19/04/2024
Hegarty's Law predicting a 50% seats change in our 2024 NGE
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But there is one reason to believe that this election will be tougher. Why? The answer is to do with the relationship between candidate numbers and re-election rates, which was first observed by political scientist David Hegarty in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. “Hegarty’s Law” (my name for it, not his), states that the more candidates there are in an electorate, the less likely the incumbent is to win. A related way of thinking about this is that, for any given electorate, if candidate numbers increase from the previous election, the odds the incumbent will be re-elected fall.
Increased candidate numbers in electorates where the sitting MP is from the former government's party could be bad news for Sogavare, says Terence Wood.