sábado, 7 de julio de 2012

The geography of elections - the case of Mexico City

In my previous post, I made my point of the diversity in Mexican electoral preferences across the country. Although I have some experience in the study of demographics across the country, there is no other city that I understand more than Mexico City. I thought it would be interesting to delve deeper into the electoral preferences in this city that is extremely complex starting with the fact that it is split in two different administrative entities. The Federal District has been ruled by the PRD --- the left party --- since 1997 and as I mentioned in my previous post they have done such a good job that they were favored in the presidential election in every single municipality, it is important to remember that Lopez Obrador, the PRD candidate for the presidential election ruled the D.F. from 2000 to 2006. The northern area of the city, the State of Mexico has been ruled by the PRI since there has been democracy in Mexico (around 83 years), and Peña Nieto was the governor from 2005 to 2011.


Boundaries between D.F. in white and Estado de Mexico in Yellow

I downloaded the information from the Preliminary Electoral Results Program that the Federal Electoral Institute provides online to anyone that wishes to download this information. The numbers that I present here are not to be taken as official since they come from this preliminary results system. I focused on the results of the presidential elections because they are they most controversial of elections and the ones where voters are actually familiar with the candidates. 

I prepared these maps aggregating the results from district level information into municipalities as I was unable to obtain the electoral cartography in time. The first map presents the absolute winner of the elections in each administrative area of Mexico's metropolitan area. You can observe that most of the Federal District plus the municipalities of Izcalli, Coacalco and Cd. Nezahualcoyotl form the State of Mexico favored the PRD candidate while no municipality in D.F. voted for the PRI and most State of Mexico municipalities except the other three did vote for Peña Nieto. It is important to note that the municipalities that did vote for Peña Nieto are very diverse in their demographic information. Naucalpan de Juarez in the center-west is one of the municipalities with highest income per capita in Mexico while Chimahuacan in the extreme East of the city is one of the most densely and poorest municipalities in the urban areas of the country. In the following maps I will try to dis-aggregate the presidential election results to explore on differences in the preferences of the population.


It is important to start with a quick view at the absolute voter numbers. You can observe from the map that winning certain municipalities can be more important in terms of number of votes than others. We should keep in mind these municipalities as we move on with the analysis. Iztapalapa, Gustavo Madero and Ecatepec are the areas with most population, followed by Cd. Nezahualcoyotl, Naucalpan and Alvaro Obregon.



So what can this way of looking at the information add to our current understanding of the city? Taking  the boundaries of the city as the definition you can observe in my analysis. The PRD obtained 45.15% of the votes, the PRI 32.7% and the PAN 18.11%. The Partido Nueva Alianza got 2.08% of votes and 1.85% of voters nullified their ballot. All in all 65% of the population in the electoral list went out to vote in what is considered the most participated elections in Mexican democracy. Let's start our exploratory analysis with the PRD.



The most obvious pattern to observe is that municipalities in the Estado de Mexico show a much lower fraction of the votes than within the Distrito Federal even in the municipalities where the PRD was victorious such as Cd. Nezahualcoyotl in  the East, let's call this the North-South divide. The second interesting pattern to observe is that there seems to be an West- East Divide thant comes after the North-South divide. Within the D.F. some municipalities voted for the PRD in fraction of more than 51%, Iztapalapa, Gustavo Madero, Tlahuac and Xochimilco while other municipalities in the west of the D.F. received much less votes for the PRD such as Miguel Hidalgo, Cuauhtemoc and Alvaro Obregon. This West- East divide could be related to the huge differences in income per capita in these areas. Further analysis would be required but this is one of my hypothesis. I worked in Car Market analysis and this divide shows the same pattern that the analysis of who buys new cars and who buys used cars. An interesting outlier is the Benito Juarez municipality in the center of the D.F., this area has the highest human development indicator values of the whole country. Only 39 % of votes for the PRD.

This West-East divide is also to be observed in the State of Mexico, Cd. Neza, La Paz, Chalco and Ecatepec gave the PRD 40% of their votes while Naucalpan, Tlanepantla and Atizapan only gave 32%. My hypothesis are similar than previously. But I do want to point out at one thing. How come that in Benito Juarez the PRD only got 39% and yet it won the area and in Chalco and La Paz the PRD got more than 40% and yet loss to the PRI. I hope this seems intriguing to you.

