Visualising latte-lapping hipsters in the Reykjavík mayoral election
The Icelandic version of hipster-shaming is calling people who live in the city centre or the Old West Town the latte lapping crowd. Instead of drinking normal pot-brewed coffee like the Icelanders of yore (who did real work with their hands), they lap up caffè lattes.
At Datasmoothie we had the privilege of providing the Icelandic Social Research Institute with visualisations of their polling data for the local elections that were held in May, including the Reykjavik mayoral elections. For this occasion we built one of our custom maps, to visualise the hipster vote compared to other parts of the city.
The map above shows different postcodes in the Reykjavík area. The map is coloured red where the Social Democratic Alliance polled in first place a week before the elections, and blue where the Independence Party (the conservatives) was leading. Grey areas are other municipalities.
The latte-lapping folks are in the the 101 postcode, the second furthest red sector to the left. For the purposes of this dataset and statistical significance, we combined the lattes in 101 with the West Side postcode of 107 (a very similar breed, I assure you). If you play around with the dropdown filters above the map, you can see that the latte neighbourhoods stay red for all sections of society except middle aged men. Interestingly the most colourful map is produced by men aged 30–44, where the conservatives lead in the centre and in the north-western suburbs, the social democrats lead just outside the centre and the Pirates, coloured purple, make a surprise entrance in the southern suburbs of Árbær and Breiðholt.
To see in more detail how men and women in different neighbourhoods were going to vote a week before the elections, see the chart below.
Time is of the essence
A week is a long time in politics. A survey that measures how people are going to vote for an upcoming election isn’t interesting once it’s a few days old. The news cycle shifts and opinions change. Indeed, the actual results differed significantly from the polling data shown above, with the conservatives getting the most votes and the liberals (Viðreisn) snatching third place.
Many companies run monthly surveys to measure how happy people are with their service, or how aware they are of a brand — a so called “tracker survey”. The results of a tracker survey can be weeks old and still entirely relevant. A company might react to the results on a quarterly basis by adjusting its marketing spend or hiring policies, so a few weeks passing doesn’t invalidate the results.
But in politics, old news isn’t interesting: It’s old news.
One reason why Datasmoothie was a great fit for the needs of our client, the company doing the polls, was that they could go from raw data to online visualisations within a matter of minutes. So as soon as the data was in, we could build visualisations and charts to be used by the client’s client, Mbl.is (screenshot on the left, click here to see it in action).
The results are in
The polling is now old news, and a new coalition in the City’s council has been formed. The candidate who lead in the above polls in hipster-Reykjavík, the incumbent, continues his reign as Mayor, even though he got fewer votes than his conservative competitor, who did better than the polls suggested he would.
And with regards to the results, the following tweet shows how the left-coalition (coloured orange) is distributed across postcodes compared to the population of each postcode. The hipsters in 101 are 13% of the population but have 33% of the council members as residents.
