Electoral district of Berkeley

Berkeley is an electoral district of the Enderronian Parliament in Plymouth Prefecture, first contested at the 1946 federal election. It is named after the town of Berkeley in northern Plymouth, on which it was originally based, and is currently located in the northern suburbs of St Claire.

The sitting member, since the 1989 by-election, is Bob Crouch, a member of the Social Democratic Party. He is currently the longest still-serving member of the Social Democrats and one of the two last parliamentary survivors of the Behrens Government, the other being Ed Calderon.

History
Berkeley was one of the 75 electorates contested at the 1946 election, the first since Enderronian independence. It was originally centred on the town of Berkeley, which is located just beyond the St Claire metropolitan area. Successive redistributions have moved it significantly southwest, and since the 1990s it has been located in its approximate current position in northern St Claire. Nevertheless, it has retained the name of Berkeley, primarily because it is a pre-independence electorate, and the Enderronian Electoral Commission's guidelines on redistributions require it to preserve the names of such electorates where possible.

Berkeley was held by the United Party without interruption from 1946 to 1989, albeit on consistently tenuous margins; the party's two-party-preferred margin in the seat only exceeded 10 percent once, at the 1958 landslide. Berkeley's southwesterly shift has caused it to transform from a marginal United seat to a safe SDP seat, particularly since the 2000s. The Social Democrats' Bob Crouch won it at the 1989 by-election, and he has held it since.