Reflecting on the numbers behind NI’s General Election results #ge2015ni (updated with individual party analysis)

For some the 2015 Westminster campaign in Northern Ireland was a vision of normalisation, with non-sectarian issues such as homophobia, women’s reproductive rights and austerity at the heart of many political argument. Yet the old us-versus-them crept in late in the day with the use of religious affiliation census data to encourage voters, and anonymous letters being posted. The traditional intra-unionism and intra-nationalism skirmishes were weakened by the four-seat unionist pact and the near complete absence of Alasdair McDonnell from …

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Who cares about Voting and Identity? Nicholas Whyte explains the stats … #ImagineBelfast15 (updated with charts)

Nicholas Whyte spoke at a lunchtime event being run under the umbrella of Imagine!2015 The Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics in the Ulster University’s Belfast campus: Who cares about Voting and Identity. You can listen back to his half hour presentation and follow along with the slides below. He broke down census results for national identity and looked at the most British / Irish / Northern Irish / Other wards and constituencies. He asks which parties are engaging with …

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TDs that tweet – who, when and how

In an unexpected follow-up to last night’s post about tweeting MPs and MLAs … When they’re not in the Dáil or attending wake houses working on constituency issues, many TDs are busy twiddling their thumbs tweeting. Earlier today Eamonn Bell published an infographic that summarises the messaging habits of TDs. Eamonn’s number crunching (at the bottom of the infographic) goes beyond mere adoption figures and points to how TDs are exploiting the service (levels of retweets and use of hashtags) …

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MPs with a slim majority are more likely to tweet: crunching numbers of tweeting elected representatives

Democratic Audit UK today posted a summary of results of research by James Donald who has been looking at the tweeting characteristics of Westminster MPs. It made me wonder about our local politicians. But first, the highlights from the UK-wide findings. Nearly 63% of MPs (408) had Twitter accounts in January 2013, while 37% were still abstaining. (Today, Tweetminster suggests the figure has risen marginally!) The findings showed that the younger an MP is, the more likely she/he is to …

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Plotting school attendance rates in Lisburn and Newry

Lisburn and Newry school attendance - using data gathered by The Detail

Over the weekend, The Detail published details about school attendance in Northern Ireland using 2010/11 attendance data for every primary and post-primary school that was released by the Department of Education in response to their Freedom of Information request. Quoting some of The Detail’s findings: The average pupil attendance across all schools in Northern Ireland in the last school year was 94%. However, our analysis of the department’s figures shows that the attendance levels for at least 20,914 pupils fell …

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