2011 Constituencies - reprise

As the new parliament convened on August 1st with all 500 members endorsed by the Election Commission - only two had to go through a by-election due to a yellow card after irregularities in the first round - now is a good time to round up the coverage on constituencies for this election.

Interestingly, I got asked twice whether my collection on the administrative entities covered by each constituency allows to create a map showing the geographical extent of the constituencies. Sadly, I had to answer in Radio Yerevan style, that in principle it'd be possible - but the thing which I would need to actually do that are the boundaries of the administrative entities. And as I wrote here quite some time ago, I haven't yet found a source of really authoritative maps which could be basis on such a boundary collection. And even if I had such a map, creating the outlines of some 10,000 entities is something hardly possible to do as a hobby project by a single person.

But at least I have finished with getting all the constituencies covered in my XML, and also entered some of the election results into it. And if I can find a complete list of election results in an easily parseable format I will certainly fill them in completely. For the 2007 election I have found an Excel sheet at the EC website with exactly that, including several of the by-elections due to the yellow and red cards, and when I get time and mood I will add those into the corresponding XML. As they were the previous single-seat constituencies, I have also started with the XML for 2006, but that will probably take more time till I can finish that listing.

So much for the technical part, now a few words to the political part of the election. One thing which is very notable when looking at color coded maps like the one I posted above is that again the constituencies in the South are almost uniformly won by the Democrats, whereas the Northeast and partly the North are Phuea Thai strongholds. Also notably the local strongholds of Newin's Bhum Jai Thai in Buriram and Banharn's Chat Thai Phatthana in Suphanburi aren't that strong anymore as they were in the past. As in the map above I colorized at province level, these provinces became grey as the constituencies were won by more than one party - which looks like a big bunch in the map, but in fact most of the constituencies inside were actually won by Phuea Thai. Only three provinces were exclusively won by a different party - Bhum Jai Thai won Nakhon Nayok and Chainat, and Chat Thai Phatthana won Ang Thong. At Mangomap, one can find similar maps down to the constituencies itself (Country, Bangkok), and on New Mandala there is the corresponding analysis of these results (Country, Bangkok).

A bit surprising to me compared with the 2007 election is the low number of by-elections ordered by the Election Commission. Whereas it were around 20 in 2007, this time there were just two (in Yala was only a recount, not a by-election as some news reports claimed). Thus the dark prophecy from Not The Nation of an everlasting election did not come true. Though I doubt this election was so much cleaner than the 2007, I can only suspect that this time the powers behind have accepted their defeat and let Thaksin' proxies that they will do good for the country - and if they fail go the democratic way of government change at the end of the term. But somehow I doubt it will really be like this...