Which Parties Are Closest to Each Other?
Ahead of the elections in February 2025, there was quite a bit of debate about who might form the next coalition government. In this story, we analyzed how much overlap there is between all possible combinations of the parties, who had a chance to win seats in the next parliament.
The story is based on data from the Wahl-o-Mat, a tool that allows users to check which party best represents their preferences. For this tool, all parties answer whether they (don’t) support 38 claims across policy areas. We calculated how many claims the different parties agreed upon.
The heart and start of the story is a venn diagram that was coded in D3 and svelte. We learned a lot in the process of coding this, for example, if three parties overlap in each two-party combination but there are no overlaps between all three parties (because the parties agreed on different claims), you can’t visualize that with a Venn.
For this story, I programmed the interactive visualization in D3.js and svelte. My colleague Rina Wilkin did the data analysis and Marc Röhlig wrote the text.