Six Observations on the PCA's Voting on BCO Amendments

I've been doing some analysis of the voting thus far on the (now failed) proposed amendments to the PCA Book of Church Order (BCO). As I have been creating the maps tracking the voting by the presbyteries, I have also been keep track of the vote tallies for each presbytery. If you are not the sort of person who is interested in number crunching and statistics, read no further. However, I think there are some interesting observations to be had from looking at the numbers. (NOTE: I have the vote tallies of 61 of the presbyteries. To date, 72 presbyteries have voted, so my data is not complete; however, I think it represents a large enough sample (84.72%) to make some observations.)

Observation 1: Abstentions matter! In 5 Presbyteries (Calvary, Chesapeake, Palmetto, Warrior and Western Carolina), the difference between BCO 14-1 passing or failing was less than the number of abstentions. The same is true in 4 Presbyteries for the voting on BCO 14-2 (same presbyteries as above, minus Chesapeake). For example, in Calvary Presbytery, the proposed amendment to BCO 14-1 passed by a vote of 37 to 31 and their were 10 abstentions. If those 10 men (or just 7 of those 10) had voted against the amendment, it would have been defeated.

Observation 2: Those same 5 presbyteries decided on 14-1 without a majority voting either way. There were 4 presbyteries that decided on 14-2 without a majority voting either way. For example, in Calvary Presbytery, 47.44% voted to approve 14-1 while 39.74% voted to reject it. There was not a majority vote for approving the amendment. The same is true of Chesapeake, Palmetto, Warrior, and Western Carolina Presbyteries for 14-1. (Chesapeake's percentages were: Approve: 45.83%, Reject: 47.92%. Palmetto: Approve: 34.55%, Reject: 43.64%. Warrior: Approve: 40%, Reject: 48%. Western Carolina: Approve: 0%, Reject: 17.07%.) For 14-2, the same presbyteries lacked a majority, except for Chesapeake which had 50.98% voting to reject.

Observation 3: The total number of votes from all presbyteries on 14-1 is 1,058 for, 1,167 against, 144 abstain. For 14-2 the numbers are 966 for, 1,221 against, 183 abstain. If all those voters had been at General Assembly last year, these amendments would have never gone to the Presbyteries in the first place. But, in fairness to those who were not able to attend GA, a lot of great opinion and analysis pieces dealing with these amendments have been written since then, as well.

Observation 4: There were more abstentions in presbyteries which rejected the amendments than in presbyteries which approved the amendments. The average abstention rate (# of Abstentions/Total # of Votes) for presbyteries approving 14-1 was 5.52%; whereas, the same rate for presbyteries rejecting 14-1 was 8.98%. For 14-2 the numbers are 5.63% and 8.53%, respectively. I'm not sure what this means, other than, perhaps if voters thought the amendment was going to fail, rather than be on the losing side of a vote, they simply abstained.

Observation 5: The average size of presbyteries (that is, the total of all voting members at the meeting of Presbytery which voted on the amendments) approving 14-1 and 14-2 was larger than the average size of the presbyteries rejecting 14-1 and 14-2. The average size of a presbytery approving 14-1 was 44.71 while the average size of a presbytery rejecting 14-1 was 35.03. For 14-2 the average sizes were 43.73 and 36.1, respectively. There are a lot of reasons why this may be. As noted in Observation 3, the raw total votes is clearly for rejecting the amendments. Why, then, do approving presbyteries have more voting members? It could be that those in favor of approving the amendments did a better job in those presbyteries of getting like-minded elders to Presbytery (the "rally the troops" factor). It could be that those presbyteries have a higher percentage of Assistant Pastors (see here: http://www.baylyblog.com/2009/04/reading-metro-ny-presbytery-minutes.html here: http://www.weswhite.net/2010/02/proposal-for-attaining-ruling/ and here: http://www.therulingelder.com/2010/02/over-at-johannes-weslianus-rev.html for more on Assistant Pastors in the PCA). It could simply be that those presbyteries which approved 14-1 and 14-2 have more congregations in them, on average. There are a lot of reasons why the size of the presbytery is larger in approving presbyteries, and without more data, all I can do is speculate.

Observation 6: What happened in Western Carolina Presbytery? (OK, that's not really an observation, but it is a question I have after looking at the numbers.) Those brothers get the award for most skewed vote in favor of abstention. The tally for 14-1 was 0 voting yea, 7 voting nay and 34 abstaining. For 14-2 the totals were 0, 6, and 35! Perhaps there was some procedural tactic I'm not aware of at work, but it makes me wonder: Why have the amendments on the docket in the first place if all you're going to do is abstain? Perhaps someone more familiar with what happened at Western Carolina can help me understand the situation.

If anyone is interested, I've posted a spreadsheet of the vote tallies, here: PCA BCO Statistics

Feel free to reach your own conclusions based on these numbers.

A Small Milestone

This blog does not get a huge amount of traffic, but I would like to point out that sometime last night it did receive its 5,000th visit and its 2,000th unique visitor. Those are some large numbers, even if it took several months to reach them. I thought I would take a moment to break down some of the sources of that traffic.

Geography
The vast majority of my visitors have come from the United States. No surprise there, since I'm an American writing about mostly American theological issues. However, the non-United States visitors are interesting. I've had visitors from Canada (Hello, Canadian Presbytery of the ARP!), the United Kingdom, and South Korea, but also countries such as Cambodia, Bulgaria, Bahrain, and Indonesia.

Within the United States, the state that I get the most traffic from is South Carolina (home of Erskine and the headquarters of the ARP), followed by North Carolina, then California, Virginia and Georgia. I have had visitors from all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia.

Sources
Since I began tracking statistics, I have had a fairly even split between people coming to my site after using a search engine and people being referred to my site by a link on some other site. Direct traffic is a distant third.

Search terms involving Erskine have been the most used to find my site, followed by terms involving "ruling elder" or "ruling elders."

The sites that have referred the most traffic to this blog have been Facebook (hello "Alumni for Erskine" Facebook group!), followed by the blogs of Rev. Brian Carpenter and Rev. Wes White.

Content
The most read articles on this blog have been: Erskine Alumni Associate Joins Suit against the ARP, followed by the more recent General Synod of the ARP 2010, Part 2: The Bad. Most people who come to this site read whatever is on the front page.

What does it all mean?
I love statistics, numbers and graphs, but the question is: can I learn anything from all this data? I believe so: That most of my visitors in the U.S. come from states where there are heavy concentrations of ARP congregations tells me that people in the ARP are reading what I write. That's a good thing, as I write quite a bit about the ARP and issues the denomination faces.

That my most people find my site by searching for things related to "Erskine" and that my most popular articles have been about Erskine or Erskine and the ARP tells me that Erskine has been an important issue that interests many people. I believe it will continue to be important, as well.

Here's hoping the next 5,000 visits to my site will be beneficial to all who come to this blog!