Election Special What on earth happened?! Up to date examples for Health and Wealth How to incorporate the results into an essay on voting behaviour or electoral systems

Health and Wealth The number of woman in parliament has risen by about a third. (29% up from 23%) The number of woman in the cabinet has also increased, Amber Rudd is Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Anna Soubry and Priti Patel are small business and employment ministers.

Ethnic Minority Representation The number of BME MPs is up from 27 to 42. Sajid Javid is business secretary.

The Result How the events unfolded

In Scotland SNP's new MPs Your new MP

Analysis of the Result Why such a massive shift? You won’t be examined on this but it is interesting! Why did Labour performed so poorly? they won 100 fewer seats than the Conservatives, their worst election performance in almost three decades. In Scotland you could look to the rise in nationalism and a move to the right. In England, they were too left. Didn’t talk to the aspirational middle class. They also failed to effectively defend their handling of the recession.

Why were the Liberal Democrats punished so heavily? Largely, or perhaps solely due to their broken promise on tuition feeds. Why did the Conservative party exceed everyone's (including Cameron's ) expectations?

Electoral Systems If writing about FPTP then on a positive we have a one party majority government. This means that despite the demands for the system to change it is unlikely to during this term. However Since the election the Electoral Reform Committee have published research that shows that 60% of the public want FPTP replaced with some form of PR. Why?

If Writing About PR BBC article Examples UKIP, despite what you might think about their policies, came 2 nd in 120 constituencies and only got 1MP. UKIPUKIP In Scotland the SNP got 50% of the vote but 95% of the seats. Labour got 24% of the vote and only 2% of the seats.Scotland

Voting Behaviour

Newspapers The Sun will claim that they got it right again! The Scottish version urging readers to vote SNP and the English version urging its readers to vote Conservative. How much influence they had is doubtful, were they merely reflecting a change in public opinion? Social media Voters' views on the digital election

TV debates Third of Labour voters say Nicola Sturgeon won debate - Telegraph

Leadership Polling found that voters were far more influenced by how they viewed the party leader than by their local candidate. Research for Total Politics found that 69 per cent of people intended to vote based on their feelings about the party leader. Just under a third of those polled said the performance of their local MP would be the deciding factor when casting their vote. Nicola Sturgeon came across very well, voters were able to identify with her and trust her. Miliband had the same issues of coming across as awkward and too polished. It clearly was important as 3 of them resigned after the result. Watch party leaders' resignations

Geography If we look back at the electoral map, there was a clear North/South divide. Another map shows the effect that coal mining towns had on voting. Or is this social class?

The Statistics aren’t out on the following… Social class Gender Age However you could argue that social class played a significant part in the success of the SNP as their manifesto had a number of “left” policies that were popular in areas such as Glasgow where there are a higher number of DE voters. On the other hand you could argue that a strong leader, and a rise in nationalism and a desire for change were key to their success.