Stephanie Doctor
Context: This would probably be in the context of a news source, maybe graphics to go with a news story. User: Users would be interested news readers of varying education levels and perceptual abilities. Task: The task is generally to inform readers about campaign finance and show trends in data across candidates and states. Data: ProPublica API Campaign Finance data, US Census 2015 population data Display: Computer. These visualizations have not been formatted for mobile use.Visualization Techniques: Bars, maps, small multiples - created in R
Background & why it's interesting: After much deliberation and many changes of topic, I decided to visualize campaign finance data for presidential candidates this year. Campaign finance is, of course, a very relevant topic in this election year. I've been following the elections quite closely so I was interested in doing something politically related. I was also glad to have the opportunity to use the ProPublica API, as I've never scraped data with an API before but have always wanted to learn how.
I imagine this would be something journalistic, used by people who are generally interested or it might constitute graphics that go with a news story about campaign finance.
CUT-DDV:
Visualizations:
One thing that is important to note is that the data is inherently flawed as it does not include contributions from PACs or superPACs. This changes a lot of the comparisons between candidates (e.g. Sanders appears to have relatively more money than he does once you consider that most other candidates still in the race receive significant amounts of money from PACs) but I think there are still things to take away from what I have. I'm not sure if the API includes data on PAC contributions - I wasn't able to figure it out in the time I had.
Candidates' Receipts, Disbursements, and Cash on Hand: This visualization had the most iterations since it was the first one I made, and some of the decisions I made while making this viz carried through the others. I started by showing a stacked bar for each candidate, in alphabetical order, in which each candidate's bar is blue or red depending on their party. The darker bar represents the candidate's cash on hand and the lighter bar represents disbursements, so the total height of the bar represents the candidate's total receipts.
Next, I decided to sort the candidates based on total receipts, highest to lowest.
Since my data include contributions through January 31, 2016, I decided it only made sense to include candidates who were still in the presidential race on that date.
Finally, while the data are not current, a month and a half has passed since the end of January and most of the candidates in the figure have since left the race. Instead of removing them completely, I decided to color them gray in order to de-emphasize them.
Candidates' Contributions by State: I went with some of the decisions I previously made for these (namely for color). The idea was to visualize where each candidate's contributions were coming from, so I chose to do small multiples for the maps.
When I did this I noticed that in the maps of candidates with more money (Clinton, Cruz, Bush, Rubio kind of) oftentimes the boldest states were simply those with the highest populations (California, Texas, New York, and Florida). I decided that a way to remedy this would be to normalize by the state's population. I merged in data from the 2015 Census and divided the state totals by the population to get a per capita value, and mapped that instead. When we do that, we see a lot of the distributions even out but there are still some notable states like Ohio for Kasich, Texas for Cruz, and Vermont/Massachusetts for Sanders.
Distribution of Contribution Sizes: The other aspect of this data I wanted to visualize was the size of the contributions to each candidate, though this didn't really turn out exactly as I thought it would - but I'm still happy to take comments on the visualization of it. The data source provided values for four bins - Under $200, $200-499, $500-1499, and $1500-2699. The issue I had was that the numbers seem off (you may notice that they don't seem to line up with the totals given in the first viz), but I haven't been able to figure out why that is. It could just be that they don't report contributions above $2700 here, or there could be something beyond that... I'm not sure. But here's what I made.