Now the PRI results. They received an average of 32.17%.


I find this map truly flabergasting, I was expecting to see similar results than the ones on the PRD, yet they are extremely different. First things first, the North South divide. Yes there are huge differences between D.F. and State of Mexico, this is familiar territory. But where is your West-East divide? Completely gone... In both the D.F. and the State of Mexico. Naucalpan a very high-income area and Cd. Nezahualcoyotl home to some of Mexico city worse slums gave a very similar amount of votes --- relatively speaking --- to Peña Nieto. In the D.F. Miguel Hidalgo (Polanco is here), Cuauhtemoc (Tepito is here) and Venustiano Carranza (home to the Airport) gave very similar results in terms of PRI fractions. Benito Juarez, Gustavo Madero and Xochimilco gave the same number of votes to the PRI. The only pattern that you might be able to talk about is some sort of North South divide within the D.F. but it is definitely not clear at all. What is true is that Iztapalapa, Coyoacan and Tlalpan are the areas where the PRI scored the lowest and it does not correspond exactly to the areas where the PRD scored highest. We are missing our third runner of the evening. 

The PAN, the right wing party, who managed to loose all municipality governments in the D.F. except for Benito Juarez. Some speak that these disastrous results are related to a very poor choice in their candidate for the government of the city. But Politics is for politicians and I am more interested in facts derived from quantitative analysis. 
When I first saw this map I actually decided that I had to write this post. I was expecting to see either of the previous two patterns that we observed for the PRD and PRI results, and here a third completely new pattern that actually made sense after a while. The North South divide in the results of the PAN are gone. There is very little difference in the results in the State of Mexico and in the D.F. Miguel Hidalgo, Naucalpan and Atizapan are all around 24%. Iztapalapa and Chalco are both 12%. Ecatepec and Gustavo Madero are close to 15%. What is really striking is the West- East divide that becomes much more noticeable than in the previous maps. Alvaro Obregon and Azcapotzalco who were sort of middle ground in their preferences to the PRD are now clearly similar to their surrounding municipalities. It is important to mention that the North-South divide in the Eastern part of the city does exist. the South East and North East are different in their PAN preferences. Yet the borders between D.F. and State of Mexico appear to have nothing to do with this.

Now these results are basically based on pure observation, they are affected by my own subjectivity and do not look into the statistical significance of the differences I mention. There are better geo-statistical analyses that are much more precise and that would yield more robust results. Nevertheless I could not have released them in such short notice. I do believe that if I performed these analysis such as cluster/hot spot analysis, run a k-means algorithm and check for statistical differences between the resulting areas and of course some local autocorrelation I would be able to support my hypothesis of the existence of this North South and West_East divide that affects differently the three political parties. The reasons for these divides remains to be explained, I believe the West-East divide is related to income while the North South divide has to do with matters related to historical governance.

In case you are interested I present the results for the PANAL a minor party that represents the teacher union which is very strong in Mexico. Here the difference between D.F. and State of Mexico is clearly noticeable. Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juarez and Coyoacan show particularly low support for the PANAL, it would be interesting to see why that is. My guess: it's related to the number of years of education.

The patterns of vote nullification is unclear, I would throw a huge hypothesis that there are several factors involved, one is the urban rural divide, second is the number of years of schooling and third a sentiment of belief in the Mexican party system.

On participation in the elections, the differences between D.F. and State of Mexico are only noticeable in the East of the city. the West-East divide is again there. I would dare to say that the pattern I observe here is similar to the results of the PAN.
 I would be interested in performing this analysis at the section level, I am looking for the electoral cartography of Mexico and as soon as I manage to obtain it I would like to perform more in-depth statistically robust analysis of electoral preferences in Mexico at the national level.

Any suggestions or comments are greatly appreciated.


jueves, 5 de julio de 2012

Geographical diversity in Mexico's presidential elections.

