Global Mapping of Electoral Districts (GMED)

Check out this guest post on Washington Post's Monkey Cage that uses data from this project! Link

Updated October 12, 2014

Political Scientists tend to think at the country level when it comes to questions in comparative politics due to significant constraints in data availability at lower levels of political aggregation. The electoral district (constituency), however, is a vital arena of competition in the politics of any country. This project aims to develop a dataset of geo-referenced electoral districts across the world and link it to other data sources so that questions can be developed and tested at the constituency level.

Stage 1: GIS Mapping of most recent elections in 76 countries

The following maps have been geo-referenced to date:

Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bhutan, Brazil, Burma, Bulgaria, Canada, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, East Timor, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Zambia

The following are currently being processed:

Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Malta

Stage 2: Link to Constituency-Level Election Archive

GMED has begun linking the geo-referenced map to the Constituency Level Electoral Archive. This entails matching each constituency to the CLEA code. The result is that we are able to display various election outcomes at the constituency level for these elections. To date, the following countries have been linked:

Argentina

Germany

Norway

Australia

Austria

Belgium

Brazil

Bulgaria

Canada

Cape Verde

Colombia

Costa Rica

Denmark

Finland

Ghana

Greece

Iceland

India

Indonesia

Ireland

Jamaica

Luxembourg

Mexico

Netherlands

New Zealand

Portugal

Romania

Singapore

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

Zambia

Stage 3: Link to other GIS data

GMED has begun linking the maps to other data sources. If the other data source is point data, it is easy to generate constituency-level variables. We have done this for the AidData project. See Monkey Cage blog here.

Stage 4: Increase number of countries and years in the dataset

In another effort, GMED is teaming up with Mike Findley (University of Texas, Austin), Brian Min (University of Michigan) and Ken Kollman (University of Michigan) to greatly expand the number of constituency maps and create a website that generates data at the constituency level.

Projects to Date Using GMED data:

1. Ethnicity and the 2010 Elections in Myanmar

2. Overview of the 2011 Elections in Thailand (with Allen Hicken)

3. Cross-cutting Federalism and Ethnic Violence, link

4. Electoral Competition and Foreign Aid in Developing Democracies (see Monkey Cage blog post, here)

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