The winners and losers of a Christmas general election

Who will you feel most sorry for in the event of a December election? Election officials who will find many of the venues they normally use for polling stations already booked up for Christmas parties and school plays? Or party activists, who will have to go door-knocking in the cold and dark, maybe through horizontal sleet or snow? Perhaps it is the humble voter, who will find an election campaign impinges on their festivities?

Or maybe you have a hard heart and don’t much sympathise with any of them. You just want to know if holding an election in winter will make much of a difference to the outcome. If you are, I regret to have to tell you that the evidence isn’t terribly conclusive.

It’s common to hear claims about the effect that the weather will have on turnout, usually without much evidence to back them up. The problem is that we have had just 26 general elections in the last century; the number of cases is low and so many other things have changed in that time that sensible analysis is very difficult.