One of my colleagues used to have a lovely wall-chart of the results of the British 2010 general election. It was always a shock to see it: the strange and disproportionate bursts of yellow space, the huge swathes of blue, the concentrated bursts of red.

I wanted to produce something similar for the 2013 Italian election, and decided to produce maps that were as detailed as possible. Below, I’ve given cartograms for each of the main parties, at the level of the comune. Note that the colour boundaries are set according to quantiles of the party’s vote distribution — so you’ll need to check the legend to see what the darkest colour refers to (for some parties it’s quite small).

This way of doing things isn’t always sensible: some comuni are tiny; and the numerically tiny comuni can sometimes be disproportionately large. Really, what we would need is an equal area cartogram [PDF], but those are hard to do in R.

Still, they are fun to look at. If you want the full size PDFs, drop me a line — the full archive is ~200Mb. Source code is here, and assumes you’ve downloaded shapefiles from ISTAT and data files from this page.