Michael Steed

Michael Steed is a British psephologist, political scientist, broadcaster, activist and Liberal Democrat politician. He was born in 1940 in Kent, where his father was a farmer. He has written extensively on parties and elections.

He was educated at St. Lawrence College, Ramsgate, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1960 the South African authorities refused him entry to Sharpeville to deliver food aid to victims of the Sharpeville shootings.

From 1963 to 1965 Steed undertook postgraduate research at Nuffield College, Oxford, under Dr David Butler. At the same time he was active in the Young Liberals, particularly on the issue of apartheid in South Africa. He became national Vice-Chairman of the Young Liberals.

In 1966 he became Lecturer in Government at Manchester University, a post he held for many years until taking early retirement through ill health. As a psephologist he became a specialist in the detailed analysis of election results from a sociological point of view, for many years providing media such as The Observer and The Economist with texts making such complexities as "percentage swing" accessible to the lay reader. In the later 1960s and throughout the 1970s he made regular television appearances on "election night" programmes, often at the side of Bob McKenzie who popularised the "swingometer" based on the concept of swing devised by David Butler. Steed was to develop a more complex formula for calculating swing, sometimes known among psephologists as "Steed swing" to differentiate it from "Butler swing".

From 1964 until 2005, Steed – latterly in conjunction with John Curtice – was responsible for the statistical analysis in David Butler's regular Nuffield election studies entitled "The British General Election of ....".

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