David Jeffrey has been doing very interesting work visualizing the UK Conservative Party leadership election, which started me thinking about how support for each candidate would differ depending on how an MP voted on the Brexit-related indicative votes earlier this year.
In April, I used social network analysis to identify voting factions among UK MPs during the indicative vote process. For that analysis, a faction was defined as a group of MPs who voted together on all twelve of the indicative votes. The image below shows the results by political party.
I identified eight factions within the Conservative Party with more than five members, totaling 212 MPs and 68% of the party. A further 45 MPs were a part of factions with between two and five members, and 57 MPs did not vote in lock-step with anyone.
Below is an overview of the factions and how they voted (Euroskeptic scores come from Alexandre Afonso).
Voting factions and the leadership contest
My data on the candidates Conservative MPs comes from David Jeffrey's map of this information, downloaded on 9 June. As a result, it will be somewhat out of date, given new endorsements in the last few days. However, given that I am looking at broad groups of MPs, using slightly out-of-date should still provide useful insights and be used as a comparative baseline later.
The graphs below make clear that the factions are quite divided, and in most, a majority have not publicly endorsed (the elections are by secret ballot). But it is clear that e.g., Johnson draws much of his support from the large, Euroskeptic factions (1 and 2), while Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove are more dependent on the 'Other' group.
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