basis for the calculations that feed our seat predictor are notional results.  These figures are not predictions of what will happen in the next election, but rather calculations about what would have happened in 2007 if that election had been fought under the new boundaries.

The figures Weber Shandwick has used are those calculated by Professor David Denver of Lancaster University in his paper published by the BBC in September 2010.  Professor Denver is a renowned psephologist who takes a particular interest in the electoral politics of Scotland.

However, our calculation of the notional results does differ slightly from Professor Denver’s conclusions, with one seat allocated differently.

Professor Denver has the Conservatives winning 20 seats in total.  Breaking 20 would be significant for the Conservatives – which is why they might not want to look too closely at the figures behind that total.  We did, in order to guarantee that the Scotland Votes election predictor was based on the most credible calculations available.

Our recalculations using Professor Denver’s own figures show that he had mis-allocated a list seat to the Conservatives in the South of Scotland region.  This seat should have been allocated to the SNP, meaning that they would have won the 47 seats under the new boundaries that they did win in the actual election in 2007.  The Conservatives would still have had an increase in their haul, but only by two seats, taking them to a total of 19.

When you use the election predictor for the 2011 Holyrood election, the changes indicated, depending on the predicted results you enter, will be changes from these notional results, rather than the actual results in 2007.

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