The most partisan first names

I downloaded data from the Instituto Nacional Electoral to find out which names are the most overrepresented among the three main political parties in Mexico (PRI, PAN, and PRD). As was to be expected —names are markers of class, income, religion, and geographical regions— there are some major differences in which names the members of each political party bear.

The parties differ not only in their politics, but also in their internal structures and regions where they have support. The right wing PAN likes to keep its enrollment small and has 220,568 members or 3% of the total membership of the three major parties, the left wing PRD has 2,590,972 members or 33% of the total, and the PRI has 5,044,528 members or 64% of the total. And obviously, the political support of the parties varies by region, with not that much overlap between the PAN and PRD.

In the following charts I’m showing first names with at least a total count (for all parties) of a hundred and a party memebership of at least 30 (for the party displayed in the chart).

Notice how having more than one name is popular among members of the PAN, also that very few female names are overrepresented. The data you can download from the INE doesn’t include sex, but using an older dataset the membership of the PAN was 52% female a couple of years ago.

Note all the alternate spellings of Anayeli, Isabel, etc and how, unlike the PAN, people with two names are rare among the popular names.

I’ll just use this picture of the Guerrero Chimalli to illustrate the PRI:

In the previous charts I used the full first name as a single name (Luis Miguel is different from Miguel Luis) but we can also analyse the names as single entities:

Female names are more common among PANistas when analyzing each name as a separate entity

Again notice all the alternate spellings (Brayan/Bryan, Jocelyn/Jocelin, etc)

I also created a ternary plot so you can view how common the names are in each political party at the same time (remember the PAN has a very small membership)

I was curious about all the alternate spellings of Anayeli, though in the table below I’m only showing the most common ones —there literally are dozens and dozens of variations— and, well, PAN members just don’t like that name.

Name	Count for All Parties	Party	Count for Party	Expected Percentage	Percent Named Belonging to Party
NAYELI	1730	PAN	39	0.03	0.02
ANALLELY	387	PRD	278	0.33	0.72
ANAYELI	1449	PRD	1015	0.33	0.70
ANALLELI	110	PRD	74	0.33	0.67
ANA YELI	138	PRD	92	0.33	0.67
NAYELLI	134	PRD	88	0.33	0.66
MAYELI	115	PRD	74	0.33	0.64
NAYELI	1730	PRD	1084	0.33	0.63
NALLELY	837	PRD	501	0.33	0.60
YANELI	301	PRD	176	0.33	0.58
NAYELY	217	PRD	124	0.33	0.57
NAYELY	217	PRI	92	0.64	0.42
YANELI	301	PRI	121	0.64	0.40
NALLELY	837	PRI	319	0.64	0.38
NAYELI	1730	PRI	607	0.64	0.35
MAYELI	115	PRI	39	0.64	0.34
ANA YELI	138	PRI	44	0.64	0.32
ANALLELI	110	PRI	35	0.64	0.32
NAYELLI	134	PRI	42	0.64	0.31
ANAYELI	1449	PRI	426	0.64	0.29
ANALLELY	387	PRI	104	0.64	0.27

I figured it would be a good idea to count the percentage of first names that are only present in one party, and to my surprise the PAN has the highest percentage of unique names by far. I also measured the complexity of the names using Levenshtein and Soundex distances, and again the PAN had the most similarly spelled/sounding names.

Here are random samples of some unique by party names:

Names that are only present in the PAN
ADALGOT
BLERIATH
EDONE
EMIDGIO
EROILIA
GIBSON
HABANA
JAUDEL
JOLANI
GLORESBINDA
LIUVITZA
MYLTHON
NUYHIAVI
ORSIRIA
RICCO
VEUDY
YAMICLET
YECIA
YURINTZI
ZAADIA

Names that are only present in the PRD
BASELIA
MUYKEY
ERAMIS
GUILSONI
HAIRA
HEREDINDA
HORANA
IGILVIA
ISBELI
JASSINA
PAARIS
LLARIDEY
MAFAIDA
MARVITA
PRYTSCILIA
SARIDH
YARHELI
YESSMIT
YSAYCHU
ZIRIACO

Names that are only present in the PRI
AAGAR
ADIRAI
BEGAIN
BERENIZA
ELIOTZEL
ELISAMARIA
ENIZAEL
GLENIA
JARASED
MOSAISELA
NARCIDELIA
NAZDRY
POLEN
PONPOM
RUTHYALITH
SELENICO
SHADIRA
SICLALI
WUDRUM
YENIZEN

Hopefully your parents never gave you the misspelled name of a famous Mexican stripper!

Where people have unique first names they, unsurprisingly, also have unique last names

As you probably noticed the names play into some deep seated stereotypes in Mexican culture (some worse than others). Simply perform a search in Google Images for “Brayan” or visit El Deforma to see how they routinely use long names to make fun of the mirreyes. Brayan is in fact more common among members of PRD (even if unique names are more common in the PAN) and long names do seem to be more common among PANistas:

The longest name in the database belongs to GUADALUPE DEL SAGRADO CORAZON ESPINOSA DE LOS MONTEROS Y GOLZARRI, and I bet I don’t even have to tell you what party she belong to (PAN). Well, actually, it seems the name field at the time of entering the data in the INE database had a length limit and some names got clipped off, or abbreviated. I tried to somewhat clean up the data when possible.

Using a logistic regression to predict left wing or right wing party membership (I excluded the PRI since they only care about power and are corrupt, yay stereotypes!) gives exactly the results you would expect:

P.S. Code is available from GitHub

P.P.S. My next post will explain the following chart. If you don’t want to miss it subscribe to my email newsletter.

The most partisan first names

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