PhilipKatema/Malawi-Elections-Analytics

An analysis of the elections data trends for Malawi from 1994-2020 # Malawi Elections Analytics (1994-2020) **A full-cycle data analytics study of every Malawian presidential and parliamentary election from the founding multiparty vote of 1994 to the court-ordered presidential re-run of 2020** - from 12 messy official PDF files to a harmonized 189,419-row dataset, seven political-science metrics, district-level maps, and a publish-ready findings report. *The whole story in one image: in 2019 Malawi is three colors - a UTM-purple North, an MCP-green Centre, a DPP-blue South. In the 2020 re-run the purple vanishes: every UTM district (and only the UTM districts) flips to MCP. Not one district changed hands between the two big parties directly.* ## The headline finding Between the annulled 2019 election (the "Tipp-Ex election," overturned by Malawi's Constitutional Court in February 2020) and the fresh 2020 poll: * The **effective number of presidential competitors collapsed from 3.15 to 1.95** - a 38% contraction of the field, with the same electorate voting 13 months apart. * **MCP's vote share jumped from 35.4% to 59.3%** - almost exactly its 2019 share plus UTM's. * MCP gained **50-64 percentage points** in the districts where Saulos Chilima's UTM ran strongest in 2019 (Ntcheu +64, Chitipa +63, Karonga +61, Rumphi +60), while the DPP's Southern heartland barely moved. * A quarter of the national vote changed party labels between the two polls (**25.6% Pedersen volatility**) - two similar-looking elections hiding a massive reshuffle. The 2020 result was not a national mood swing. It was a **geographically surgical coalition transfer**, made arithmetically necessary by the Constitutional Court's new 50%+1 majority rule - and the data shows it in a way headlines never could. ## What's in the analysis **Behavioural metrics (Part A of the notebook)** |#|Metric|Question it answers| |-|-|-| |1|Effective number of competitors (Laakso-Taagepera)|How fragmented is the vote? Did 2020 consolidate it?| |2|Margin of victory + competi …