Scottish Parliament Regions, Constituencies & Members – Political Knowledge Atlas (10 Apr 2020)

Scottish Parliament  Constituency Political Knowledge Seed Branch

MindManager provides an unparalleled range of ‘information cartography’ functionality that enables  contextual knowledge to be embedded and attached to map branches in multiple ways…

Branch Outline Shape 
For geographic area seed branches the outline shape indicates the nature of it’s borders with it’s equivelant neighbours…

CIRCLE = all coastal borders (ie. ‘island(s)’)

HEXAGON = all land borders (ie. ‘land-locked’)

ROUNDED RECTANGLE = mixed coastal & Land borders

Note(s)
i) Assignment of shapes to geographic area seed branches is controlled by MindManager’s unique Smart Rule feature using the ‘SLC – Borders Types’ tag (eqivelant to thematic mapping in GIS).

Fill Colour: Political Affiliation
The colour of the constituency branch indicates the current MSP’s political party affiliation, or as an ‘independent’.

Image: Thumbnail Location Map
MindManager allows a single image to be embedded within a branch, which may be sufficient for the requirments. However with a bit of forethought (and some software ‘jigery pokery’  🙂 we can also create one that incorporates more than one visual element so that, like the ‘rich’ branch text, more core knowledge can be ‘packed in’ to a single branch without visually overwhelming the user.

‘Thumbnail’ Consituency Location Map –

The double thumbnail map (which has been created by us) provides locational context…

• thumbnail map of Scotland on the left with boundaries of electoral regions, with the selected electoral region coloured in red.
• thumbnail map of just the region with boundaries of each constituency on the right, with the selected constituency coloured in red.

Note(s)
i) This map image is also used for the region seed branch.

ii) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.

iii) Due to the disparate nature of the geographic extent of equivelant administrative and electoral areas in Scotland, their locations are not always immediately obvious from the map for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all should become clear though!

  Text: Official Name & Unique Identifying Codes
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters within a single text ‘string’ – we can pack several different pieces of ‘core knowledge’ into the text of a single branch without it visually overwhelming the user.

Note(s)
i) All names and codes are meticulously sourced from official sources to ensure unambiguous identification of the administrative / electoral areas and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions).

Costituency Name – We have taken the names of the Constituency from the parliament website.

ONS Code – The UK Government Office for National Statistics and in partnership with the devolved governments maintain a series of codes to uniquely represent a wide range of geographical areas of the UK (such as Council Areas and Electoral wards), for use in tabulating census and other statistical data, known as ‘ONS codes‘ or ‘GSS (Government Statistical Service) codes’.
Although the codes are not formally hierarchical like the previous system it replaced, ONS codes for the same type of geographic area start with the same 3 characters…

• S12 = Unitary Authority
• S13 = Ward or Electoral Division 
• S14 = Westminster Parliamentary Constituency
• S15 = European Electoral Region
• S16 = Scottish Parliament Constituency
• S17 = Scottish Parliament Electoral Region
• S21 = National Park
• S22 = Travel to Work Area
• S23 = Police Force Area
• S34 = Workplace Zone
• S92 = Country

Region Name & Parliament – Given the number of branches in our maps, the screen space can fill up quite quickly as users drill down the hierarchy and expand their content. Thus we often repeat contextual information from ‘higher up’ the map – in this case the Electoral Region name and the fact that it’s a constituency in the Scottish Parlaiment – wherever expedient so users can more easily keep track of what they’re looking at. 

Note: By-Election Log
Additional knowledge can be attached to the branch in the form of a note. This is basically as rich an environment as a word processor page, so ‘rich’ text, tables and images.

 MSP Changelog – With 2 different electoral systems in play, the political changes we hope to record in this note will come about in different ways…

• Regional Level – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, than in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list will take over (though see note below). However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
• Constituency Level – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a by-election (though see note below).

