Coal and the Conservatives

Interesting election results in the UK over the weekend, where the Conservatives romped to victory. This was despite a widespread consensus that neither the Conservative or Labour party would get a majority. This was a triumph for uncertainty and random error over the deterministic, as none of the statistical forecasts appeared to deem such a decisive victory probable. The UK election is a lot harder to model, for numerous reasons, when compared to the US.

This means that a lot of pollsters and political forecasters will have to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate their methods. Obviously, the models used to forecast the 2015 election could not handle the dynamics of the British electorate. However, there is a high degree of persistence within electuary constituencies. Let’s explore this persistence by looking at the relationship between coal and % Conservative (Tory) votes.

Following a tweet by Vaughan Roderick and using the methodology of Fernihough and O’Rourke (2014), I matched each of the constituencies to Britain’s coalfields creating a “proximity to coal” measure. What the plot below shows is striking. Being located on or in close proximity to a coal field reduces the tory vote share by about 20%. When we control (linearly) for latitude and longitude coordinates, this association decreases in strength, but not by much. For me, this plot highlights a long-standing relationship between Britain’s industrial revolution, the urban working class, and labour/union movement. What I find interesting is that this relationship has persisted despite de-industrialization and the movement away from large-scale manufacturing industry.

> summary(lm(tory~coal,city))

Call:
lm(formula = tory ~ coal, data = city)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-42.507 -10.494   2.242  10.781  29.074 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  42.9492     0.7459   57.58   <2e-16 ***
coal        -24.9704     1.8887  -13.22   <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 14.36 on 630 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.2172,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.216 
F-statistic: 174.8 on 1 and 630 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

# robust to lat-long?
> summary(lm(tory~coal+longitude+latitude,city))

Call:
lm(formula = tory ~ coal + longitude + latitude, data = city)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-44.495  -8.269   1.485   9.316  28.911 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 246.4355    18.9430  13.009  < 2e-16 ***
coal        -15.1616     1.8697  -8.109 2.68e-15 ***
longitude     1.4023     0.4015   3.493 0.000512 ***
latitude     -3.8621     0.3651 -10.578  < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 12.76 on 628 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.3838,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.3809 
F-statistic: 130.4 on 3 and 628 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16