Recently did a survey over on r/SampleSize on the major regions of Europe, since these are a frequent cause of discussion here on reddit. These are the preliminary results after a bit over 60 responses.
The survey allowed respondends to pick multiple regions for each country if they found it to be fitting.
This sample size is of course still quite low, so if you want to take the survey yourself: https://forms.gle/zJurFZAQ8JMaFtQH8
I would love to see more responses from people into geography!
For now this is a breakdown of the five big basic categories. The survey includes a lot of other more granular categories (like balkans, scandinavia, baltics, …), that I would love to follow up on, if there is interest. However for these I have not gotten enough responses yet for it to feel representative.
Important things to note:
The first map uses the total votes and assigns each country the region which obtained the most votes, while the pie charts show the vote distributions for each country. I think this shows very neatly why there often is so much discussion on these regions here on reddit. Like Germany being very split between central and western europe, or the balkans being split between southern and eastern europe.
For the choropleth maps, I normalized over the most answered response for each region. So 100% does not mean that 100% of respondends picked this country, but that this country was the most picked one in this particular region. (Although most of the time it was close to 100%)
Posted by DM_me_fun_stuff_pls
25 Comments
This is why you never ask the public for their opinion.
The problem with this kind of categorization is that it implies that these regions are mutually exclusive. I think any reasonable person would consider Spain to be both Western Europe and Southern Europe.
What is the third color in Portugal? Its too low resolution for me to see.
Will you do a global version? Interested to see how people see world regions.
Interesting with the piecharts!
Super cool idea
If Macedonia is southern europe then Bulgaria, Albania, and most of the balkans should be too
This is really cool
It’s interesting that even though Turkey is marked as “not Europe” most people actually put it in one of the European categories. They just couldn’t agree which one.
It is good to see the responses be posted on here, even if they dont realky make sence but that just is because europe cant properly be divided based on artifical borders.
Portugal, the only place that can be in southern, western and eastern europe at the same time
Could you mix the colors from the survey so that you can see a gradient of colors?
montenegro, albania and bosnia and herzegovina should really be southern if croatia and macedonia are
Holy fuck this topic is sooo overdiscussed. People just don’t realize Europe can be split up geographically and politically. Some country can be be politically eastern while geographically central, etc etc.
Interesting how Eastern Europe still seems to be very much based on cold war alignments. Hence there’s a pretty sharp divide, and Greece is not included.
Western Europe doesn’t seem quite so strongly influenced.
I think Southern Europe is slightly influenced by holiday destination popularity.
I like how you can tell that people got confused on east and west lmao
I expected Hungary to be central tbh
also I feel like a Balkan category might have been in order
otherwise this is amazing
Very difficult to categorise Croatia.
Croatia southern Europe but Montenegro , Albania and Serbia to the south are Eastern Europe ? Laughable
Surprised Western Europe and not southern Europe is most popular option for Portugal while southern Europe and not Eastern Europe is most popular option for Croatia and Macedonia
Everyone has to have a label for some I guess
Don’t use that terrible map of Georgia.
I mean, for me its just impossible to not consider Poland eastern Europe. Its like the quintessential eastern europe.
I appreciate the tiny sliver of Southern Europe in Iceland
Europe today would not be the Europe it is without the Romans bringing law, order democracy and Christianity to it as they conquered those lands.