#GE24 candidates in numbers and charts

The statement of persons nominated – ‘candidate lists’ to you and me – for the General Election have been published by the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland. Here’s a numeric breakdown of the people seeking your vote on 4 July.

136 candidates are running across the 18 constituencies. That’s a third more than 2019 (102), but two fewer than a previous high watermark of 138 in 2015.

Just 2 parties are running in all 18 Northern Ireland constituencies: Alliance and the SDLP.

Belfast West and Strangford will have the longest ballot papers, with 10 candidates apiece. Just 5 candidates are running in Upper Bann.

Just under a third of candidates standing are women (33.1%). That’s the highest proportion at a Westminster election, just a smidgeon above the 2017 General Election field (33.0%). No constituency has an all-male or all-female ballot paper. (North Down was an all-male race in 2019.)

Two-thirds of candidates in Belfast South & Mid Down are women. All but 1 candidate in Belfast East, East Antrim and North Antrim are men. The largest number of women on a ballot paper will be 5 in East Londonderry.

The parties with the highest proportion of female candidates are Aontú and the Conservatives (60%, 6 apiece). Alliance is the fielding the largest number of women (8), followed by the SDLP (7). Leaving aside Cross Community Labour Alternative which only has 1 candidate, the TUV has the greatest proportion of men nominated as candidates (85.7%) followed by the UUP (82.4%) and the DUP (81.3%).

9 independent candidates are running in 7 constituencies. 2 are running in each of North Down and Strangford. Only 1 woman is running as an independent candidate: Anne McCloskey in Foyle: she stood for Aontú at the last general election.

14 incumbent MPs are running for re-election, the lowest number of incumbents putting themselves forward on the ballot in recent years. Worth noting that there have been 0 general elections in the last 20 years where all the Northern Ireland incumbents got reelected.

Note: given the volume of data and the manual categorisation, not to mention the pattern matching to look across Westminster elections, there are plenty of opportunities for miskeying and mistakes. If you spot anything odd, do flag it up and I’ll look into it. Either in the comments below, or drop me an email alaninbelfast at gmail dot com.

Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social media training/coaching; produces podcasts and radio programmes; is a FactCheckNI director; a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland; and a member of the Corrymeela Community.