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Marginal seat

 
Political Dictionary: marginal seat

A constituency in which the distribution of party support is relatively evenly balanced so that the incumbent party has a narrow majority and a small net movement of voters will lead to its changing hands. In many constituencies, the socio-economic make-up of the electorate is such as to permanently skew support to one political party, and incumbents have substantial majorities which are normally unassailable by challengers. Such one-party ‘safe’ seats predominate in many political systems, in which case the outcomes of elections are decided in the ‘marginals’, the often small number of seats in which there are genuine prospects of partisan change. For this reason, the parties tend to concentrate their campaigning efforts on wooing voters in marginal constituencies, and the latter also attract especial attention from the opinion polls. It may be noted that seats can, of course, shift between the ‘marginal’ and ‘safe’ categories reflecting population movements, boundary changes, and political realignments.

— Stan Taylor

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Wikipedia: Marginal seat
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A marginal seat is a constituency held with a particularly small majority in a legislative election conducted under a single-winner rather than a proportional representation voting system. The opposite is a safe seat.

These seats require a smaller swing to change hands and are therefore typically the focus of most of the political party campaign resources. The concentration of money and manpower to areas where they will make the most difference is known as targeting. The creation of policy that will benefit a particular seat, while costing all taxpayers is known as pork barreling. [1]

Political parties often face tension between the holders of marginal seats and safe seats. Holders of safe seats tend to get far less discretionary resources—governmental as well as political—from their political party than do holders of marginal seats.

In Canada they may be known as target ridings or swing seats.

A similar phenomenon happens in United States presidential elections, where the Electoral College system means that candidates must win states rather than votes. Again, resources are concentrated towards the swing states with the smallest majorities.

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Political Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Marginal seat" Read more