What’s the best way to tell this story?
Over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, there is a discussion of this chart:
There has been some criticisms of it, and I posted the following reply. I encourage you to check out the whole discussion. My reply:
As the author of the chart in question, it’s neat to read this discussion and criticism. (Someone cares!)
I chose a stacked bar chart after experimenting with a variety of visualizations and judging that this resulted in the densest, clearest picture. There may be better visualizations, and I’d love to see someone make one. (And if our tool can’t do it, that’ll certainly help us prioritize our development plans.)
Regarding the choice of colors, you’re of course completely right. It’s a limitation right now that you can’t select them — I felt lucky just to get Republican to map to red. I’d prefer to use the traditional party colors, with lighter shades for leaning. We hope to address this soon.
As for where to put “other”, I thought carefully about this. I think it would be misleading to place “other” in the middle of the right/left continuum, and likewise would be misleading to omit, so I chose to include it at the end. To the extent that some unknown subset of “other” belongs between Democrats and Republicans, I’m failing to portray that, but it’s a tradeoff I thought made sense.
You can copy & edit my chart to put “other” in the middle (just add & remove the Y variables until they’re in the right order). I don’t think it’s quite as clear, but YMMV. You could also argue that there should be _no_ sorting, on principle, since the right/left continuum is somewhat bogus to begin with — but while agreeing with the sentiment, I think in practice it makes the picture harder to see.
The remaining issues mostly stem from the source data (which comes from the New York Times, who in turn credit the Pew folks, but don’t link anywhere — which is a bummer). There’s obviously text that should have accompanied the data, given the unexplained asterisk. But you’ve got to make do with what you’ve got.
Other people have commented on the LDS/Mormon issue in the NYT chart comments, but there’s been no response from the Times. Also, I’m no expert, but aren’t there people outside LDS who identify as Mormon, even though they may be few in number? I could add more annotation to the chart to clarify the issue, but instead I’ve made a new version with LDS removed, since the issue is not central to the chart.
If anyone can point me to a better data set, however, or a public link to the primary survey data the NYT republished, I’d love to use it. In fact, comparing such data would be interesting in its own right.
Please keep the feedback coming — I’d really like to make the best possible visualizations, and a better visualization tool, so this is extraordinarily valuable.
Peter C.
