[DDI-users] Defining political parties as DDI categories
Humphrey Southall
Humphrey.Southall at port.ac.uk
Wed Jan 17 13:10:59 EST 2007
Although we cannot quite make a public announcement, the GB
Historical Project has major new funding covering mapping British
electoral units (constituencies) over the last 150 years and using
these to present detailed parliamentary election results over that
period. That means listing the number of votes for each political
party in each constituency in each election.
Our system for holding statistical data is very much based around the
DDI, but so far has been used mainly to store and present either
aggregate census or vital registration data. See:
http://www.ddialliance.org/codebook/projects.html#britain
Has anyone experience of using the DDI with electoral statistics?
I know that in principle we should define a new variable for each set
of parties that get listed, so that for example the results for
constituencies in which these parties stood:
Conservative
Labour
Liberal Democrat
... would be different from this:
Conservative
Labour
Liberal Democrat
Scottish Nationalist
However, this would mean that our system could not present any
national maps or time series graphs. Is there any fundamental
objection to defining a single variable which includes ALL the
parties who ever stood in British election over the last 150 years?
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
About Britain: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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