Picturing the 1992 British General Election

Tufte's (1983, 1990) splendid books on data portrayal effectively challenge the reader to go out and to do likewise. A major intent of the present paper is to answer Tufte's challenge in the context of the rich geopolitical information inherent in the 1992 British general election; an appropriate choice since Tufte himself is a political scientist. Several of the types of diagram presented here have appeared already in the political literature, but others represent new possibilities made possible by modern technology. Missing from this paper are the colour diagrams which greatly assist the interpretation of multivariate data of this type. In addition to the representation of the election data, the paper also brings together and summarizes various of the author's analytical studies of election data, updating the earlier results in the context of the 1992 data. For simplicity, in this paper the phrases 'Liberals', 'Liberal party', etc. will be used without distinction for the Liberal Democrats, the Social Democratic party and the Liberal/Social Democrat Alliance.