If the 2016 vote for Brexit was described as a political earthquake in the United Kingdom, then the 2019 General Election is the equivalent to the tsunami that followed this seismic event and swept over some of the deepest Labour heartlands in England. Political commentators spoke of a demolishment of the Labour party’s ‘red wall’ as the results came in (although the ‘wall’ that may have once stood had already started to crumble in previous elections). Approaching the outcome of the General Election from a visual perspective puts such metaphors into a visual representation. The following map shows the outcome of this year’s general election – the fourth (and definitely final) of this decade – in three different cartographic visualisations:
Tag Archives: britain
In Focus: Brexit and the UK General Election
The introductory words by Prime Minister Theresa May in the Conservative manifesto 2017 outlined the main focus for the government’s General Election campaign: ‘Brexit will define us: our place in the world, our economic security and our future prosperity’. But when it came to Brexit, the campaign itself featured little of political substance from either of the two main parties. The impact of the EU-debate on the (quite unexpected) election outcome is very complex, with the anticipated Conservative gains in Leave-voting Labour seats failing to materialise.
In a contribution for the “In Focus” feature of Political Insight (September 2017, Volume 8, Issue 2) I looked at the outcome of the general election from the perspective of Brexit:
Political Landscapes of the United Kingdom in 2017
How much has the United Kingdom changed following the second general election within two years, and following the referendums on independence in Scotland in 2014 and the membership of the European Union in 2016? Each poll appeared to have had a significant impact on the political debate and the next vote which never seemed far away. As such, the 2017 general election looks like the culmination of the preceding ballots where all of the previous debates got a more or less prominent mention during the electoral campaign. Ultimately this led to some significant changes in the political landscapes of the country with each corner of the United Kingdom being affected by these dynamics.
Politicians, spin doctors and commentators quickly aim to interpret the outcome according to their views. In contrast, the following series of maps showing some key statistics and data from the election results aims to provide a more neutral as well as more comprehensive look at the underlying geographies. It shows different angles on key characteristics such as winners and runners-up in each constituency, changes in votes, vote shares of the two largest parties, turnout and changes in turnout between the last two general elections.
In this feature, different cartographic techniques are used to show how the electoral landscape in the UK is shaped not only by physical space, but also by political dimensions as well as from the perspective of people. The conventional (land area) map is therefore complemented by a hexagon cartogram where each parliamentary constituency is represented by a hexagon (some changes in constituencies over the past decades are reflected in split and merged hexagons), and by a gridded population cartogram where each area is resized according to the number of people living in that area.
Each of the three maps therefore provides a unique insight into the diverse spatial patterns of politics that emerged from the 2017 general election. To fully understand the new political landscapes of the United Kingdom, only a combination of different perspectives as shown here can help to gain a more complete picture. Geography matters not only in its physical dimension, but just as much in its social and political spaces that are depicted in these maps.
Here is the ultimate cartographic wrap-up of the 2017 general election in 21 maps:
Conservative vote share
(click for larger and labelled version)
Labour vote share
(click for larger and labelled version)
Britain elects: The changes
Featured
“Nothing has changed” was the infamous quote made by Theresa May during this year’s UK election campaign over a policy u-turn. This marked the beginning of a reverse of the Conservative support in the polls which eventually led to the changes that changed the political geography of the United Kingdom significantly when compared to the just as surprising result of the 2015 election. The following map uses the same approach as the previous map series showing the winning party in each constituency, but adds further detail to the picture by also highlighting how seats have changed between the last and this election:
Britain elects: The results (summer edition 2017)
The United Kingdom went to the polls…again. Following the general election in 2015 and the referendum on the country’s membership in the European Union in 2017, the British electorate had yet another chance to have their say about the country’s future. After the then prime minister David Cameron delivered referendum which he had promised to win the 2015 election, the British electorate voted for leaving the European Union by a small majority of 51.9% which led to Cameron’s resignation. Theresa May took over leadership of the Conservative party and became Prime Minister in July 2016. After first resisting calls for a general election, she eventually decided otherwise in the expectation of strengthening her conservative majority during the Brexit process. However, the election on June, 8th led to the opposite. The Conservative party lost its majority in parliament with the Labour party making significant gains. The following map series shows the result of the election from three perspectives. The conventional map (left) provides the most common perspective, while the hexagon-map gives a clearer picture of the distribution of parliamentary seats where each seat is represented by a hexagon (middle, changes in constituencies results in some hexagons being split). The gridded population cartogram (right) provides the most accurate depiction of how many people are represented by each party, as it gives each person in the UK an equal amount of space (while constituencies vary sometimes significantly in their population size):
EU Migration to and from the UK
The recent UK government defeat on its Brexit bill by the House of Lords based on the demand that ministers should guarantee EU nationals’ right to stay in the UK after Brexit was just the latest tale in the debate about EU migration and the United Kingdom’s role in it. The topic of migrants in the UK was an important element of the EU referendum campaigns in 2016 which led to the decision to leave the European Union. The government’s position sees the question of the rights of EU migrants as part of the upcoming negotiations with the EU where also the rights of UK citizens living in the European Unions need to be agreed. In terms of absolute numbers, this is a much smaller share of affected people (approximately 1.2 million UK citizens are estimated to live in other EU countries) compared to other EU citizens living in the UK (estimated at around 3.2 million). The following two maps show these numbers in comparison in their geographical dimension. Using the most recent annual estimates (published in late 2016 by the ONS and further data from the UN) the cartograms show the countries of the EU (excluding the UK) distorted by the number of UK citizens who are living in another EU country (left map) and by the number of other EU citizens who are living in the UK. The countries are shaded by their ratio between the number of UK migrants in the EU and the number of other EU migrants in the UK:
