Announcing Vote for Policies Data

With the General Election drawing closer, Vote for Policies has released its data, showing how each constituency would vote if only policies were considered.

This article was originally published by Vote for Policies.

After we ran Vote for Policies for the 2010 UK General Election we talked about the fascinating insights and things that we could discover if we explored all the data from survey results. This time around, we’re going to do all of that and more.

We’ve just launched Vote for Policies Data. It’s a section of the website that allows you to view the data that we have in new and interesting ways. To start with, we’ve added the results for all constituencies, as well as a colourful map that shows you which parties are leading, and where, across the UK.

That is just the beginning though – over the coming weeks in the run up to the election, we’re going to pack the site full of maps, charts and other visualisations.

For example, soon you’ll be able to see results by country, the constituencies a party is leading in, who’s leading in the marginal constituencies, results for specific issues and how many surveys are completed each day.

Get involved

We need your help. We want to open the data up and make it available for everyone. So we’d love to have people with web development and/or data visualisation skills get involved. If that’s you, please get in touch!

Open source data

We’ve put the code for the Data site up on GitHub, a website that allows us to make it an open source project and easy for people to contribute.

The Data website uses an API (application program interface) that we’ve built – this is a way of making it easy to pull information out of our database, while still keeping everyone’s individual survey results safe. We are going to publish documentation for this API so that any developers who are interesting in building things with our data can do just that.

Perhaps you have some interesting data that you can combine our constituency results with, or maybe you have a data visualisation idea for showing country results in a completely new way. You may just want to experiment with our data on your own website.

We’re excited to see what happens!

Photo: hoboton via Freeimages

Further reading:

If public vote for policies, not personalities, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage could lose

Vote for Policies crowdfunding to support ‘sustainable democracy’

If we voted for policies at elections, and not parties, the results might surprise us all

The people’s manifesto

The Guide to Sustainable Democracy 2014