News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #3
News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #3
The point of this visual argument is that members of the US Senate are older than most Americans and thus public policy doesn't necessarily reflect citizens' needs (ignoring arguments about experience and term limits). The question is: What's the best way to visually make that case?
I see (at least) X different options:
First, simply plot the ages of every Senator. Obviously, an active title helps as I've done here. Notice that because the graph is so tall, I've added another horizontal axis at the top of the chart. I've also colored the bars for Republican-Democrat, though that's not all that important.
Second, tweak the first plot and add a reference line for the median age of the US population (which is 38.1 years). I guess this helps a bit, but I get a bit of a moire effect, which I don't like, and it's not clear to me this actually helps much.
Third, instead of using the nationwide median age, use state-specific median ages. The dots help with the moire effect and the little bits of annotation I've added off to the side are helpful and a little interesting, I think. I'm still not sure this is helpful.
Fourth, okay, instead of simply plotting the age of each Senator, what if we do some differencing. Here, I ask a slightly different question: How long has it been since my Senator was my age? (FWIW, I'm a little older than 38 😉). Maybe this is a little more helpful for people because you can really see that it's been a looong time since o
Fifth, convert the metric to when each Senator was age 38. Here, I change the graph to a dot plot (man, those bars are heavy) and change the metric. Does it help if I show the year at which each Senator turned 38? So, Dianne Feinstein, who is currently 87 years old, turned 38 in 1964. I wonder if this sort of metric helps put these ages in better context for readers?
I'm not sure I have a great answer here. All of these graphs are tall--or wide if I went that way--but the challenge is creating a metric and a graph that clearly conveys the argument that Senators are far removed from the age of the average (median) American.
If you have ideas on other/better ways, please let me know. Tweet me @jschwabish or send me a DM. And thanks for being a newsletter subscriber. If there are other things you'd like to see more (or less) of here, please let me know.
Take care,
Jon
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