A visual approach to indices

The Economist’s »Democracy Index« measures and categorizes the state of democracy in 167 countries. The idea of my visual representation of this index is to give a different perspective on countries. Usually, we compare countries on a map. This is reasonable as their geographical position and shape is often a dominant cultural and economic driver. On the other hand, arbitrary shapes are hard to compare, map projections are always trade-offs and the impact of globalisation and digital communication demand post-spacial perspectives.

This graphic was created by me and Annick Ehmann first as a print graphic in the InGraphics Vol. 10 magazine at the Infographics Group in 2017. The graphic was created under the Creative Direction of Jan Schochow and the Art Direction of Klaas Neumann. It received an SND Award of Excellence in 2018. The interactive, extended version was created in 2018 with updated data and additional aspects by me.