Unvote discover correlations between the council votes on legislative acts and countries' features. This project was made by the Nighthawk team during the Diplohack Brussels hackathon on 29-30 April 2016.

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