Prior to the UK local elections in May 2019, Sky News was shared a database with historic local results since 1973.
The data shows that the two main parties control three-quarters of the councils, one of the highest rate of two-party dominance of the last 46 years. It also told us that the rise of the LD explains the fall of the two-party dominance and the increase of councils without overall control, and that the LD was not favoured by joining the government coalition in 2010.
We published these findings in our story, where people can also search for a particular local authority and see how each area has voted over the past 40 years (scroll down in the previous link).
To promote the story, I played with ggplot
and gganimate
to produce a gif map, although it is particular tricky this kind of visualisations in the UK due to boundary changes.
Here is my "how I did it" R Notebook.