Graphical inequity ruins the chart

This Economist chart has a great concept but I find it difficult to find the story: (link)

I am a fan of color-coding the text as they have done here so that part is good.

The journalist has this neat idea of comparing those who are apathetic ("don't care about whether Britain is in or out") and those who are passionate ("strongly prefer" that Britain is either in or out).

The chosen format suffers because of graphical inequity: the countries are sorted by decreasing apathy, which means it is challenging to figure out the degree of passion.

This chosen order is unrelated to the question at hand. One possible way of interpreting the chart is to compare individual countries against the European average. The journalist also recognizes this, and highlighted the Euro average.

The problem is that there are two different averages and no good way to decide whether a particular country is above or below average.

Here is my version of the chart:

The biggest change is to create the new metric: how many people say they really care about Brexit/Bremain for every person who say they don't care. In Britain, over four people really care for each one who doesn't while in Slovenia, you can only find fewer than half a person who really cares for each one who doesn't.

 

 

Comments

[Shampshire]

I feel like there's a hanging "so what" with this chart. It'd be much more interesting if we could correlate something (either your metric or simply the % who feel strongly) to:
- % who think Britain should stay
- years of membership in the EU
- extent of trade with Britain
- size of country
- attitudes to Britain
- etc.

to address some of the explanations hinted at in the body of the article.

And, a complete aside, I quite like the way the original chart handles the overlapping dot for Greece.

[Janie]

OK.But the older one with more info and most people will not ask how is the number calculated.