Parliamentarian Incomes
A welcome but controversial transparency law from 2013 forced all members of parliament of the Austrian national assembly to report their annual incomes from other sources than their politicians’ salaries. The data is limited due to the way the law limits the reporting upper boundary at EUR 10.000 p/m. So if a politician is earning just over 10.000 a month or 100.000 a month, we have no way of knowing.
Are there patterns of income across different political parties?
I defined the variables as colours for parties, shapes for gender, size for income. That way, at first glance, some immediate patterns become apparent. The green party has a lot of women, that seem to not make as much through their “side hustles” as the blue and black right-wingers.
A two-pager
I love creating a border-to-border 2-pager covered by the entire graphic. It’s just such a great feeling to package all the available information and data into one visual. This way it can read more like a “Where’s Wally/Waldo” than a top-to-bottom, left-to-right story. I think it’s the best way to engage an audience to interact with the graphic in print!
Some things are even better online
I loved the overview aspect of the print version, but being able to set the filters by party, gender, income-groups, it just made the income patterns all the more clear. Additionally, being able to hover over each parliamentarian and their faces to get extra info is a cool bonus.