politics – Page 22 – Coffee Spoons

The South China Sea

Over the last few weeks, tensions have been rising in the South China Sea. While most of the world has been focused on violence in Ukraine and Nigeria, fishing boats and other maritime vessels in the South China Sea have been clashing—thankfully without the use of guns or missiles. These clashes contribute to a growing fear that one day, one clash will spiral out of control and lead to something more than required paint jobs for fishing trawlers.

Thankfully, for those of you unfamiliar with who exactly owns what and what they think they own versus what they think others own—in short a mapped out version of the conflict—the New York Times has put together a nice map.

Credit for the piece goes to Derek Watkins.

Home Ownership

I am pretty much a sucker for small multiples. And so today I present a good one from the Washington Post. The story starts looking at the broad, national scope of the issue. And from there it breaks home ownership down by state.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post’s graphics department.

Wisconsin Politics

Today we dive into state-level politics north of Chicago, in the state of Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an in-depth article looking at the political divide in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. While one could publish an article of that nature with just lots and lots of words, the Journal Sentinel chose to use maps and charts to support their arguments.

Comparing Milwaukee urban vs. suburban voting patterns

Credit for the piece goes to Craig Gilbert and Allan James Vestal.

Comparing the Troop Deployments of Russia and Ukraine

Things remain tense in Ukraine, especially after the violence late last week in Odessa. But in many senses, Ukraine is limited in the operations it can undertake against the separatists, at least with its armed forces. A lot of this has to do with the tens of thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and aircraft now deployed along the border. Thankfully the Washington Post has taken the time to detail just what is known to have happened lately.

The buildup along the Russian–Ukrainian border

Credit for the piece goes to Gene Thorp.

Tax Day and Income Inequality

Tax Day for Americans seems like a great time to talk about income inequality. The article from which this chart comes talks about a recent book exploring the parallels of the 19th century’s inequality—as the article reminds us, the time of “Please, sir, may I have another?”—and the forecast for the 21st. Anyway, the graphic is a nice use of small multiples and highlights that despite the damage done to capital wealth by Great Depressions and two world wars, it is well on its way back to unequal levels.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.

Motorcycle Helmet Laws

Today’s piece does not involve any particularly crazy graphics or forms of data visualisation. Instead, the piece is a novel way of telling a story. People are increasingly familiar with what we might call here scrolling stories. Scroll down the page and suddenly you have glossy photos or high-definition videos. The New York Times, however, has taken this idea in a different direction for a story about motorcycle helmet laws.

Instead of glossy photos, we have clear and concise charts. Instead of lots of text blocks, we have just a few sentences. The story is told by the charts and the text offers the necessary context or background. Not all stories will have the data behind them to allow the story to be told—or shown—in such dramatic fashion. But, I can hope they do.

Credit for the piece goes to Alastair Dant and Hannah Fairfield.

Changing the Minimum Wage

Here’s a piece from the New York Times where I have to quibble with some minor design decisions. The story behind the graphic is various state actions on the minimum wage compared to where President Obama wants the minimum wage raised. This is a good story and broadly I like the execution. But these arrows, these arrows pierce my design heart. (Too much of a metaphor?) Instead, I think a simple dot plot would have sufficed. But as I noted above, this is more of a quibble than a shame-on-you.

Changes to minimum wages at the state level

Credit for the piece goes to Alicia Parlapiano.

One Proposal to Simplify the Tax Code

Republican congressman Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (basically responsible for the tax code), wants to simplify the tax code. This nice graphic by the Washington Post basically sums up the changes.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

Answering Some More Questions About Ukraine

So Ukraine is even more of a mess and in less than a week’s time, the Crimean people will vote in a referendum on whether they want to remain a part of Ukraine or rejoin Russia. This graphic of mine is an attempt to answer some questions—though hardly all I wanted—about Ukraine, Crimea, and about what the Russians have been doing. (To be fair, the Russians still don’t admit that the troops and soldiers are theirs. But really, I mean come on, we all know they are.)

Economically Isolating Russia

The West hesitates to use military force to push Russian troops out of Crimea. Likely with good reason as any such campaign would be neither cheap nor bloodless in addition to running the risk of spreading beyond the borders of Ukraine. So that leaves diplomatic and economic isolation. Diplomatic isolation is already underway—the G8 conference to be hosted in Sochi this summer is all but dead. But economic isolation is still being discussed.

The United States is generally in favour, but Europe—namely Germany—has been more cautious. But as my graphic shows, without Europe a sanctions regime would be largely toothless since half of Russia’s exports go to Europe. Except that Russia is also responsible for a significant proportion of Europe’s imported natural gas and sanctions on Russia could cause an interruption in that fuel to Western Europe. Naturally, most of that natural gas is, of course, transported through pipelines running across Ukraine.