Race ace? UK and US consider constitutional changes

At the end of January political leaders in the two countries, the UK and the US, suggested that they would consider important constitutional changes. In the UK David Cameron said it was time to do some renegotiating the relationship with the European Union. After four years he promised an election on withdrawing or not. At almost the same time Republican leaders in a number of American states said it was time to change the allocation of electoral college votes from winner take all to a distribution that would be based on congressional district results. The states considering this change were states in which Democratic candidates for the presidency were the usual winners. The states to keep the winner take all arrangement were states Republicans regularly won.

These are both important constitutional changes. Both were inspired by political/partisan considerations. Both received quite a lot of press attention because they would be important changes.

The question is how much attention did they receive from their respective electorates? Twitter is the medium used for investigating that attention. While Twitter is used by only a minority of citizens in both countries people who are very interested in politics are also most likely to be using Twitter for political communication. In this sense, at least, these are opinion leaders even if small in proportion to the total population.

To make sense of the numbers of messages posted to Twitter about these two subjects we need a point of reference. What is big and what is little? For big I will show the numbers for Obama for the same 10 day period. This is big. There are more messages mentioning Obama than for any other politics topic.


The range is from 139,831 to 232,406 messages per day mentioning Obama. This is one more way we know that US politics is presidential politics. All political issues are collected in the president. And, in this case, we have a celebrity in the White House. That is about as big as it gets day to day.

A more 'measured' point of reference is the argument about gun control that happened about the same time in the US. It was precipitated by a mass killing in an elementary school. The service remembering the children was televised nationally; the President Obama attended and spoke to the need for gun control


The NRA, the National Rifle Association, is represented by the red line, and gun control by the blue line. The range is from 14,478 messages per day to 49,660 per day. Very roughly there is a10 to 1 ratio between Obama and either gun control or NRA. The spike on the sixth day, January 30, 2013, reflects the first Senate committee hearing on gun control. Former member of the House Gabrielle Giffords, whose career was ended by being shot, was able to read a few sentences in support of gun control. The head of the NRA said a pox on proposals for gun control.

Counting messages per day mentioning Obama is counting in the hundreds of thousands. The total for the 10 days was 1,838,318. Counting messages per day mentioning gun control or NRA is counting in the tens of thousands. The totals were very similar. There were 222,604 messages containing gun control and 242,503 mentioning the NRA. What about the suggestions for constitutional change?


Blue represents the messages posted to Twitter mentioning the change in distributing electoral college votes. Red is the number of messages mentioning Cameron's proposals about UK's relationship to the European Union. The totals are again very close. There were 15,995 messages about electoral college reform and 16,484 about Cameron's proposals. The range was from 635 to 2,195.  In both cases there was a spike followed by a more or less monotonic decrease.

Counting messages per day about the constitutional reforms is counting in the thousands.

Conclusion -- people in the UK and the US paid very little attention to proposals for constitutional reform. It was much less than Obama; roughly a 100 to 1 ratio. It was a 10 to 1 ratio between gun control and the constitutional changes.

And the race was a tie!

© G. R. Boynton, 2/07/2013