Interpreting political maps

For those interested in how deprivation might tie into voting patterns, blogger Alasdair Rae created maps of the 100 most and 100 least deprived parliamentary constituencies, highlighting the voting choice at the 2010 general election. He points out that the most obvious thing to note here is that the vast majority of the 100 most deprived constituencies voted Labour and the vast majority of the 100 least deprived constituencies voted Conservative. Many of these are Conservative or Labour ‘safe seats’ with large majorities, for example Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North where he has a majority of 21,194.

As you can also tell by the larger size of the 100 least deprived constituencies they also tend to be more rural.

On Alasdair’s site you can click through to interactive maps of the result.

I’ve looked at the changes since this year’s election and found the following:

– Out of the 100 most deprived constituencies all five liberal democrat seats switched to Labour, although the Conservatives held on to both theirs (Amber Rudd in Hastings and Rye and Oliver Colville in Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport).

– Out of the 100 least deprived constituencies 6 of the 7 Liberal Democrat seats have similarly gone to the Conservative party, with the exception being Nick Clegg’s ward of Sheffield Hallam.

This makes for an even more polarised map than before, with 98 Labour seats in the 100 most deprived and 98 Conservative seats in the 100 least deprived.