A small tool with very visible limits.
Norwegian Politics Data is live, and I find it poor beside my other politics tools.
There are four pages. The history is short. I can inspect one municipality, but there is no page where I select two and put their profiles side by side. The app can calculate relationships across municipalities; the comparison interface I want is still missing.
In 2025, it offers six factors across all 357 current municipalities: population, population density, the share aged 65 or above, turnout, cars and education. Select 2021 and the factor choices shrink to one. Turnout. The municipality layer shrinks to 355.
That makes the tool feel thin very quickly. Denmark and Sweden have more historical depth. The Netherlands has a wider factor catalogue. Norway runs, but I reach the edge sooner than I would like.
Belgium is a useful check on that reaction. Its preview has only three factors and one election year, so Norway does not come last by every count. Belgium also has the side-by-side municipality page Norway lacks. What feels poor is a combination of history, range and the things I can actually do with the interface. Counting columns would not settle it.
I also need to distinguish two kinds of missing work.
The difference between 357 and 355 has a specific reason. The old Ålesund election result belongs to a municipal geography that does not divide reliably into current Ålesund and Haram using the evidence accepted for this version. Giving each current municipality a plausible share would create two neat rows without establishing that either row was right.
So both municipalities remain outside the 2021 municipality analysis, and the app explains why. The national result still covers the full country. A restriction on one municipal analysis does not remove those votes from Norway's national total.
That boundary needs evidence before it can move. The missing comparison page is development work. I cannot borrow the seriousness of the Ålesund problem to make an unbuilt feature sound principled.
There is still something useful inside the smaller tool.
In the 2025 education view, the Green Party result shows a Pearson correlation of 0.77 across 357 municipalities. Education here means the share of residents aged 16 or above with short or long higher education. The ten municipalities with the highest education shares gave the party an average 7.6% of the vote, compared with 1.5% in the ten with the lowest.
That gives a reader something more concrete than a general impression about education and voting. It is also where the reporting would begin. Do the larger cities account for much of the relationship? What happens when population density is inspected separately? What do people who know these places think the national pattern leaves out?
Switching factors can help formulate those questions. It does not by itself control for their effects or identify a cause. The numbers describe a relationship between municipalities; they do not tell me why a particular person voted Green.
The public tool makes that first look possible without asking the reader to download the files and write the calculation.
Norway has been waiting in this project for a while. In April, I wrote about pushing too hard while the Norwegian adapter, shared engine and public apps became too many simultaneous problems. The following piece recommended that Norway wait for a calmer pass.
It now has an app, a public source repository and a TID page. That gives the criticism a common object. Someone else can open the tool and judge the same limited surface instead of relying on my account of what exists locally.
I would still like more history and the missing comparison page. Those wants should not disappear into a paragraph about responsible limits. Older elections need a source and geography pass. A side-by-side view needs development. They are different jobs, and the next version should be judged by what it actually adds.
For now, Norway is public. It remains a small tool with work I can name.
Open Norwegian Politics Data in TID · Source code and data
Earlier: Don't Push When You Push Too Hard and HR Has Concerns About My Git Strategy.
— Dennis Hedegreen
