Eyes on Europe: Giving voters new insights through technology

By Ben Rudolph, Managing Director of Modern Journalism, Microsoft Corporate HQ

Today, in collaboration with Microsoft, industry leader POLITICO Europe launched the next wave of its 2019 European Parliamentary election coverage featuring 27 new interactive data visualizations created with Microsoft Power BI. The latest Elections hub content follows last month’s launch of an interactive homepage visualization and includes new country-level pages sharing important information and the latest news about each of the European member states participating in the election.

“Each member state has its own electoral system, its own voter turnout and its own unique political landscape. At POLITICO Europe, we’ve built a European Election hub that reflects this national dimension” said Johannes Boege, Chief Product Officer at POLITICO Europe. “With these country pages, we are again combining our leading journalism with state of the art data technology. Enabled by Microsoft Power BI, our product provides comparisons of 2014 results with the latest projections, linking national parties, their European parliamentary groups, voter turnout and key information on the voting process. At a glance, our readers can get a very detailed and up-to-date overview of the EU elections in their country and compare it with the situation in other member states.”

At Microsoft, we’re thrilled to collaborate with POLITICO Europe to deliver on our commitment to empower the news industry to discover and tell impactful stories in engaging ways. Recognized as the most influential publication on European affairs for two of the three years since it launched, POLITICO Europe is on a mission to bring nonpartisan education and insight to the European electorate as they navigate the complicated election process, which spans thousands of candidates and hundreds of parties.

To help achieve this goal, the new country pages enable POLITICO Europe readers to interact with reports to see the country-level seats by party as well as voter data from 2014, comparing it to the current predictions for 2019. The reports showcase the breakdown of party seats and affiliated groups, information on the voting system and process and past voter turnout stacked against population. Behind the scenes calculations make it easy for readers to interact with the report to understand the impact their vote could have in the upcoming election. Because the visualizations are built it Power BI, updates can be made in real-time as new data becomes available or news stories emerge.

This new content builds on the success of the homepage visualization that shows the projected composition of the next EU Parliament.

Microsoft is thrilled to continue collaborating with POLITICO Europe to launch new content formats that bring discussion about the future of the EU to new and existing readers.

Find out more about how Power BI is being used to build the solutions on the Power BI blog.

Tags: EU Elections, POLITICO