Evaluating the Austrian NR election data using the First-Past-The-Post

With the US election coming up this November, we were interested to see how the election results and the distribution of members in the lower house of the parliament and the Government of Austria could look like if we used the first-past-the-post electoral system. This election system is used by many English-speaking countries. (The system of Nebraska and Main for the United States Electoral College are ignored.) We wanted to see if the structure of the results would be similar to the results of the USA.

We took a special look at some of the most popular points of critique and tried to find out if these points would hold true for Austria as well. For this, we mainly focus on the maps of the districts and electoral district levels. The map of municipalities is manly for references and providing a closer look on the results.

About the visualizations

Parallel Coordinates

• "First-past-the-post" shows the percentage of regions (municipality/district/electoral district) where a certain party won (each line represents a party).
• "Proportional Representation" shows the percentage of seats in the National Council won by the parties. So how the National Council actually look like.

Choropleth Map

Provides geographical context for the data and details-on-demand on hover and click.

Bar Charts

The bar charts on the right-hand side show, in numbers, equivalent data to that shown by the parallel coordinates. "First Past The Post" shows the number of regions where a certain party won in the selected year. "Proportional Representation" shows the number of sets in the National Council won by the parties in the selected year.

The bar charts that arise on a hover interaction on the choropleth map show the number of votes for each party in the hovered region.

Interesting findings

• Fairness
• Largest parties receive an "unfair" "seat bonus": In the 2019 election, the ÖVP won at least 80 percent of the seats compared to about 37,46 percent of the total cast votes.
• Smaller parties are disadvantaged: On the district and voting district level the NEOS, BZÖ, JETZT, FRANK did not get a single seat in any of the elections analysed.
• For smaller parties, it is more important to focus on a few areas instead of spreading their resources across the whole country: does not apply as we do not have local parties. But if Austria would use this system in 2013 the NEOS and the BZÖ might have focused on the birth region of their respective leaders. In this regions they won some municipalities but did not get enough votes to win a whole districts.
• Parties with similar political orientation hurt each other much more than with the Proportional Representation: In the 2013 election, the BZÖ and the FPÖ (both right-wing parties) would have been able to win more districts if they would have worked together.
• Coalitions are less likely: In all but one (Districts, 2013) configuration of the nine possible examples, a coalition was necessary to have a majority.
• Few swing seats change election results (and many "safe seats" for large parties): In the last three elections, there were many states where not only one party won. With the analysis of more elections, we suspect there could be a trend.
• Gerrymandering: Unrelated but we kind of did this after WWI (Trennungsgesetz)

Data

Data acquired from data.gv.at