Welcome to the latest in our occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. Today – bar charts. Or, more precisely: why bar charts? Not, why push tactical voting and ‘we can win here’ messages, but why bar charts rather than pie charts, line graphs, scatter graphs or any of the myriad of other graphical devices available?
Pie charts make an occasional appearance in political leaflets but bar charts are so much the dominant form that the idea of switching to pie charts was the concept behind one of Liberal Democrat Voice’s April 1st spoof postings a few years back. However, the reasoning behind this is talked about only very rarely, despite their being some hard-nosed scientific research behind it.
A good example is William S. Cleveland and Robert McGill’s academic paper Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods (September 1984, Journal of the American Statistical Association) (hat-tip: FlowingData).
What they found was that when it comes to the sorts of comparisons required for a tactical voting / we can win here message, scatter plots and bar charts generally are better understood than pie charts and graphical devices that rely on volume (rather than length) or intensity and shades of colours.
Where bar charts edge it over scatter plots in leaflet design is, in my view, that scatter plots need clear axises and space to be easy to follow. Bar charts work better in the more crowded environment of leaflets as they retain more of their clarity as other elements intrude around them than scatter plots do.
The 2011 World Infographics Summit also saw discussion over the relative merits of bar charts, pie charts and other graphical devices with, as Scientific American reported, the case for pie charts being harder to understand again being made. Most importantly, “the human brain is more adept at comparing lengths than areas”.
That’s all not to say that the choice of bar chart over other devices was based on careful psychological and graphical design research. But the advantages of bar charts do help explain why they seemed to be the right choice and why they prospered.
As for the first bar chart, I’ve so far traced the idea back to Chris Rennard’s Association of Liberal Councillors booklet in 1984, when he called them “block graphs” and included some examples from recent elections. Anyone got any earlier spots?
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8 Comments
Bar charts are trivially easy to distort, as well.
http://www6.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2011/01/14/and-so-onto-barnsley-central/ is perhaps a slightly exaggerated version of the trend, but not every bar chart that has ever appeared in a political leaflet is as accurately-scaled as the Hull one shown in this article…
So much easier for Libdems to play the old game of supressing the zero I’m afraid.
This one from the Tories compairng their result in a General Election year to Lab and Lib Dem from previous years has got to be the worst distortion of the bar chart.
http://peterblack.blogspot.com/2011/04/really-dodgy-tory-bar-chart.html
@Colin Green – Astonishing! They used different elections to get the numbers for different parties!
@toryboysnevergrowup
“So much easier for Libdems to play the old game of supressing the zero I’m afraid.”
You mean like the graph on a Tory leaflet here showing increase in council tax during the then minority Labour administration when all the council tax charged in the previous Tory-led administration was suppressed but which started from a marked zero!
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Lies, Damned Lies and Bar Charts.
The best Bar Charts are those comparing the Red Lion with the Dog & Duck.
@MBoy
Astonishing! Their PPC last year in Swansea was the Lib Dem PPC in 2005, so I can guess where they’ve got that idea from.