State of the Union

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In advance of President Obama's State of the Union speech tonight, here's a quick look at his past addresses to Congress and the policy issues they covered. This chart shows the number of words devoted to each policy area in each speech.

The topics are coded chronologically, so the same policy area might be covered in multiple parts of the same speech. Also, not all topics are mutually exclusive; science and technology sections often include discussion of jobs, etc.

Data Source: CSPAN

Chart Tool: Adobe Illustrator

Virginia Votes 2013

Tuesday is Election Day, and in Virginia the races for governor and other state executives are making plenty of headlines. But in addition to these high-profile offices, Virginians will also be choosing new representatives for the state's House of Delegates.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. Many of the delegates who are elected won't be new. And in close to half of the house races, voter's won't have much of a choice.

Eighty-seven of the 100 house races feature incumbent candidates, 42 of whom are running unopposed. Of all the races, 45 have only one candidate on the ballot.

Virginia House of Delegates 2013
Candidate Parties in District Races
* = Incumbent candidate

In 2010, Virginia redrew district lines for the House of Delegates. Like the congressional redistricting process at the national level, Virginia's redistricting was based on Census results and intended to divide the state into districts of roughly equal population.

How did redistricting affect the competitiveness of Delegates races?

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In 2009, before redistricting, 54 of 100 races included candidates from both major parties, and nine of those also featured at least one third-party candidate. In 30 races, major party candidates ran unopposed.

In 2011, the first House of Delegates election after redistricting, the number of races with candidates from both major parties fell to 27 — half of what it was two years before. Forty-three races saw Republican candidates running unopposed, up from 21 in 2009. Democratic candidates ran unopposed in 20 races, up from nine in 2009.

This year's elections will be more competitive, on the whole, than in 2011, but there are still more one-sided races than before redistricting. Forty-three races have both Republican and Democratic candidates, and seven of those also include third-party candidates. Republicans are running unopposed in 29 races, and Democrats are unopposed in 16.

The 2010 redistricting process also redrew lines for the state Senate districts. State senate elections won't be held again until 2015, but so far redistricting has offered mixed results in terms of competitiveness in the Virginia Senate.

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In the 40 senate districts, the number of races with candidates from both major parties increased from 16 in 2007 to 24 in 2011. At the same time, the number of unopposed Democratic candidates fell from nine to three, while the number of unopposed Republicans increased from eight to 11.

The Virginia Public Access Project has some great information on the 2010 redistricting process, including maps and lists of precincts that changed districts between the 2009 and 2011 elections.

Data Sources: Virginia State Board of Elections, Election Results

Chart Tools: Google, Adobe Illustrator

Extra Credit: More Freedom!

Is there a relationship between wealth and freedom? What about government stability? The Bubble Chart of Freedom is here to find out.

Again, I'm using Freedom House's Freedom in the World index. Today's chart focuses on the top 50 largest countries by population, and the freedom ratings are from Freedom House's scores for 2012.

There's a significant amount of research suggesting a strong correlation between national wealth and democracy. Perhaps I'll post a bibliography on the topic sometime soon. In the meantime, the data here seem to support that correlation. The Free countries in the green shades are mostly floating at the top of the chart, where the values for GDP per capita are highest. Not all Free countries are among the wealthiest — India and Indonesia are pretty low on the GDP scale — but almost all the wealthiest countries are Free.

The x axis shows how long each country's constitution (or in the absence of a constitution, the legal document establishing the current form of government) has been in place. The question I wanted to answer here is whether countries with more stable governments are more likely to be Free, with constitution age acting as a proxy for regime stability. It's a tricky measure, since it really doesn't say anything about the content of the constitution or how the government applies it, but hopefully it does help separate countries in transition from more established governments.

Because so many countries have been through significant transitions and adopted new constitutions within the last 50 years, the x axis scale is logged to alleviate some of the crowding between the 10 and 50 year marks.

The relationship between constitution age and freedom is not as clear as the one between wealth and freedom. It is interesting to note that none of the countries that adopted new constitutions in the last 15 years is Free.

Again, only the 50 most populous countries are shown here. The full data set might show a different picture — perhaps on a future post.

Here's the data in table form. Countries with Freedom House scores of 1 to 2.5 are Free, 3 to 5 are Partly Free, and 5.5 to 7 are Not Free.



Data Sources: Freedom House Freedom in the World reports.
Population, GDP per capita and constitution data from the CIA World Factbook 2013.

Chart Tool: Google

Assignment 2: Substance over Methodology — Freedom in the World

"Graphical displays should … induce the viewer to think about substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else"
— Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

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I'm using one of my favorite data sets today to explore a particular challenge: How do you clearly illustrate meaning in data that don't have intrinsic meaning? Put another way, how do you explain the methodology behind data without distracting from what the data have to say?

The data in this case come from an index — Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World index, which scores every country in the world based on civil liberties and political rights. It's a very popular and useful tool for foreign policy writers and researchers who want to compare different governments to each other or look at governance trends over time.

Like any scoring system, though, it uses a manufactured scale to rank qualities that are not easily quantifiable. In order to understand what the scores say about freedom, first you have to understand how the scores are created.

I've seen (and tried) several different approaches to graphing Freedom House scores, and every approach has pros and cons. Trend lines are most common for charting scores over time, although the Washington Post recently opted for columns to show scores for Iraq and Afghanistan. One drawback is that we're used to associating upward-sloping trend lines with positive changes, and in Freedom House's index higher scores actually mean less freedom. If you keep an ascending scale on the y axis, it might take readers a moment to realize a downward dip in scores is really a good thing.

