L to R: Referendum Ireland, RTÉ News, The Irish Times.
Even an overwhelming vote margin can be interesting to map, but I’m a bit disappointed with the maps of the Irish referendum held last Friday on whether to repeal Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. The official Referendum Ireland website, the Irish Times and RTÉ News all use two-colour constituency map (one colour for yes, another for no); the Irish Times goes a little further and shows choropleth maps for the yes and no sides, but quartiles don’t reveal very much either. The Guardian and even Wikipedia show more granularity. [Maps Mania]
Update: Lots and lots of choropleth maps on the Irish Political Maps Twitter account.
When it comes to maps of the results of Australia’s same-sex marriage referendum (or, to be more precise, postal survey), it’s a mixed bag. At the official end, the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides infographics, but no maps. The Sydney Morning Herald provides a map of the results by district (see screenshot above), but it’s boolean (yes/no) rather than a choropleth or heat map. For that, you’ll want to look at The Australian’s interactive map (they also have a map showing yes/no by constituency, centred on Sydney, whose western districts voted against the most).
Finally, this map by “lunatic map maker” Matthew Isbell is making the rounds; I want to make sure he’s correctly attributed.
Haud Oan is Scottish artist Jane Hunter’s response to the EU referendum results. It’s a textile map of the results, with threads leading off to Europe from pro-EU Scotland; the English threads have been cut.
The BBC’s election night map is bare-bones, showing which side won which local authority, but not by how much. Appropriate for the moment, and for finding your locality, but not necessarily very revealing.
The New York Times
The New York Times’s map, another example of the fine work done by their graphics department, is a choropleth map that indicates the margin of victory in each local authority. It shows the intensity of the win by each side. (The Times does something similar with a hexagon grid map.)
The Guardian
But the EU referendum isn’t like a general election, where each electoral district has roughly the same population, and counts the the same in parliament. In this case it’s the raw vote numbers that count, and local districts can vary in size by as much as a couple of orders of magnitude. So the Guardian’s approach (at right), a hexagon grid that combines a choropleth map with a cartogram to show both the margin of victory and the size of the electorate, is probably most fit for purpose in this case.
I’m actively looking for other maps of the EU referendum results. Send me links, and I’ll update this post below.
YouGov’s eurosceptic map of Britain measures the level of euroscepticism in the regions of England, Wales and Scotland in the run-up to the U.K.’s upcoming EU referendum. “New YouGov research using the profiles data of over 80,000 British people on the YouGov panel reveals the most and least Eurosceptic areas of Britain, down to the finest detail our data will allow. There are 206 local education authorities in England, Scotland and Wales, 188 of which we have large enough samples to report a position on the EU.” [via]
