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Version française
Overview
Cantons
Regions
French 2004 Elections took place on the 21st and 28th of March with two elections for regions and "cantons". It resulted in a large win of left wing parties: 24 regions out of 26 turned socialist, only two remained to the right wing: Alsace (north-east of France, next to Germany) and Corsica (the Socialists won in number but couldn't vote for one person so choose a right wing leader instead.) For the cantons, the results are less clear since only 1/3 of the cantons were being elected. This page shows a visualization of the elections results using Treemaps. It shows the results for the cantons and for the regions.
Cantonal elections is for electing local representative for the French departements. A "canton" is similar to a district and may contain one or several parts of cities. Each canton has a representative belonging to a political party. The visualization of the cantonal elections shows which parties participated to the first and second round, their respective relative importance and the outcome of the election, which should be unserstood canton by canton.
Regional elections is for electing one region president for each French region. Regions are becoming more and more important throughout Europe because each European country contain an administrative subdivision of comparable size and function. Therefore, Europe tends to become organized as countries and regions (Lander in Germany, small countries elsewhere, etc.) They can be compared to states in the USA in term of population, although much smaller in area. Voters have to chose one president for each region. Therefore, the important information to look for is the total number of votes, not the local percentage of votes.
Visualization of the two rounds of
cantonales elections in the "Ile de France" French region, containing
the departements (approx. Counties) number 77, 78, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95,
as a Treemap. The
left rectangle represents the first round and the right rectangle the
second. Each of these rectangles contain the departements, which
contain the cantons (approx. county subdivisions), which contain the
communes (districts), which contain the results by political
party. The area of these rectangles is proportional to the percentage
of votes. The color use the traditional scheme of political parties:
dark red for extreme left, red for Communists, pink for Socialists,
orange for RDC, yellow for misc. left and others misc. parties, grey
for misc. right wing parties, light blue for UDF, blue for UMP,
military green for FN (popular extreme right wing party) and dark blue
for other extreme right wing parties. White is for nul votes and black for
abstention.
Copyright 2004 Jean-Daniel Fekete et INRIA Futurs.
This image
has been created using the InfoVis
Toolkit.
The outcome of the election is visible on the rectangle to the right. The majority of cantons in the region went to left parties but some departements remained to the right wing. Some cantons had only one candidate for the second round. This is due to two reasons: candidates have to get a minimum of votes to be allowed to stay for the second round and several political parties have rules to desist for the best candidate on the second round. Interestingly, when that happens the rate of nul votes -- shown in white -- increases dramatically (up to 33%), expressing the dislike of voters.
Raw datasets are also available from this page and have been generated from the official "ministère de l'intérieur" public site (http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/avotreservice/elections/reg2004/index.html for the régionales elections and http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/avotreservice/elections/can2004/index.html for the cantonales elections).
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Hauts de Seine (92) |
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Seine et Marne (77) |
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Yvelines (78) |
Visualization of the two rounds of the regionales elections
in the "Ile de France" French region, containing the departements
(approx. Counties) number 75, 77, 78, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, as a Treemap. The
left rectangle represents the first round and the right rectangle the
second. Each of these rectangles contain the departements, which
contain the communes (districts), which contain the results by
political party. The area of these rectangles is proportional to the
number of votes. The color use the traditional scheme of political
parties: dark red for extreme left, red for Communists, pink for
Socialists, dark green for the "Oxygen" Green party, light blue for
UDF, blue for UMP, military green for the FN and white is for nul
votes.
Copyright 2004 Jean-Daniel Fekete et INRIA Futurs.
This image has been created using the InfoVis
Toolkit.
|
Visualization by percentage of votes. |
Ile de France |
To be completed ...