Election donations: across the country

The Herald's interactive on election donations broke down the money by electorate and party, but as someone relatively new to the country, I don't know where all the electorates are, so I don't know where to start to look.

An ordinary map isn't very effective for displaying the data, because the urban electorates are geographically much smaller than the rural electorates: I wanted something that showed the geographical layout but gave every electorate the same space. I used a hexagonal map layout that Chris McDowall designed for showing votes, and David Friggens updated after the 2014 boundary changes.

In all these maps the Maori electorates are inset in the top left, with the main display showing the general electorates. The area of the coloured hexagons shows the amount of money, with the same scale across all the maps.

The first map shows the total donations across all candidates, shaded according to how close the vote was. The largest amount was in Te Tai Tokerau, where the election was very close. Napier, a moderately close contest, had the second-most money donated. Apart from these two there isn't any clear relationship between margin and amount of donations. Perhaps the donations are really motivated by support for the nationwide party, or perhaps they are based on developing a relationship with the MP rather than affecting who is elected.

The tiny dot for the Maori electorate of Hauraki-Waikato is correct: no donations were reported by any candidate.

By party

The six remaining maps show how the donations varied by party.

National Party candidates reported substantial donations in all the general-roll electorates except, oddly, Auckland Central. As the Herald reported last week, the majority of this money was from the National Party itself. There were no National Party candidates in the Maori electorates, and so no donations.

Labour had much more uneven donations. Napier was the largest, with $99,000 donated to Stuart Nash.

Epsom, unsurprisingly, was the hotspot for donations to ACT. Despite its importance, it didn't have an especially high total donated.

New Zealand First received donations in just three electorates, with the largest total and most donors for Ron Mark in Wairarapa. Only two people nationwide, National's Matt Doocey in Waimakariri and Labour's Stuart Nash in Napier, reported donations from more sources.

I combined donations for Mana Movement and the Internet Party, but the donations in the Maori electorates were to three Mana candidates and in general electorates were to Internet Party candidates. From polling and commentary before the elections, Te Tai Tokerau and Waiariki were where the merged party had the best chance of picking up an electorate seat, and these had the largest donations.

Napier stands out visually for the Conservative Party: that's a single donation from the party to Garth McVicar.

The Green Party campaigns primarily for the party vote rather than in electorates, and reported only a small amount donated with no clear patterns.

Summary

The hexmap gives a geographical index to the data, not a substitute for the detailed records. It's intended to help you explore and decide what details to look up.

Read more here for the technical details about the above visualisations.
Thomas Lumley is professor of biostatistics at the University of Auckland. He blogs at statschat.org.nz and notstatschat.tumblr.com; he tweets at @statschat and @tslumley.