How to create a parliament chart in Flourish
Visualize election results with our new parliament chart template
Parliament (or hemicycle) charts are a common way to visualize election results. The shape of the chart is similar to a parliament layout, and therefore makes it ideal to visualize seats held by each political party.
We’ve recently added parliament charts to Flourish, so now you can easily make them yourself. All you need is a dataset with parties and their seat numbers (and optionally historical data to compare to a previous election). Below is a basic example showing the two most recent UK elections.
Features
The template gives you lots of control for setting up and fine-tuning your chart. For example, you can:
- Adjust the number of seats to fit the size of any parliament in the world.
- Tweak the shape of the parliament layout by increasing or decreasing the size of the arc, the inner space, or the number of rows.
- Compare current election results to a previous election.
- Use a default color scheme, or assign a specific color to each party.
- Add an interactive legend. Mousing over one of the parties in the legend will highlight all the party’s seats.
- Show or hide a results table.
- Optionally animate seats that have “flipped” from one party to another.
As with all Flourish graphics, our parliament charts are mobile-friendly. They will even rotate on mobile to make maximum use of the available space. (This idea was borrowed from our friends at the FT.)
Try making one now, or read on for a full demonstration.
How to make a parliament chart in Flourish
- Select the parliament chart template.
- Upload a CSV or Excel file, or just type in your values to existing data sheet manually. You must have at least one column with the party name and a column with the number of seats.
- Optionally, add another column with data from a previous election.
- You can now tweak the chart as you like. Change the colors, the number of seats, remove the table, add a legend.
- Once you’re happy with your parliament chart, you’re ready to publish it to the world, download it to host on your own servers or use it in a Flourish story. You can also download it as an image if you prefer (including as an SVG to edit it in a vector graphics tool).
Looking for more ways to visualize election results?
Our package of election-related templates is growing. Here are some other templates that make it super easy to visualize election results in a beautiful and interactive way:
- Show election results and create your own coalitions with our election results chart
- Analysing all members of parliament with our Survey template
- Visualize poll results over time with the Horserace chart
- Who lost votes to who? Visualize it with a Sankey diagram
- Visualize the shift in party popularity with slope charts