Friday, May 24, 2019

How Europe Votes


From now until Sunday people in the European Union will be voting to elect their Member of the European Parliament. Some countries, such as the Netherlands and the UK, voted yesterday. Many other countries will not hold elections until Sunday. In order to avoid early results affecting how people vote elsewhere in Europe no results are allowed to be published anywhere in Europe until Sunday night.

If you can't wait until Sunday night for the results of the 2019 European Union Election then you can explore Zeit's Europe from Left to Right interactive map. This map colors 80,000 regions in Europe based on the most recent election results in that country. The map is therefore not a map of how people have voted or intend to vote in the 2019 EU election instead it maps out which way people voted in their most recent national election.


On the map you can select any of the main political groups to see how they have most recently performed across Europe. For example if you click on Green you can view a choropleth map of how much support there is across the continent for Europe's Green parties (Lithuania and the far north of Finland seem to show the most support for Green parties). If you click on the extreme right you can see that in the most recent national elections Poland, Austria and northern Italy have all shown a high level of support for extreme right-wing political parties.

The colors assigned to each country's political parties is determined by the the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which categorizes political parties in European countries based on their positions on ideology, European integration, and policy issues.

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