When it comes to local election results, punditry usually heads in one of two directions. Either the local elections will be held up as an ironclad prediction for the next general election result or they are an utter irrelevance which tells you nothing about how people will vote in national elections.
Strangely, which of the two positions punditry tends towards seems to be very much linked to whether the local elections have been bad or good for the party backed by the pundit in question.
As you might expect, of course, the truth lies somewhere in between – and the data can actually tell us something useful about Liberal Democrat prospects at the next general election, whenever that may be.
For decades various teams of political scientists have been working out National Equivalent Vote Shares (NEVS) based on local election results. That is, they take the raw figures and make adjustments to take account of the fact that local elections take place in different parts of the country each year (for instance, most of the councils which had elections in May this year won’t have elections again until 2022).
This means that the NEVS is, broadly speaking, a reliable snapshot of support for each party UK-wide at the time of the local elections.
However, this does not mean that a NEVS is the same thing as how the party will perform in a general election. In the case of the Lib Dems, we have routinely underperformed our NEVS from the previous year in a general election.
The table below shows the Lib Dem performance in each of the past six general elections as well as our NEVS in the year before’s local elections. As can be seen, typically the Lib Dem vote has dropped by 1 to 7 points between the local election and the general election – and the two general elections with the lowest drop were dominated by the Iraq War and Cleggmania respectively, making them fairly atypical.
|
GE Result |
Year Before’s NEVS |
Difference |
| 1997 |
17% |
24% |
-7 |
| 2001 |
19% |
26% |
-7 |
| 2005 |
23% |
27% |
-4 |
| 2010 |
24% |
25% |
-1 |
| 2015 |
8% |
13% |
-5 |
| 2017 |
7% |
14% |
-7 |
So, given that the typical drop has been 6 or 7 points, what does this tell us about Lib Dem prospects at the next general election?
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