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Concept
Swing (politics)
Summary
An electoral swing analysis (or swing) shows the extent of change in voter support, typically from one election to another, expressed as a positive or negative percentage. A multi-party swing is an indicator of a change in the electorate's preference between candidates or parties, often between major parties in a two-party system. A swing can be calculated for the electorate as a whole, for a given electoral district or for a particular demographic.
A swing is particularly useful for analysing change in voter support over time, or as a tool for predicting the outcome of elections in constituency-based systems. Swing is also usefully deployed when analysing the shift in voter intentions revealed by (political) opinion polls or to compare polls concisely which may rely on differing samples and on markedly different swings and therefore predict extraneous results.
A swing is calculated by comparing the percentage of the vote in a particular election to the percentage of the vote belonging to the same party or candidate at the previous election.
One-party swing (in percentage points) = Percentage of vote (current election) − percentage of vote (previous election).
Labor Party 51% (this year) less Labor Party 41% (four years ago) means the Labor Party saw a swing of 10 points (this implies in their favour and can also be published as +10 points).
Examples include the comparison between the 2006 and 2007 Ukrainian Parliamentary elections.
The above charts show the change in voter support for each of the six major political parties by electoral district and nationwide vote results.
In many nation states' media, including in Australia and the United Kingdom, swing is normally expressed in terms of two parties. This practice is most useful where most governments tend to be from an existing two-party system but other candidates do sometimes run, and is used to predict the outcome of elections in constituency-based systems where different seats are held with different previous levels of support.
Official source
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