On Sunday, Mexico elected its new president for the period 2012 to 2018. Enrique Peña Nieto obtained 38.14% of the votes, making him --- still to be confirmed officially --- the new president of the United States of Mexico. The leftist candidate and front-runner Obrador (A.K.A AMLO) obtained 31.64% of the votes, loosing the presidential elections for the second time after he was less than 0.5 points from the Right Party (PAN) current president Felipe Calderon back in 2006. In what was the Mexican elections with the most participation in the history of mexican democracy (63.14% of participation), Mexicans punished the poor performance of the PAN in the past 12 years in their holding of the executive power that includes 60,0000 dead. Mexicans welcomed back the PRI who was ousted unceremoniously from the Pinos (the equivalent of the white house in Mexico) in 2000 after 71 years of authoritarian rule that was plagued with violation to human rights --- including the masacre of students in 1968 --- corruption and abuse.

Enrique Peña Nieto represents the new PRI, "It is Mexico's undisputed master of political marketing: young, handsome, successful" mentions the german newspaper Die Zeit in its portrait of the new Mexican president. In his acceptance speech, Peña Nieto asked Mexicans to forget political differences and to work together for the future of the country. The extremely mediatic event where he and his wife --- a beautiful soap opera actress that probably helped Peña win the hearts of sufficient Mexicans to beat his two main contestants --- thanked those who voted for the PRI and made a commitment to rule the country responsibly was also the place where I saw the following sentence: "Today Mexico won, Mexico has decided".

My immediate question was actually what Mexico chose him? Who actually helped Peña to beat his opponents? In one article it was reported that Peña was particularly popular in the social segments of women, the older than 30 and people from rural settings and particularly unpopular in the segments of young voters and those with more years of education, who actually voted more for AMLO.

 I spent Sunday night following the PREP system that showed the counting of the votes as they arrived from the voting sections. Google built a real-time system that allowed not only to monitor the election results at the national and state level, but also gave the results at the district level. I was really surprised to see this google tool and even more interested in looking at the geographical patterns of the election. 


The results show that electoral preferences are very different across the country. In the North -West and the Bajio where the PAN has always been strong, electors still preferred Josefina Vasquez Mota to be their first female president. In the North-East, the Pacific Coast and even in the extreme South and the Peninsula the PRI was favored. In the South of Mexico, from the capital to the southern states of Oaxaca, Tabasco and even Quintana Roo, Mexicans preferred to vote for the leftist candidate.

Today I stumbled on the following image on facebook and found it quite funny. The image uses part of the history from the Lord of the Rings fantastic realm created by Tolkien to show the important diversity in electoral preferences. Although the image was probably made by individuals who did not adhere to the PRI proposal and probably dislikes USA foreign politics in Mexico, I think it is quite creative. Perhaps the image, by comparing PRD winning states with Rohan and PAN winning states with Gondor , is hinting at the necessity of PRD and PAN followers to unite if they really want to oust the PRI from power. This will have to wait until 2018...


 In the meantime I wanted to show the differences of these 2012 elections from the 2006 presidential elections. At that time the PAN won the elections by a difference of only 0.5%. The country was clearly split in only two. A clear North-South divide that has clearly changed in the last elections. Beside the clear shift of the Northern states to favor the PRI there are some interesting changes to note. Chiapas did not favor the PRD and voted for the PRI, same thing in Campeche. Puebla a state that usually has been related to conservative trends voted to the left this time. Veracruz voted mainly for the PAN in these elections.

In a deeper analysis of geographical patterns of votes it is interesting to observe certain interesting facts.

1- In some states preferences were homogeneous.

a) PRI

Chihuahua


Zacatecas

Michoacan
Nayarit
Sinaloa
Merida
Although most of these states are in the North-East, Merida and Michoacan are some outliers from the mix.
b) PRD



Tabasco
Oaxaca
Quintana Roo
Distrito Federal - Southern Mexico City


Some states in the South voted homogeneously for the left, in particular southern Mexico City/ D.F. the capital of the country with over 8 Million inhabitants and around 5 Million voters (out of an electorate of 49 Million). This hints at the satisfaction of people in the capital of their PRD rule since 1997. A first interesting question is how come Merida is complete and absolutely decided for the PRI and Quitana Roo completely and absolutely decided for the PRD when they are contiguous states. What makes these two places so different in their electoral preference?

