Five European countries with the longest formation processes

It took me about a year to finish this course due to all kinds of life changes, but I finally have a final result.

As I mentioned before, I chose a political topic: I searched for data on the longest formation processes in Europe. I found this data at the research group 'The Representative Democracy Data Archive (REPDEM)-project' of the Political Science Department of Umeå University in Sweden.

Instead of the ten European countries with the most lengthy formation processes (number of days between election results and formation of a new government), I switched to five because this kept the visualization clearer. It is important to note that I chose a square design so that I can place it on Instagram for example, and the visualization remains clear on that medium (not too small letters, symbols, etc.)

I also chose not to symbolize the length of the processes, per country, by means of a distance between two hands - the known symbol for negotiation - as I mentioned before, but by means of a simple line. My initial idea would make the image too unclear and cluttered. Instead, I chose to drape the hands around the title of the visualization.

I also left the hands out of consideration with regard to symbolizing how often a country has set a 'record' as a top 20 country. (As indicated in a previous assignment, this is interesting because for example the Netherlands and Belgium score 'high' regularly with long-term formation processes, while the other eight countries mostly follow afterwards. So those countries really seem to be 'long-term political negotiators'.)

I eventually chose to visualize the frequency by means of wave movements of the line: the higher the wave, from top to bottom, the more frequent the occurrence is in the top 20 of longest formation processes (I also tried to explain this concisely in a legend). The range eventually went from once in the top 20 to 5 times (Belgium). I calculated the 'width' of the wave movements, and how the lines should relate to each other within the range mentioned, in R - the length of the lines as well -, and ultimately used the R visualization as a blueprint for my final image. Therefore I did not use a basic visualization from RAWGraphs: this tool did not visualize the combination of my variables in the way I wanted, and that is why I decided to code the visualization myself in R.

Finally, I chose to work in Photoshop instead of Illustrator because I wanted to make a social media visualization, and it seemed easier to use this program for that. Also, as indicated in previous assignments, I wanted to use more of a drawing style for my visualization à la Mona Chalabi, and Photoshop also seemed more suitable for that. To use the drawing style, I also used a graphics program on my tablet, and a drawing pen (mostly for the hands).

Finally, a comment on the data: I collected this 9 months ago and it concerns data on formation processes up to and including 2023, and is therefore probably outdated by now.

Below is the result; although I put a lot of time into it, I am honestly a bit disappointed about the simplicity of the image. I am curious about the opinions!

Zie text above.

See below!