About twenty years ago, I had an idea to make a poster with a history of every senator who’s ever served in the U.S. Congress. I thought it would be neat to be able to trace the occupants of each seat in each state over time. I worked for a political redistricting firm at the time, and began to research the project, but I got busy and set it aside.

I picked up the idea again this past year for Timeplots, and now we are almost done with an expanded and more ambitious version of that original vision. And we had twenty more years of U.S. history to trace!

Check it out at http://timeplots.com/senate, and leave your comments below– we’re always interested in feedback. Thanks!

The Pew Research Center recently conducted a survey on public opinion of the BP oil spill; their findings are recorded and explained here. I’ve visualized some of those findings below. (NB: In each instance where I used a pie chart, the responses totaled 100 percent.)

They asked respondents, “Do you think the leak in the Gulf of Mexico is a major disaster, a serious problem, not too serious, or you don’t know?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republicans were split in their responses between deeming the leak “a major disaster” and “a serious problem.” Democrats, on the other hand, were more likely to state the leak was “a major disaster.”

Click for full view.

“Has the response of the federal government/BP been excellent, good, only fair, or poor?” Again unsurprisingly, the administration fares better than BP.

Click for full view.

The poll also asked respondents to compare President Bush’s handling of Katrina to President Obama’s handling of the oil spill. Because the oil spill is still a relatively new story, many respondents were less familiar with the spill than they were with Hurricane Katrina. Results:

Click for full view.

Finally, the poll measured support for oil drilling and alternative energy options, comparing poll results from April 2009, February 2010 (before the spill), and May 2010 (after the spill).

Click to view full size.

Click here to read the full report from Pew Research.

Gallup’s interactive “Presidential Job Approval Center” has some great tools, but using their widget, one can only compare four trend lines (ie., the job approval ratings of four presidents) at a time — it would be nice to see a more comprehensive visual comparison. Using Gallup’s data, I played around in Excel and Illustrator and created the following chart.

The chart details each president’s job approval at 460 days in office (the length of Obama’s current tenure), each president’s all-time high and all-time low approval rating, and average approval rating. You can tell at a glance which presidents experienced the most tumultuous terms: Truman, LBJ, Nixon, and G.W. Bush each have wide spans from highest to lowest approval ratings, and quite different “current” (460 days in) ratings than their eventual averages.

Our new Visual History of the American Presidency contains a column in which the presidents are ranked on a one- to five-star scale; I included our rankings in the chart below, along the x-axis (there are no five-star-ranked presidents in this time period).

Click to view full size.

So what do you think? Is this chart a useful visualization of Gallup’s data? Did we get the rankings right?

The online news site Raw Story posted an analysis a few weeks ago noting the 600 percent increase in split votes on the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2009.

Raw Story includes a table in their article listing FEC votes from 2003 to 2009; I made a quick chart of that data and added in a notation every time a seat changed hands. (The FEC has six commissioners, three Republicans and three Democrats, at all times. Commissioners are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate.)

Click to view full size

The Raw Story article provides a good explanation of the partisan gridlock the FEC experienced in 2008 and why certain recent GOP appointees have led to the uptick in split votes.

Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen and the original author of the study, explained, “The Federal Election Commission is hopelessly deadlocked, and the caucus of three Republicans really have realized that the best way they can prevent the enforcement of campaign finance laws is just by voting as a bloc to deadlock everything. Without a four-vote margin, the FEC can’t act.”

“At this point we have a dysfunctional FEC,” Holman continued. “It’s an agency that simply does not function anymore.”

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, the day women’s earnings finally catch up with men’s earnings for the previous year. After engaging in an argument with a friend over the merits of the equal pay argument — he maintained women had less market value in the workplace than men (due to traditionally having less education, working less hours, etc.) — I drew up a quick chart showing the history of men’s and women’s annual salaries over time, with a line added in representing the number of women obtaining Bachelor’s degrees.

The numbers are imperfect; they don’t control for occupation, industry, race, etc., but it shows how women’s skills are increasing at a disproportionate rate to their salaries. (Once you control for factors like education and experience, the wage gap gets slightly smaller, but persists.) Click to view full size:

Leave any comments below! For more info on the gender pay gap, click here.

A few weeks ago, we tweeted about the chart below, posted by Yale professor Chris Blattman on his blog. The graph was first posted on the Aidwatch blog, here. Click to view:

The graph’s original author criticized the new, trendy “3-D” approach to development, writing that we must “hold our politicians accountable when they sacrifice Development big-time to achieve small-time (or sometimes illusory) Diplomatic or Defense goals.”

Jérôme Cukier, the OECD’s data editor (OECD numbers were used for the pie chart), thankfully decided to respond. He used Tableau to create interactive graphs of aid flows to fragile states: a few screenshots are below, but Cukier’s actual post is worth a full read. Nice to see an awful graph transformed into something similarly simple, but much more useful and informative — click on each image to view in full size, and click here to read Cukier’s description of his process.

It’s Emancipation Day here in DC, marking the 148th anniversary of the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. According to the National Archives, “the act brought to a conclusion decades of agitation aimed at ending what antislavery advocates called ‘the national shame’ of slavery in the nation’s capital.”

The holiday often passes unnoticed, even by those living in DC — but the DC Emancipation Act was actually an important precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation. The language of historic legislation is hard to get through, so to save myself the trouble, I used Wordle to make a quick word cloud of the Act’s major sections – click to see in full view:

Today’s tax day, and with everyone around us complaining about high taxes, we wondered how the U.S. measures up to other OECD countries. Turns out, most Americans have a significantly lower income tax burden than residents of most other developed countries — but does that mean Americans are happier? We found each country’s Human Development Index (the UN’s attempt at measuring quality of life) and attached it to the right-side axis, connecting each set of bars with its corresponding ranking. (Of course, a high HDI rating doesn’t necessarily lead directly to happiness, but it is an indicator.)

The chaos of the connecting lines is indicative of the disconnect between low tax rates and high quality of life; in fact, there seems to be a link between high tax rates and high quality of life. Click to see full view:

For more information on how the OECD collected its data, click here or read this article. For the 2005 HDI rankings, click here.