When I was in graduate school I made a lot of these:

I liked this approach because the inverted y-axis values give gains in freedom an upward-sloping line. The colored regions show clearly whether a country is classified as "Free," "Partly Free" or "Not Free" without leaving the reader to interpret the scores. If I were making this chart today, I might leave the scores off the y axis entirely since they draw attention to Freedom House's methodology when the real take-away is the trend line. But, if you're really interested in how Freedom House rated Ukraine each year, the scores are there to see.

Back to the chart at the top of the post. Like everything on this blog, it's an experiment. Instead of an up-and-down trend line (does freedom go up and down? I guess it does when you assign scores to it), I wanted to try showing different levels of freedom by color only. The red-yellow-green scheme is widely recognized and familiar — green is good, red is not good, yellow is somewhere in the middle.

It's still hard to graph Freedom House's index without some explanation of the scoring methodology. See all the notes I added to the top chart just to feel like I was being thorough? And they don't even go into all the changes Freedom House has made to its methodology over the years.

One thing I might have done differently: The green, yellow and red areas on this chart don't correspond exactly to Freedom House's "Free," "Partly Free" and "Not Free" classifications. Freedom House's "Partly Free" rating encompasses scores of 3.0 to 5.0. On my chart, 3.0 is still pretty green and the true yellow doesn't show up until 4.0. Looking at it now, I feel it might be more important to show the three broad classifications more clearly than to show a continuous and symmetrical color gradient.

Data Source: Freedom House Freedom in the World data, 1972-2012.

Chart Tools: Adobe Illustrator (top chart), Microsoft Excel and Word.

Extra Credit — Budget Variations

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I'm a fan of Google's interactive charts and tables, and I think the ones in the last post turned out pretty well. The ability to scroll over a line or column segment to see more data is especially handy for packing in the details while keeping the chart clean.

Even with that great feature, some of the budget data were still hard to display — particularly in the smaller spending categories that are hard to find when you're mousing over. So I tossed the data in Adobe Illustrator so I could have a little more flexibility with the design. It's still hard to read in spots, but it's nice to have control over the labels and segment colors.

Illustrator also lets me add a few design flourishes, like these paths highlighting the redistribution of budget outlays among spending categories:

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Data Sources:2014 - H.Con.Res. 25 PCS, (113th Congress); 2012 - H.Con.Res. 34 (112th Congress); 2000 - H.Con.Res. 68 ENR (106th Congress). Accessed through THOMAS between May 14, 2013, and May 20, 2013.

Chart Tool: Adobe Illustrator

Assignment 1: Show the Data — U.S. Federal Budget

There have been a lot of stories coming out of Washington lately, and the federal budget really hasn't been one of them. That will likely change soon. As of May 15 Congress can begin considering appropriations bills for the 2014 fiscal year, meaning between now and September we can expect to hear more about how much money federal agencies will have to spend in the coming year.

Despite its seemingly unlimited pockets, Congress is required to abide by specific spending limits each year. Who sets these limits? The President's Budget gets a lot of attention when it's released each February (or April as was the case this year), but these budget recommendations are just that — recommendations. Congress actually sets its own spending limits with an annual budget resolution, usually passed in April.

By law, once the president has released a recommended budget, both the Senate and the House of Representatives draw on that document and their own priorities to draft separate budget resolutions. Once each house approves its own resolution, they swap notes and hammer out their differences in a report that becomes a binding outline of next year's spending. The final budget resolution is the basis for appropriations bills that portion out money to specific agencies.

Of course nothing's straightforward in the Congress, and lawmakers have failed to agree on a final budget resolution for the last three fiscal years. A budget resolution for 2014 also appears to be dead in the water. 

So how much does Congress have to spend in 2014? Well, it depends where you look.

Fiscal Year 2014 Outlays by Category (in millions of dollars)
Technically, when Congress fails to pass a budget resolution the previous year's resolution remains in effect. The last successful budget resolution was Senate Concurrent Resolution 13 (S.Con.Res. 13 ENR). It was passed for the 2010 fiscal year but includes spending levels for 2011 through 2014. In years when no final budget resolution is passed, the House sometimes formally adopts its own resolution as binding for the purposes of making appropriations.

The charts above show spending levels for 2014 outlined in S.Con.Res. 13 alongside those proposed by the House and the Senate in separate resolutions this spring. None of these is a definitive guideline for next year's appropriations, but it's fun to compare them.

It's also fun to compare spending levels for each category over time.

Notice how Homeland Security got its own spending category in 2005. The Overseas Contingency Operations/Global War on Terror category was originally called Overseas Deployments and Other Activities when it showed up in the 2008 budget.

U.S. Federal Budget Outlays by Category, 2000-2012 (in millions of dollars)

Data Sources: 2014 - S.Con.Res. 13 ENR (111th Congress), H.Con.Res. 25 PCS, (113th Congress); S.Con.Res. 8 ES (113th Congress); 2012 - H.Con.Res. 34 (112th Congress); 2011 - H.Res. 1493 (111th Congress); 2010 - S.Con.Res. 13 ENR (111th Congress); 2009 - S.Con.Res. 70 ENR (110th Congress); 2008 - S.Con.Res. 21 ENR (110th Congress); 2007 - H.Con.Res. 376 EH (109th Congress); 2006 - H.Con.Res. 95 ENR (109th Congress); 2005 - S.Con.Res. 95 (108th Congress); 2004 - H.Con.Res. 95 ENR (108th Congress); 2003 - H.Con.Res. 353 EH (107th Congress); 2002 - H.Con.Res. 83 ENR (107th Congress); 2001 - H.Con.Res. 290 ENR (106th Congress); 2000 - H.Con.Res. 68 ENR (106th Congress).
Accessed through THOMAS between May 14, 2013, and May 20, 2013.

Chart Tool: Google Docs