UK election cyberscapes

In anticipation of the upcoming election in the UK, we have decided to explore the geographies of election-related references in the British Isles. The map below visualises which of five political parties contain the most references at any particular location in the Google Maps database.

References to UK Political Parties

First, a brief note on method. We searched for the three major political parties (Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) at each location, as well as two of the parties on the far-right of the political spectrum (UKIP and the BNP) that have made gains in recent years. We also searched for the terms "tories + election" and "lib dems + election" and assigned a dot to either the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats if either one of those terms had the most hits at any location.

The map reveals some interesting online political geographies. The Tories score better than any other party. In fact, 61% of locations possess more references to the Conservatives than any other political party, whereas 33.8% of places have more references to Labour and only 3.4% for the Lib Dems.

The UKIP has a particuarly strong showing in the South West, with multiple points that contain more references to "UKIP" than any other party. The BNP do best in South Wales, West Gloucestershire, West Yorkshire and South Tyneside.

One of the most interesting aspects of the map is the degree to which it diverges from maps of likely voting patterns of constituencies. Some of the differences can likely be explained by the relatively recent boost in the polls to the Liberal Democrats (which hasn't yet had a chance to be reflected in material indexed by Google Maps). The strong showing by the Tories could also perhaps be attributed to a greater degree of online engagement by that party.

Another way of gauging online popularity of political parties before the election is to search for the names of each party leader throughout the country. Here we again chose the leaders of the three main parties, as well as Nick Griffin (BNP) in order to explore whether this method can tell us anything about the popularity of the far-right in different parts of the country. The map below shows these results.

References to UK Political Party Leaders

Here we see that Labour's Gordon Brown outperforms his rivals in almost every part of the country, a fact that likely owes much to his current position as Prime Minister. The only significant anomaly seems to be a large number of references to David Cameron in Oxfordshire. Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems again show poorly in this map, although it will be interesting to see how the online visibility of these figures changes after the election.

References to Nick Griffin unsurprisingly appear in many of the same places in which there was also a great deal of visibility for the BNP. We explore the visibility of far-right parties in some more detail through the following maps, which display total number of references to the BNP and the UKIP (this time not compared to any of the other political parties).

References to the British National Party

References to the UK Independence Party

These maps seem to indicate that there is not always a greater total number of references to the BNP or UKIP in places in which they scored highly in the first two maps. In some places, such as West Gloucestershire, it could simply be that there are fewer online references to any of the mainstream political parties.

Are these maps predictors of election results and likely voting patters? We doubt it, but it is nonetheless interesting to observe the very unique geographies occupied on the Internet by different segments of the political spectrum. We will, however, claim any credit for correctly predicting an election result of 61% Tories, 33% Labour and 3% Lib Dems.