Note(s)
i) Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. Even if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election, they are not obliged to resign as an MSP and so a by-election is not automatic.

ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Regions, Constituencies and / or MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website.

iii) As is so often the case in our knowledge mapping work, the only place where such information is gathered in the one, easily accessible place and freely accessible in the public domain, is Wikipedia. However…

• how quickly after the event the information appears on is another matter…
• … if at all (and we have no way of knowing it’s missing).

  Spreadsheet Table: Previous Constituency Election Results (coloured by party)
As well as the ability to link to, and import, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, MindManager also (again uniquely) has it’s own in-built spreadsheet tool that allows users to create their own from scratch within a branch. This provides yet another way of packing in a lot more visually structured knowledge into a single map branch eg. election results, colour coded by political party for easier comprehension!

Note(s)
i) If appropriate, and it’s correctly structured, embedded spreadsheets can be toggled between the Table View and a Chart View of the data. However this feature is only available within MindManager. Whatever view is set there at the point of export, is the one that will appear in the HTML version of the map.

ii) Like Embedded Data Fields, Embedded Spreadsheets can be hidden / shown by clicking the green toggle arrow just above the top right corner.

Previous Constituency Election Results (coloured by party) – This embedded spreadsheet table shows the results of all Scottish General Elections in the Constituency for each party – number of votes for each, winning majority & voter turnout – going back to the first in 1999, coloured by political party. It provides ‘at a glance’ contextual political knowledge. The results are taken from the Wikipedia article for the Constituency, which contains the list of candidates and results of all general elections, as well as useful background historical knowledge (which makes it the ‘go to’ single source of general election knowledge that we have found).

Note(s)
i) *An additional column marked with a year and an asterisk indicate a by-election.

ii) The recommendations of the first review of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region & Consituency boundaries were enacted in time for the 2011 Scottish General Election (as indicated by the vertical dark line in the table). Some boundaries were amended, whilst some constituencies were abolished completely and new ones created. Thus it is not always possible to compare all electoral results ‘like for like’ before and after this review.

iii) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.

  Index Marker Tags & Goups: Various
A variety of Index Markers arranged into groups are used throughout the map to tag branches with contextual knowledge as appropriate and enable map filtering and quick navigation. Marker groups can be copied and used to do the same in any other maps.

Note(s)
i) Within MindManager tags…

• provide a useful means of internal navigation between map topics (clicking on the branch that is shown as being tagged with that marker in the ‘Index Task Pane’ will immediately focus the map on that banch).
• can be generated automatically from branches (the title of the parent branch is the group name and those of all the immediate sub-branches become the individual tags within the group) .
• can be copied and pasted in their groups from one map to another.

NAVIGATION (‘NAV’) MARKERS
‘Navigation’ index markers tag the branch that they are named after. They provide another way of navigating the map – clicking on the tag in the index pane takes the user  straight to the tagged topic.

NAV – Scottish Parliament Constituency – Each Scottish Parliament  Constituency seed branch is tagged with it’s own index marker, created from the branch text itself. Thus there are 2 ‘parts’ to the marker tag – Constituency name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S16000083).

POLITICAL MARKERS
‘Political’ index markers tag the branch with knowledge about the designation and current political representation of the constituency.

SCOT PARL CONS – Designation – Historically there were several diferent types of  Paliamentary Constituency in the UK, with significant differences between the way each worked. However since the advent of universal suffrage, the differences between county and borough constituencies are slight.
From Wikipedia:-
“Borough constituencies are predominantly urban while county constituencies are predominantly rural. There is no definitive statutory criterion for the distinction; the Boundary Commission for England has stated that, “as a general principle, where constituencies contain more than a small rural element they should normally be designated as county constituencies. Otherwise they should be designated as borough constituencies.”[1] In Scotland, all House of Commons constituencies are county constituencies except those in the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee and three urban areas of Lanarkshire”.

