The document discusses a project aimed at visualizing the correlation between council voting behavior and state development indicators. It outlines challenges faced in utilizing data on food additives and pesticides, leading to a focus on council voting analysis using datasets from the general secretariat. The project offers a tool for visualizing these correlations on multiple platforms with plans for further development and enhancements to the dataset and user experience.

1. Unvote
Visualising
the
correlation
of
the
Council’s
voting
behaviour
with
state
development
indicators.
All
photos
kindly
CC0-­‐licensed
by
Pexels.com

2. 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

3. 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

4. Tech
specs
and
screencaps
HTML
+
JS
Java
Swing
+
MySQL

5. 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