Sunday, June 26, 2016

Mapping the Divided Kingdom

Fake is the New Real has released a map showing the vote margins in the UK's European Union referendum. It visualizes where and by how much UK voters voted to leave or remain in the EU.

Most other visualizations I've seen have used a choropleth map to show the extent to which areas voted to leave or remain in the EU. This map uses colored scaled circles to show the vote margins in each UK local government area, region, and country. I think the result is a much clearer visualization of the support for staying in or leaving the EU around the UK.

If you select the country option you can see that Northern Island voted to remain and Wales voted to leave. However in both cases only by a small margin. The biggest margins were in Scotland and England - both on opposing sides. This really emphasizes the huge political gap between the two countries at the moment and I suspect predicts Scotland's eventual split from the Union Kingdom.

If you select the regions option you can see that London was the only region in the whole of England which voted to remain. This points to a huge political and cultural divide in England between the capital and the rest of the country.

Switching to the local government area view it is clear that outside of London the main areas which voted to remain were mainly the largest university towns, Overall remain proved most popular with younger voters, the higher educated and those on higher median incomes. This seems to be confirmed by this view of voting margins in local government areas.

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