UK politics on Twitter: A regional breakdown
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Your support makes all the difference.When we speak to people one of the points to often emerge is how can Twitter be used to connect with constituents and for more local politics. On Tweetminster you can already search for MPs by constituency, and we are currently working to expand the feature to PPCs and we will be releasing several more locally-relevant tools soon.
In the mean time we thought it might be helpful to use Twitter’s new lists feature to create listings around regions (we would have loved to do this per constituency, but unfortunately there’s a limit to the number of lists a user can create).
The aim of these lists is to make it easier for people to find their local MPs and PPCs on Twitter and to showcase a regional breakdown of politicians using the service.
Here’s what we found:
North East
MPs & PPCs: 8
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 37.5% Lib Dems: 25% Labour: 37.5%
East Midlands
MPs & PPCs: 15
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 47% Labour: 47% Other: 6%
Wales
MPs & PPCs: 8
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 38% Labour: 38% Lib Dems: 12% Other: 12%
Northern Ireland
MPs & PPCs: 1
Party breakdown: Other: 100%
East of England
MPs & PPCs: 24
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 29% Labour: 38% Lib Dems: 21% Other: 12%
North West
MPs & PPCs: 18
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 33% Labour: 33% Lib Dems: 22% Other: 12%
South East
MPs & PPCs: 30
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 27% Labour: 40% Lib Dems: 20% Other: 13%
Yorkshire & The Humber
MPs & PPCs: 20
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 29% Labour: 55% Lib Dems: 15% Other: 1%
West Midlands
MPs & PPCs: 19
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 21% Labour: 69% Lib Dems: 5% Other: 5%
London
MPs & PPCs: 42
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 21% Labour: 33% Lib Dems: 29% Other: 17%
South West
MPs & PPCs: 32
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 18% Labour: 53% Lib Dems: 28% Other: 1%
Scotland
MPs & PPCs: 21
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 29% Labour: 23% Lib Dems: 29% Other: 19%
Totals
MPs & PPCs: 238
Party breakdown: Conservatives: 27% Labour: 42% Lib Dems: 21% Other: 10%
View UK politics on Twitter in a larger map
While the numbers reflect several trends that you would expect, such as a concentration of users in London, probably less expected, and more interesting, is the diverse regional spread (in the case of the Conservatives) or concentration (in the case of the Lib Dems) and the possible correlation between these trends and voting and campaign expectations within the various regions.
You can find all the regional lists linked from @tweetminster . We hope the findings are of interest.
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