2- An Urban- Rural divide.

a) PAN in the cities, PRI in the rural areas








Coahuila
Guanajuato

Sonora
Queretaro
San Luis Potosi


Although Queretaro, Coahuila, Sonora and San Luis Potosi showed dominance by the PRI, when you look into the details you can see that the big cities in these states actually voted for the PAN. Queretaro City, San Luis City, Hermosillo, Saltillo and Torreon actually voted for the PAN, it was their rural or and smaller city counterparts that actually changed the balance of the elections. In Guanajuato the pattern is similar, people in Leon, Celaya, Salamanca and San Miguel de Allende voted for the PAN and the rural parts of the state voted for the PRI. In this case the PAN won the state probably because there are more larger cities than in the other states of the center of the country.

b) PRD in the cities, PRI in the rural areas
Tijuana
Puebla
Chiapas
In Chiapas, Puebla and Tijuana people in the major cities voted for the PRD. It is quite surprising to see that Tijuana City and Puebla City were actually for the left party. To my best understanding these cities had been supporting other parties in the past. Another big surprise was to see the state of Chiapas, the state with the highest proportion of indigenous populations and home to the Zapatista movement to vote for the PRI this time. Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of the city actually voted for the PRD. Again seeing the results in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Tabasco and Quintana Roo it is quite surprising that Chiapas voted for the PRI. I would really be interested to see what happened at the Section level.

3- Estado de Mexico - PRI domination except in the areas closest to the D.F.

Estado de Mexico - Northern Mexico City
 It is quite interesting to see that although most of the Estado de Mexico voted for the PRI --- Peña Nieto was the governor of the state the last 6 years --- some of the most populated areas in the country and part of the urbanized area of Mexico City actually voted for the left. Cd. Nezahualcoyotl the municipality with most population in the country and population densities in the top 20 most densely populated areas of the world clearly voted more as a D.F. Delegation than as a Estado de Mexico Municpality. This type of analysis clearly indicates that the Estado de Mexico and D.F. borderas should probably be reanalized. Ecatepec, Cd. Neza, Chimalhuacan, Chalco, Izcalli, Tlanepantla and Coacalco might prefer to be part of the D.F.
4- Guadalajara - a small drop of blue in a green ocean

Guadalajara
 I was very surprised to see that Jalisco, the state that host Guadalajara ---  the second city with more population in the country --- actually had voted for the PRI. Almost... A small area in the state, in the upper north-west of the city. An area called Zapopan, and also part of the center of Guadalajara City remained loyal to the PAN.

Basically the population with the highest income stayed with the PAN and the rest voted for the PRI. This hints at another trend in voter preferences. Urban/Rural, Income, Historical preferences are some of the aspects we have observed until now.

5- Monterrey - Almost loyal to the PAN

Monterrey
Monterrey, the third city in population size and the closest to the USA of the main cities in Mexico, remained loyal to the PAN. 

There is one municipality in the urban are that voted for the PRI though. I am intrigued by this municipality where Peña got 40% of the votes whereas the PAN only got 29%. 

The trend in the other municipalities was PAN 45% PRI 30%. 

It would be interested to see what demographic characteristics explain this difference.



5- An interesting case of electoral diversity - Veracruz

In Veracruz you can actually see many of the differences we saw in other areas of the country. Rural areas voted for the PRI, a North South divide. Xalapa, a student city sometimes called the Mexican athens voted left. The Veracruz city port voted right and Cd. Madero and Tuxpan in the North voted PRI. The results in Veracruz would probably be the motive of a very interesting paper on electoral diversity in Mexico. I would really like to learn more about the reasons for the electoral diversity in this state.

To conclude with this post, it seems that the diversity in electoral preferences hints at a more mature democracy in Mexico. It also hints at the diversity in the population. I hope our new president Enrique Peña Nieto keeps this in mind in his next 6 years of ruling the country. I hope when he says Mexico won he doesn't believe that all of Mexico elected him... I hope he means this as the fact that Mexico won because we are truly entering a democratic era. I hope the old ways of the PRI are not used again, I hope repression, authoritarian rule and corruption will not come back with the PRI. Enrique Peña Nieto ,welcome to the presidency, we hope Mexico moves in the right direction with you... We really need it...