UnvoteVisualising  the  correlation  of  the  Council’s  voting  behaviour  with  state  development  indicators.

All  photos   kindly   CC0-­‐licensed   by  Pexels.com

First,  a  false  start

• Thinking  of  the  discerning  consumer,  we  tried  to  combine  data  on• Food  additives• Pesticides• Food  and  feed  alerts

• But  couldn’t  find  any  use  for  the  data• Because  there’s  no  data  on  ingredients  in  different  food  products• Cross-­‐referencing  would  have  been  a  pain• And  a  manual  search  wouldn’t  have  been  that  usable

• We  decided  to  turn  to  another  direction

Bringing  context  to  Council  voting  behaviour

• There’s  nothing  new  in  visualising  Council  voting  behaviour  per  se• Dataset  available  from  the  General  Secretariat

• The  Member  States  are  different,  but  does  this  affect  their  voting?• Are  economic  considerations  a  factor?• Does  voting  behaviour  change  according  to  policy  sector?• Do  large  contributions  to  development  aid  signal  a  more  international  stance?

• We  don’t  imply  causality,  but  we  deliver  correlation!• A  total  of  1420  series  in  the  World  Development  Indicators,  courtesy  of  the  WBO  (though  not  all  have  meaningful  data  for  our  purposes)• We  decided  to  offer  a  tool  for  visualising  correlations  of  votes  to  indicators

• And  we  do  it  on  two  platforms

Tech  specs  and  screencaps

HTML  +  JS

Java  Swing  +  MySQL

Use  cases  and  further  development

• Researchers,  journalists,  general  public

• Adding  more  (and  up  to  date)  datasets  from  EuroStat• Comparison  of  multiple  indicators• More  options  for  zooming  in  to  relevant  voting  data  (policy  area  etc)• Better  country  plotting  in  votes• Displaying  indicator  values• Export  options  for  the  visualisation