Voting advice applications and data visualisations for the Sweddish 2018

1. STATISTICAL METHODS AND DATA VISUALISATIONS
FOR THE SWEDISH ELECTION 2018
Data in the News Room
Munich, February 26 2018
Kristofer Sjöholm
kristofer.sjoholm@svt.se
@KristoferSjhlm

2. SOMETHING ABOUT ME
Worked with web development, data and
journalism since 1995
Head of data journalism team SVT Pejl 2010-2015
Project manager for the Voting Advice Applications
and election result data in the elections 2018
Currently working on the EU Parliament Elections

4. Link

6. WHY VOTING ADVICE APPLICATIONS?

7. They are a fun and drives a lot of
traffic to our digital plattforms

8. Source: Allmänheten och medierna
i valet
Alla 18år +
Change from 2014
Ny mätpunkt
Ny mätpunkt
4 out 10 Swedish voters used SVT:s VAA 2018

9. As a Public Service company
we need to deliver an election
coverage for ALL citizens

10. In countries with a high usage of VAA:s it has
ha positive effect on the turnout – especially
among young people and voters with low
political interest.
Source: Garzia, Trechler, De Angelis 2017

11. THE DATA COLLECTION TOOL IS CRUCIAL

12. THE CHALLENGE
• 3 elections in the same day
• 1 parliament election with 8 parties and
5.000 candidates
• 290 different municipalities with 2300
party officials
• 20 counties with 200 party officials
• How do we get the super local questions
and how can we get as many answer as
possible?

13. FIRST PHASE QUESTIONS TO THE LOCAL PARTIES
• The 5 most important questions
that they will fight for in the
local election
• With these answers we
constructed the local questions
• In total we hade about 1500
different local questions

14. TEST EVERYTHING

15. BUILD PROTOTYPES

16. USER TESTING FROM START TO END

17. PANEL TEST THE QUESTIONS

18. BE TRANSPARENT

20. CO-OPERATION WITH 50 LOCAL NEWS
PAPERS ALL OVER SWEDEN

21. OTHER MEDIA ORGANISATIONS
PUBLISHED THE VAA TOO
• Around 50 different local news papers
published the Valkompass as well
• We allowed them to have banner ads and
count the traffic in their web statistics
• We had a common release date together
with them
• They helped us with the selection of the
local political questions

23. TELL A STORY WITH YOUR DATA

24. THE POLITICAL SPHERE
Where do we find parties
and their candidates?

26. HOW DID SWEDEN VOTE –
CONSTITUENCY VISUALISATION

28. BUILD YOUR OWN
POLITICAL MAJORITIES

30. WEB DATA VIZ + TV GRAPHICS = TRUE

31. Interactive web visualisations used for TV graphics

33. http://map.svt.se/?election=1&viz=change&party=sd&change_filter=5

34. http://map.svt.se/?election=1&viz=change&party=m&change_filter=-3

35. Open Source Development
original from SVT Graphics
Department

36. DATA ANALYTICS AFTER THE ELECTION

37. POLITICAL ANALYTICS BASED
ON THE VAA ANSWERS

38. FINALLY

39. Machine learning and data will not turn the
journalism we know upside down.
It’s just new tools we need to learn and master in
order to be relevant.
Hire system developers, statisticians and data
journalists and integrate them in the news room.
Now.

40. THANK YOU
https://www.svt.se/datajournalistik/election-showcase/
Kristofer Sjöholm
kristofer.sjoholm@svt.se
@KristoferSjhlm