Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

THE PATTERN OF FLOWS The overall results of the two elections across the forty constituencies suggest that there were two major sets of shifts between 1997 and 1999: away from Labour, the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, the Liberal Democrats; and towards either Plaid Cymru or abstentions (Table 9.1). The Welsh Assembly Election Survey, a sample survey of 1,189 voters undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 election, allows us to trace these shifts in detail. TABLE 9.1 Results of the 1997 general election and the 1999 Assembly constituency election 1997 1999 Votes Votes Conservative 317,127 19.6 162,133 15.8 Labour 886,935 54.7 384,671 37.6 Liberal Democrat 200,020 12.3 137,657 13.5 Plaid Cymru 161,030 9.9 290,565 28.4 Other 54,932 3.4 47,992 4.7 Did not vote 570,678 26.0 1,204,318 54.1 The percentages for each party indicate their shares of the votes cast; the percentages for did not vote are shares of the total electorate. Table 9.2 is the flow-of-the-vote matrix derived from the survey data. It shows the percentage of each party's supporters in 1997 who voted for the various parties, or abstained, in 1999. There is a clear difference between the Labour and Conservative 1997 voters, on the one hand, and the Liberal Democrat and Plaid Cymru supporters on the other. Almost half of the former decided to abstain in the Assembly contest, whereas the percentages were much lower for the second group.2 A second major feature of the matrix is that whereas just over one-third of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat 1997 supporters remained loyal to the party in 1999, fully two-thirds of Plaid Cymru's 1997 voters did so. Finally, by far the largest inter-party flows were from Labour and the Liberal Democrats to Plaid Cymru. In sum, therefore, Plaid Cymru's success in 1999 was a function of the party retaining support among those who voted for it in 1997 in addition to winning over substantial numbers of former Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters. While Plaid Cymru succeeded in attracting the support of one in six Liberal Democrat voters (34,000 electors), their success in attracting 10 per cent of Labour 1997 voters gave a larger numerical boost to the party (over