alva datablog: Where the Labour Leadership election was won

Labour Leadership Election Special:

• Labour Leadership Election: The policies that won and lost the election
• Jeremy Corbyn: Where the Labour Leadership was won
• Andy Burnham: Where he lost the Labour Leadership battle
• Yvette Cooper: Where she lost the Labour Leadership battle
• Liz Kendall: Where she lost the Labour Leadership battle

With the Labour leadership contest having come to an emphatic conclusion on Saturday, we turned to the data to try to understand more clearly in which policy areas Jeremy Corbyn really managed to steal a march on his competitors.

Between May and August 2015, alva tracked over two million discussions related to the leadership debate from print, online, broadcast and social media. These were classified by candidate and policy area as well as being analysed for sentiment.

The key findings from the report were:

• The Economy, Public Services and Welfare have dominated discussions of the 4 candidates
• Relatively little attention has been paid to Tax, Business and Housing
• The candidates are ranked Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall by overall sentiment
• Corbyn has strong advocacy around his policies on the Economy, Public Ownership and Defence
• Andy Burnham has differentiated himself on Housing, Tax and Public Services, but is seen as weak on the Economy and Defence
• Welfare is the most negatively viewed issue, with only Liz Kendall netting positivity in this area and albeit marginally

It’s striking to observe the similarity between the alva-analysed share of votes and the real results.

Figure i : alva share of votes vs actual votes per candidate

The alva results were obtained by focusing on candidate advocacy across the sources analysed, thereby looking at how much content there was which expressed direct support for each of the contestants.

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