 SCOT PARL CONS – Current Political Party – Designation of sitting MSP’s current party affiliation (tag is coloured as per the usual UK political party colours).

Note(s)
i) This can change even without a general or by- election so the current ‘political colour’ shown can be different to the one at the last election if the MSP has ‘lost the party whip’ and now sits as an independent, or even joined another party altogether!

GEOGRAPHIC (‘GEO’) MARKERS
‘Geomarker’ index markers provide ‘spatial intelligence’ in a map by tagging topics as being part of a specific geographic area of various ‘types’ – administrative, electoral, statistical, topographic etc. The areas do not need to be topics in the map for them to be a ‘Geomarker’. They are the equivalent of ‘Lookup Tables’ in ‘GIS’.

GEO Borders
The nature of the area’s  borders with it’s equivelant neighbours…

 SCOT PARL CONS – Border Types – This Marker Group indicates the status of the constituency’s borders with all of it’s equivalent neighbours, in respect to the ocean (as per the topic shape). Thus these tags will enable the filtering of a map to show / hide those areas that do / do not have a coastline.
Possible tags…

• All Coastline (Island)
• Mixed
• No Coastline (Land-locked)

 SCOT PARL CONS – Shared Land Borders – This Marker Group indicates which other Scottish Parliament  Constituency(s) that the selected constituency shares a mutual border with, as shown on the Ordnance Survey Election Map online viewer.
On mainland Scotland  Parliament constituency borders are contiguous i.e. there are no ‘gaps’ between them, so they have a complex interplay with shoreline, freshwater lochs, rivers, estuaries (firths), sea lochs and the ‘extent of the realm’ (the national boundary offshore). Thus in some cases constituencies share a mutual border on a water feature rather than land.
The ‘islands’ – Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles – are far enough away from the mainland that they do not share a mutual boundary with any others.

GEO Unique Identifying Codes
Within the branch text we incorporate unique identifiers codes for geographic areas for easy cross-reference with other data sources, especially GIS databases.
We also add some of the truly unique codes as ‘geo’ index marker tags to the topic. Only one topic in the map will have that ‘geo tag’. This offers interesting possibilities for adding further content at a later date.

SCOT PARL CONS – ONS Code – The Constituenciy’s official identifying code given by the UK Government Office for National Statistic (ONS) in partnership with the Scottish Government, as per the Branch Text above.

GEO ‘Look-Up Geographies
In the world of Geographic Information (GI) a ‘look up’ defines the link between one geographic feature and another. Most commonly this is between geographic areas of different ‘types’. For example a Local Council Electoral Ward will also coincide with ‘higher’ electoral geographies of Scottish Parliament Constituencies & Regions, and United Kingdom Parliament Constituencies. Of course the boundaries of the different geographies do not necessarily coincide or ‘nest’ exactly (though they might have done at one time). Thus relationships are often ‘one to many’, or even ‘many to many’, which is ‘database speak’ for ‘it’s complicated’.
Relationships are usually derived using computerised spatial analysis, with the results stored in ‘look-up tables‘ in databases or spreadsheets. ‘Geo’-tagging map branches that represent geographic areas is our hopefully useful alternative.
You can get more of an idea of the complexities of UK Geographihies from the handy UK Office of National Statistics Beginners Guide To UK Geography.

 SCOT PARL CONS – Scot Parl Region – Scottish Parliamentary Consituencies are divided amongst regions, which also have elected members. The marker is in the form  Electoral Region Name  (ONS Code) eg. Highlands and Islands (S17000011).

SCOT PARL CONS – Scottish LCs – All the Scottish local council areas that overlap with the Scottish Parliament Constuency (there may be more than 1). There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Council Name (ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute Council (GB-AGB – S12000035).

SCOT PARL CONS – UK Parl Cons – All the UK Parliament Constituencies that overlap with the Scottish Parliamentary constituency. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – UK Parliament Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S14000083).

  Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.