A collection of local election results for Birmingham from 1945 to today. These will be used in my up-coming book The Strange Death of Tory Liverpool.
This dataset uses the same columns as the Merseyside Local Election Results Project (1945-2020).
id: individual identifier
election_id: individual identifier
upper_tier: upper tier authority at time of election
lower_tier: lower tier authority at time of election
current_council: current council as of 2019
election_date: date of election
year: year of election
ward_id: individual ward identifier (changes with every boundary reform)
ward_name: ward name
candidate: candidate name
party: candidate's party
vote: number of votes won by candidate
female: female candidate (1 = female, 0 = male)
vacancies: number of positions up for election
electorate: size of electorate
ballots_cast: number of votes cast
turnout: percentage turnout (1)
est_turnout: estimated percentage turnout (2)
vote_share: candidate's share of votes (1)
est_vote_share: estimated candidate vote share (2)
source: original source of information
notes: other notes
(1) In cases where this has not been provided by the source, I have left it blank. I will be using software to predict/fill in blank variables, but I want to keep the raw data separate.
(2) Coming soon to a dataset near you!
Key sources:
Rallings, C.S., Thrasher, M.A.M. and Ware, L., British Local Election Database, 1889-2003 [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], June 2006. SN: 5319, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5319-1.
Teale, A. (2021) Local Elections Archive Project (LEAP), Available at: https://www.andrewteale.me.uk/leap/ (Accessed: constantly).