Polish Elections

Overview

As with most of my projects, my goal is both an interesting visual as well as an organized dataset. As shown in the recent Polish Presidential election, Poland has a stark geographical divide in its politics, due, in part, to resettlement programs following World War 2. This divide is between the national-conservative Prawo I Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) and the liberal-conservative Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) parties. To highlight this divide, I’m making a map showing where those two parties did best over the past 12 elections. I’m looking at elections for the EU, the Sejm, and for President and, so far, the maps are impressively consistent. I’ll document my progress in compiling the results and designing the map.

In lieu of posting the incomplete version of the map, here’s a map of the recent Presidential election. This doesn’t show where each candidate won, but where each candidate outperformed their national share, which I call their lean. Since Trzaskowski lost by about 2 percentage points, there are few towns where he lost, but by less than his national share, so they’re indicated as being places where Trzaskowski did well.

As part of this project, I’m standardizing and compiling the data so that others can use it. This data will be hosted in a Github repository and include data from other elections as well. Once this project is completed, the next step is researching exactly why there’s such a stark geographical polarization and writing a separate article on it.

To Do

• Compile Data
  • Sejm and Senate
    • 2001
    • 2003
    • 2005
    • 2007
    • 2011
    • 2015
    • 2019
  • President
    • 2000
    • 2005
    • 2010
    • 2015
    • 2020
  • European Parliament
    • 2004
    • 2009
    • 2014
    • 2019
• Match Gmina and Powiat Divisions
  • Create master list of Gmina codes
  • Determine method for dealing with territorial changes
  • Ensure shape file can work with all data
• Create Lean Map Array
  • Once I have all the data, figure out who had the better lean in each Powiat for each election
  • Think of other, better ways to display the data
• Compile Dictionary of Political Parties
• Tie Up Loose Ends

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