Partition of Europe

A long-time reader sent me the following map via twitter:

This map tells how the major political groups divide up the European Parliament. I’ll spare you the counting. There are 27 countries, and nine political groups (including the "unaffiliated").

The key chart type is a box of dots. Each country gets its own box. Each box has its own width. What determines the width? If you ask me, it’s the relative span of the countries on the map. For example, the narrow countries like Ireland and Portugal have three dots across while the wider countries like Spain, Germany and Italy have 7, 10 and 8 dots across respectively.

Each dot represents one seat in the Parliament. Each dot has one of 9 possible colors. Each color shows a political lean e.g. the green dots represent Green parties while the maroon dots display “Left” parties.

The end result is a counting game. If we are interested in counts of seats, we have to literally count each dot. If we are interested in proportion of seats, take your poison: either eyeball it or count each color and count the total.

Who does the underlying map serve? Only readers who know the map of Europe. If you don’t know where Hungary or Latvia is, good luck. The physical constraints of the map work against the small-multiples set up of the data. In a small multiples, you want each chart to be identical, except for the country-specific data. The small-multiples structure requires a panel of equal-sized cells. The map does not offer this feature, as many small countries are cramped into Eastern Europe. Also, Europe has a few tiny states e.g. Luxembourg (population 660K)  and Malta (population 520K). To overcome the map, the designer produces boxes of different sizes, substantially loading up the cognitive burden on readers.

The map also dictates where the boxes are situated. The centroids of each country form the scaffolding, with adjustments required when the charts overlap. This restriction ensures a disorderly appearance. By contrast, the regular panel layout of a small multiples facilitates comparisons.

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Here is something I sketched using a tile map.

First, I have to create a tile map of European countries. Some parts, e.g. western part, are straightforward. The eastern side becomes very congested.

The tile map encodes location in an imprecise sense. Think about the scaffolding of centroids of countries referred to prior. The tile map imposes an order to the madness - we're shifting these centroids so that they line up in a tidier pattern. What we gain in comparability we concede in location precision.

For the EU tile map, I decided to show the Baltic countries in a row rather than a column; the latter would have been more faithful to the true geography. Malta is shown next to Italy even though it could have been placed below. Similarly, Cyprus in relation to Greece. I also included several key countries that are not part of the EU for context.

Instead of raw seat counts, I'm showing the proportion of seats within each country claimed by each political group. I think this metric is more useful to readers.

The legend is itself a chart that shows the aggregate statistics for all 27 countries.

Comments

[Joanne]

I think it heavily depends on the reader because I (European, mostly up to date on EU politics) found the original way easier to read than your sketch. why use percentages? personally, I want to know the number of seats each fraction got in a given country, not the percent of total vote. for example, EPP got roughly the same % in Germany and Finland, but ended up with 27 seats in one and 4 seats in the other country. but yes, the original really could have used at least country labels for sure!

[Kaiser]

J: Thanks for your perspective. As with all dataviz, we have to consider (a) what knowledge the readers bring to the piece and (b) what question the designer wants to address (or thinks the readers are interested in).

When I use percentages, I'm interested in the relative strength of these political entities across Europe. What insight are you interested in when you want to know counts by political entity by country?