33 constituencies in Bangkok

Though I am still waiting for the constituency definitions to be published in the Royal Gazette, I have started to work through the list as published by Manager and convert it into my favorite data format XML. I guess most interesting are those constituencies in Bangkok itself, so for these I additionally also made a simple map.

One thing I noticed is that the constituencies this time cover full administrative units, same as the early single-seated constituencies 2000 and 2005 - I somehow thought I remember constituency definitions using streets and not the subdivisions as boundaries, but after rechecking the older announcements I now know that must have been constituencies for the local elections. But nevertheless the newly created subdistricts from 2009 probably came in handy, for example the district Don Mueang which previously had no subdistricts is now split between constituency 11 and 12 along the boundary of the new subdistrict Sanam Bin (airport).

A little statistics on these constituencies - while the mean value of citizen per constituency is 172,769, the actual population values differ quite a lot. The constituency with the lowest population and thus the highest electoral weight of each vote is constituency 11, which covers the district Lak Si and Sanam Bin subdistrict of Don Mueang, and has only 136,516 citizen. The other extreme is constituency 6 which covers the districts Din Daeng and Phaya Thai and has a population of 209,173. Of course the population isn't the same as the number of eligible voters, but the population on December 31st 2010 is the criteria for the number of constituencies per province, and should therefore also be the criteria for drawing the constituency boundaries within each province.