Tuesday 3 May 2016

Map Scotland's Election 2016 (boundaries for download)

A short post today to share some data for anyone wanting to map the results of the Scottish Parliament election of 2016. Anyone can download the original boundaries via the ONS Geography Portal but I've done a little bit of extra work and created kml and geojson versions and also created a version of the 2016 boundaries with the 2011 results included (plus population and electorate data). Just remember that there are 73 constituencies in 8 regions but there are 129 MSPs. I'm guessing that if you plan to map it you already know that! Here's what the constituency map looked like in 2011.

There were 69 SNP, 37 Lab, 15 Con, 5 LD and 2 Scottish Green

You can download all the boundaries from this shared Google Drive folder. The contents are as follows:


  • Readme file with licencing info. It's all open data but you should read this.
  • Scottish Parliament Constituencies 2016 - geojson
  • Scottish Parliament Constituencies 2016 - kml
  • Scottish Parliament Constituencies 2016 - zipped shapefile
  • Scottish Parliament Constituencies 2016 with 2011 results data - zipped shapefile
  • Scottish Parliament Regions 2016 - geojson
  • Scottish Parliament Regions 2016 - kml
  • Scottish Parliament Regions 2016 - zipped shapefile
  • I also included a brief note on uploading and use in CartoDB and Google Fusion Tables

Change to list view by clicking the button to the top right


I don't plan to do any mapping myself but I have been working with the data recently so thought I'd share a few different file formats and additional data that I had on my hard drive. Feel free to use if you wish.

Finally, here's a reminder of how some of the constituency voting looked in 2011. A lot of yellow then so it will be interesting to see how it goes on Thursday of this week.

There are North East MSPs from other parties - e.g. 3 Labour

Glasgow will be very interesting this time round

South Scotland will also be a key battleground


Notes: I'm sharing these boundaries just in case anyone wants to use them in their own mapping. If you do use them I'd be interested in the results, so please do share via twitter or e-mail. As for me, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict a big win for the SNP. I just have an intuition about these kinds of things.