Much fuss in the Conservative Party's internal newsletter over the (lack of) activities of so-called `bed-blocking' older Tory MPs. Apparently, the Conservative Chief Whip is,
having ``a quiet whisky'' with members whom he believes are not pulling their weight
in order to clear out 30 safe seats for a new generation of Young Conservatives. The Torygraph's story is backed up with high-quality statistics such as these:
Michael Mates, a member of Lord Butler's committee, voted in only 30 per cent of divisions, the worst record of any Tory MP. Stephen Dorrell, the member for Charnwood and once secretary of state for health, asked no oral questions and voted in only 33 per cent of divisions.
To be honest, this story sounded like bollocks when I read it and a little work demonstrates that I was right. They Work For You collects `performance' data for individual MPs: the number of speeches they make and written questions they ask, the number of divisions (votes) they attend, and what fraction of messages sent them through Fax Your MP are answered within a fortnight. The Tories' own site has biographies of the individual MPs, which usually mention their dates of birth. (I couldn't find the dates of birth of 16 of 169 Tory MPs; this won't significantly affect the results.)
Firstly, the age distribution of Tory MPs:
The ages of Conservative Parliamentarians are (slightly surprisingly) approximately normally distributed with mean 52.6 years and standard deviation 8.5 years. This tells us that `young' is a relative term here; picking an arbitrary cut-off, I've assumed that `young' Tory MPs are those aged 50 or less.
Basically there is no correlation between age and `performance' in Conservative MPs:
With outliers -- like John Bercow MP, who asks hundreds of written questions per year -- excluded, there are no statistically significant performance differences between `old' (>50 years) and `young' (<50 years) Tory MPs.
The moral of the story? Not sure, but perhaps one or more of these will do:
Comments
Posted by Francis Irving, Thursday, 29 July 2004 11:36 (link):
Fantastic graphs!
However, I think the article was deliberately picking on specific MPs, for other complex Tory-party political reasons. Maybe somebody else who knows more about the Tory party can explain?
Also, would be interesting to plot against time as an MP, rather than against age.
Posted by Anthony Wells, Thursday, 29 July 2004 13:31 (link):
Ditto to what Francis said - try doing it against time as an MP, rather than time walking around the planet :)
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Thursday, 29 July 2004 13:32 (link):
Well, they looked at MPs who asked relatively few questions, voted in relatively few divisions, and whatnot. And if you look at the ten worst-performing MPs, you do indeed find that more are `old' (over 50) than `young'. But that's just because 50 isn't the mean of the distribution; if you compare above-average to below-average age, then the distribution in the tails isn't significantly skewed -- as you'd expect if performance and age were uncorrelated.
I couldn't find anywhere good to scrape that data from! (Anyway the Torygraph specifically mentioned age, and getting MP ages was hard enough....) I'll do the graphs if you'll extend PW back to 1945, or if Anthony has a nice spreadsheet somewhere with the relevant data in....
Posted by Anthony Wells, Friday, 30 July 2004 01:10 (link):
Ooooh - I'm sure I can rattle up a list :)
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