Galicia is holding its Autonomy elections in October 21st, and the National Statistics Institute has released a small set of data from the electoral census. Working with this data we first saw how councils in Galicia have a varying percentage of their constituency living abroad, with some councils having more than 50% of their voters living outside Spain. We’ll continue to explore that data in the coming days, but today I want to take a look at how age also defines the voters profile in Galicia.

Migration is one of the key factors influencing the distribution of the galician electoral census. The other one is age, which is also a consequence of the first one. In the first graph we see the total census distribution by province and age. We can see clearly that the western provinces (A Coruña and Pontevedra) have much more weight in the census than the eastern ones (Lugo and Ourense). We can also see that the differences between these two groups are much more evident in the younger half of the census, but we can’t see clearly how important age is in the census distribution in Galicia.

In this second graph we can see the percentage of voters in each province by age, so we can more clearly see the weight of age in each of the four provinces. Lugo and Ourense in the east are the more aged provinces, both because of demographic trends and because of young people leaving for the richer provinces of Pontevedra and Coruña, other parts of Spain and abroad.

Relative data, as percentages, allow us to compare provinces and see the weight of each age group more clearly than when working with absolute numbers like the total number of voters.