Intermediate Implementations #2: Improving the Radar Chart

Since our last update, we’ve primarily continued to improve our radar chart. More specifically, we’ve attempted to address the core purpose of our visualization quest, and tried to unpack the relationship between political rights and economic liberalism. Is there a connection between political and economic freedom? To answer this, we crossed over data from Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index, with various components the Fraser Institute’s economic freedom index. The chart is shown below, in its current state.

We divide the political freedom scores for all into ten equidistant ranges. We then compute and plot the mean scores for the countries belonging to each set on each of the components of the Fraser Institute’s index dimensions. Any of the ten ranges can be selected via the drop-down menu above the chart. We aim to create a visualization that can display up to three ranges simultaneously in a superimposed way. However, as of now, our visualization only displays the latest choice made by the user.

One quick, preliminary observation to be drawn from the chart is that there is indeed a correlation between political rights and the various economic freedom outcomes. In other words, countries that score higher on the political freedom scale also tend to do have high scores on the various economic liberalism indicators. One exception stands out: size of government. Indeed, one can see that the general order of the colors (which refer to the various ranges of political freedom) is not quite the same for this component as it is for others. Importantly, though, one should note that there is much less variation in the data on this particular dimension. We hope to further develop this chart, and gain more conclusions from it.

In weeks to come, we’ll work on incorporating this chart into our dashboard, and perhaps creating further charts in d3.