The General Election 2010 statistics

As Ben over at Bad Science points out trying to scrape together all the information from the different constituencies regarding any election is difficult without a central open record. I'd put it more akin to trying to herd cats.

As such I'm indebted to TheyWorkForYou for providing a csv file of all the current MPs as well as the two xml files listing current and previous MPs. Unfortunately although this information is the best out there it still doesn't add in certain information such as age or career. For that I had to turn to the newspaper databases. No simple downloads there, nope had to pull the information by hand and some of it just wasn't there.


Dates of birth just weren't around, there's some on Wikipedia, but not as many as you might think. Ages oh yes I can find those at least roughly in some cases, but I'm still 11 short and a couple I'm not 100% happy with. Careers or at least a overall sector in which they worked in. The newspapers have that, but boy do you need to read the descriptions. I've Engineers who are down as Engineering and Engineers who are listed as Other; I've people who've acted as political advisers listed as Business and not Politics and authors listed as Art or Media. So as you can imagine it's hard-going and this is why it's taken as long as it has to sort out.

So with those caveats what does the 2010 election show?

Age
The youngest person is 24; the oldest 80.
The youngest female is also the youngest person at 24, the oldest female is 74.
They are both Labour Party members.
The youngest male is 26, the oldest male is also the oldest person at 80.
They are both Conservative Party members.

Sex
The Male/Female split for all Parties is roughly 78%/22%.

The Male/Female splits for the three main Parties are as follows
Conservative: 85%/15%.
Labour: 69%/31%.
Liberal Democrats: 88%/12%.

Names
The most common first name is Dave/David.
The most common surname is Smith.
There is, however, no Dave/David Smith currently sitting as MP.
No current MP shares a name with another current MP.
The closest shared name is David Davies and David Davis.
However there are 7 pairs of MPs which share initials and surnames:
5 Labour MPs share with a Conservative MP
1 Labour MP shares another Labour MP
1 Labour MP shares with a Liberal Democrat MP.

Careers
The top four Sectors listed for MPs:
Business 17%; Politics 13%; Law 12%; Media 9%.

By Party:
Conservative - Business 28%; Law 16%; Finance 14%; Politics 10%.
Labour - Trade Union 15%; Politics 15%; Education 13%; Law 10%.
Liberal Democrat - Business: 16%; Consultant: 16%; Politics: 16%; Education 15%.

I have additional stats, but they're either speculative or patchy so I'll leave them off for the moment.