Constituencies as announced in Royal Gazette

Election result for the
33 constituencies in Bangkok

The elections are over, and I finally also finished with working through the list of constituencies and writing down the administrative entities included in the constituencies. They were already announced in the Royal Gazette in May, both due to my vacation as well as the more entities involved than with the way larger multi-seated constituencies it took me until now to complete the list in XML format. At first I programmed it just to be able to check if I made any mistakes with the translation, but the calculation of the population within each constituencies easily could be turned into a nice statistics.

As there are 375 constituencies, this means that the average constituency has a population of 170,342. However, both due to the fact that provinces can only contain complete constituencies as well as due to the outline of the constituencies within the provinces, the actual population number differs quite a lot. The highest population, and thus the lowest electoral weight of each vote, was in Phang Nga constituency 1, which as of December 31 2010 had a population of 253,112. The other extreme is not far away geographically, Krabi constituency 3 has just 126,059 citizen. Note that these are the full population numbers, the number of citizen eligible to vote is of course lower.

Another reason why it took me so long where quite a few provinces where the constituencies does not contain complete districts or subdistricts, but instead municipal boundaries are used. The province where I had most problems with this was Rayong, where the town Map Tha Phut spreads over two districts, but both parts being in different constituencies. Also, Noen Phra subdistrict is shared between three municipalities, two of them going to constituency 1 and the remaining one to constituency 2. Sometimes Tambon in the list of entities means only the non-municipal parts of the subdistrict, whereas in other provinces Tambon means the whole subdistrict, not mentioning that there are municipal parts, somewhat confusing.

Also confusing is the fact that the list of constituencies was announced in the Royal Gazette twice, the first one signed on May 9 and published on May 12 [Gazette], and then a second one signed and published on May 14 [Gazette]. Since both are very long PDF files, I haven't yet been able to find the difference between the two lists, or if there is any at all.

Anyway, now I have the constituencies in XML format, the next stept I could do with that file would be to add the election results - I already prepared the XML scheme for this file to be able to cover these as well. But I doubt I will have the time and mood to do this for all 375 constituencies, but if there's anyone more interested in the election data you'd be welcome to join in the project and edit the XML yourself.