Okay, I'm guilty of a "gotcha."
As this BBC map shows, Latin American has been making a steady shift to the left. The color scheme on this map is the opposite of that the US media traditionally uses for US elections. Thus the countries in Red denote a left leaning government while the countries geographically closer to the US, in blue represent the right or the center right.
It's interesting to note that one exception to the liberal south trend is Paraguay, which which as any faithful "pinche tejano" subscriber knows could be the future home of GWB).
Meanwhile, back in the USA, the maps have also changed. Here's the 2006 congressional districts map (Blue for Democrats and Red for Republicans). But as any of you who've read my diary on electoral maps and cartograms knows, things are not always what they seem.
(UPDATE: A few people asked why Peru was blue. Check this update. Also, the UofM maps and cartograms don't reflect races decided after election day.)
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Readers of my past diary know that for the first 6 years of the 21st century, Republican stalwarts were fond of carrying around maps like this one.
These were the phoney baloney maps which tried to claim that Bush had what looks like a 97% approval rating after each of his elections. (Ironically the converse is now close to being true, but that's another story.)
The problems with maps like these is that they give a geographical representation of statistics that are actually about people. Some hotshot cartographers from the Univeristy of Michigan came up with a simple and effective way to more accurately portray the data.
Read the diary for an in-depth look at how they do this, but in a nutshell they take an artifically skewed county map like this 2004 presidential election map and turn it into a more accurate one like the two that follow:
These last too are also known affectionately (and interchangably) as "Phallic Florida." ;)
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Now let's glance at what the UM whiz kids have done with the new data from recent congresional elections.
The straight map of the 2006 congressional districts looks like the map on the left. On the right is a population map of the US with the lighted areas representing more people:
(Update: Important note about this map from UofM: "Some of the election results were provisional at the time I made these maps. The results may have changed slightly by the time you read this.")
When we compare the two maps it's easy to see that what looks like a vast and dominant swath of the map, say like the upper near west for Republicans, is actually a very lightly populated area, so the amount of red on this area of the map gives a false impression. Or as the UofM folks put it:
Because densely populated areas of the country tend to vote Democratic, the "blue" districts occupy smaller area on average, but they are nonetheless large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election.
They account for this problem by again using cartograms. Here's two different cartograms of the current congressional districts that give a more accurate "red/blue" representation:
The cartogram on the left accounts for population:
[T]he sizes of districts are rescaled according to their population. That is, districts are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage – which has little to do with politics – but to the number of their inhabitants, districts with more people appearing larger than districts with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground.
The cartogram on the right is different. The difference has to do with the fact that not every congressional district is the exact same size in population (besides geography):
[T]he total area of red is simply proportional to the total number of Republican Representatives and similarly for the total area of blue. In fact, this map is not so different from the previous one: the whole point of congressional districts is to try and divide the country up into parcels of roughly equal population, so if we have done it right the population cartogram should give equal area to each congressional district.
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If there's any future interest I'd be willing to look into doing another diary which does looks more in-depthly at the voting patterns in Latin America, possibly including cartograms.
The question about Latin America, according to the BBC is what "el giro a la izqierda" (the left turn) means. Does it mean a South and Central America in solidarity with Hugh Chavez's Venezuela or a more moderate left that is friendly to the "free market," such as the Goverment of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula for short) in Brazil.
Considering the fact that in the not so distance past, neocons from the United States have started wars to take down similar leftist Latin American governments, this is a topic worthy of our consideration.
Update [2007-1-9 11:13:57 by BentLiberal]: A few people asked why Peru was blue. Check this update. Also, the UofM maps and cartograms don't reflect races decided after election day.
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More Info:
The BBC source article (en Espanol) including the map of Latin America in the intro can be found at BBC Mundo.com.
The cartograms and map images are all from The University of Michigan and cited under a Creative Commons License. Many thanks to U of M's Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman.