Instead of doing anything (even remotely) productive this week, I traced the German vote at the various European Elections. Parties are sorted based on the average left-right score from the Party Manifesto project, for 2009 & 2013, except for the AfD which was placed more right because I can and party manifesto’s often don’t tell the whole story…
While using R would’ve made this prettier, I used Excel in the end, because I got lazy.
After I found this amazing tutorial on how to visualize any rates on country maps, I desperately wanted to try it.
Because it’s useless to visualize things just to make pretty colourful maps, I decided to overcome this map’s shortcomings. When asked which statement represents them best, respondents could chose between “I believe in a personal god”, “I believe there is some sort of spirit or life force” or “I don’t believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force”. Aggregation on the national level makes it look like around 35% of all Germans don’t believe in any sort of God or higher spirit.
When it comes to religion (among of other cultural things), it’s always important to treat East and West Germany separately, you’ll immediately see why.
As far as I know, the latest data available to analyze this for Germany is the ALLBUS 2012. Sadly, no information was available below Länder level. I used Stata to calculate the means and spatial data for Germany from the gadm.
I’m not that satisfied with it because I don’t like the font that much and it could look a bit more polished (and I wasn’t able to include text with the source information). But I really liked the process of doing it, so I’m doing that for Europe next on the NUTS2-level. I’m jealous of all Geography students though that seem to learn that as part of their coursework. But it’s a nice opportunity to get back to R.
So how to do this?
datagraphsandplots 
