Interactive Graphic: Visualizing Egypt's Diverse Political Parties

It's not easy to follow the political scramble in Egypt, where dozens of parties are forming in anticipation of elections this fall. Who's secular and who's Islamist? Who's liberal and who's conservative? To help readers make sense of it all, we've created an info-graphic parsing Egypt's 46 established political parties. You can use the interactive below to organize parties by four variables: political orientation, religious orientation, legal status, and the date they were founded.

Select the information you want to compare by selecting the number and order of the steps, using the buttons with drop down menus shown above the graph. Then, by double clicking on the yellow label on top of each vertical black bar, you can control what information is compared. Hovering your mouse over each vertical black bar shows you the percentages of each comparison.



Comparing data across different variables can yield some interesting results. For example, selecting political orientation as the second variable that, of non-secular parties, 50 percent are left wing organizations and about 33 percent are right wing organizations. Comparing religious orientation and legal status shows that 67 percent of non-secular parties are officially registered with Mubarak's government.

By pulling the data apart like this, it's easier to understand some of the trends that have been happening. For example, knowing how long each party has been established makes it possible to extrapolate why some parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are better organized or have larger grassroots outreach.

This visual developed using Fineo. DensityDesign Research Lab - Politecnico di Milano.