Guernsey · Voting Patterns
Who votes like whom
Guernsey’s States has no political parties — every deputy sits as an independent. This matrix compares every tracked deputy’s voting record against every other deputy’s, across 298 recorded divisions, to see whether informal voting blocs exist anyway. Hover or tap any square for the pair behind it, or pick a deputy below to pin their row and see who they vote closest to — and least like. How this is calculated.
Colour is relative to this matrix, not a fixed 0-100% scale — every cell’s exact percentage and shared-vote count is in the tooltip. Pale grey squares mark pairs with too few shared votes to compare confidently.
Four voting blocs
Grouping deputies by how closely their whole pattern of agreement across the chamber tracks anyone else’s — not just raw agreement, which almost every pair scores fairly high on — turns up a consistent shape: one large, tightly aligned group, and three smaller, looser ones. The split holds even though no deputy sits on a party ticket, so read it as a description of how the chamber currently votes, not a declared allegiance. Each group is also matched to the part of Westminster that behaves the same way, for readers more used to a whipped parliament than to a chamber of independents.
Each bar is the average agreement within that group. The vertical marker on every bar is the whole-Assembly average (80.3%) — only a bar clearing that line is more internally aligned than the chamber is on average; the rest are closer to typical background agreement than to a bloc of their own.
Consensus Core
23 deputiesThe largest group by far, and the only one whose members agree with each other clearly more than the Assembly agrees on average — the closest thing this chamber has to a governing majority, despite no deputy sitting on a party ticket.
Closest Westminster equivalent
The payroll vote
Every one of the Assembly’s eight policy-committee presidencies — Policy & Resources, Health & Social Care, Environment & Infrastructure, Housing, Economic Development, Employment & Social Security, Education Sport & Culture, and Home Affairs — belongs to a deputy in this group, and it votes together far more tightly than the chamber does. That is what a Westminster government’s payroll vote looks like: ministers and their reliable supporters, cohesive because they are in office rather than because they share an ideology. On policy this group runs from what would be the soft left to the One Nation centre-right at Westminster; office, not ideology, is what holds it together.
Crossbench Independents
10 deputiesA looser grouping than the other three. Several of these deputies actually agree more with deputies outside this group than with each other, so read it as "the deputies who diverge from the core, for different reasons" rather than a bloc with its own identity.
Closest Westminster equivalent
The Lords crossbenches
The crossbenches are a seating arrangement for peers who take no whip, not a faction with a line — and this group agrees with itself slightly less than the chamber agrees with itself overall, so it behaves the same way. It also holds the presidency of Scrutiny, which puts the Assembly’s main check on the executive outside the group that holds every policy committee — the nearest Westminster parallel being a select-committee chair drawn from off the government benches.
Unlabelled group (3)
3 deputiesA statistical grouping only — none of the deputies this page normally keys its labels to landed here, so no editorial description has been written for it yet.
Unlabelled group (2)
2 deputiesA statistical grouping only — none of the deputies this page normally keys its labels to landed here, so no editorial description has been written for it yet.
The Westminster comparisons are an editorial aid, and they map behaviour, not politics — how tightly a group votes together, whether it holds office, whether it habitually rebels. None of them says anything about what a deputy believes, and none implies any deputy holds, or would hold, a UK party allegiance: no deputy stood on a UK party ticket and the division record could not evidence it either way. A group is compared to the payroll vote because its members run the committees, not because their politics resemble any UK government’s.
This groups deputies by their recorded votes only, not by any position they’ve declared — names within each card are ordered by how distinctly they define that group, so one near the top of a card is closer to its centre than one near the bottom, whose placement is closer to a coin flip. How this is calculated.
How to read this
For each pair of deputies, we look at every division where both cast a substantive vote (“pour” or “contre”) and calculate the share of those shared votes where they voted the same way. Formal abstentions and absences aren’t counted as agreement or disagreement — they’re simply excluded from that pair’s comparison, the same way promise delivery is scored. Procedural motions (Rule 24(6)/26(1) motions, guillotines, adjournments) are excluded too, since they test a view on chamber process rather than policy.
Deputies are arranged so that similar voting records sit near each other, making clusters easier to spot — the order itself has no meaning beyond that. A pale grey square means fewer than 15 shared votes were recorded for that pair, too few to read anything into.
This measures voting alignment only. It says nothing about whether either deputy kept their own promises — see promise delivery rankings for that.