LP Conference: Delegate & Member power

As a result of arguements about the representative nature of hand votes within the CLP college at LP Conference, I did some sums and a chart. Here are my notes.

CLP’s get one delegate for the first 749 members, then one delegate/250 members, plus if they have 100 women, a women’s delegate and if they have 30 young people, they get an additional youth delegate.

This means that a CLP with 50 members will probably get two delegates, a CLP with 200 members will most probably get three delegates and a CLP with 750 members will almost certainly get four delegates.

The power of an indifiducal member is a function of the size of the CLP and the number of delegates. How much of a share in the decision to did the member have and how powerful is that decision?

I chose to represent this as:-

1 ÷ (members ÷ delegates) ≍ ( delegates ÷ members )

I then chose to represent this as a ratio of the maximum value in the range, so the power index maximum is 1.

This doesn’t tell us anything that wasn’t obvious, small CLPs are over represented in a show of hand vote. I assume,

1. All CLPs send their maximum delegation, they don’t the larger CLPs can’t afford it. (3,500 members = 15 delegates).
2. That the LP’s membership is 50%/50% men and women, which means Parties with under 200 members get no woman’s delegate.

The following explanations

1. The plateau at (.5,100) & (.5,150) is caused  by the modelling that parties with under 200 members can’t get a women’s delegate, at 200 member’s Parties get the right to send a woman’s delegate.

A frequency distribution of size of CLPs would be useful to understand how important this is. (If 50% of the membership are in parties above 750 members and 50% below, then this is obviously significant).

Here’s the spreadsheet that makes the chart; member power at conference