Political Spheres: Visual Insights into Party Lobbying

Your interactive dashboard for exploring how political parties engage in various lobbies.

Our platform provides a unique visualization of the complete political landscape, using dynamic circles to represent the involvement of party members in advocacy efforts.
Each circle varies in size according to the number the influence of active parliamentary members in a lobby, clustered with party affiliations offering a clear and immediate sense of where parties are allocating their efforts and influence.

Dive into our visual tool to understand how parties prioritize issues from environmental protection to the defense of tabacco producers.
Whether you're a policy maker, researcher, or politically engaged citizen, "Political Spheres" offers valuable insights into the dynamics of political advocacy, empowering you with the knowledge to understand the Swiss macro political trends in lobbying.

Visualization

Party representation

This visualization allows us the understand the macro trends in party involvement in each lobby category. At the same time, we wished to see how invested a party was on one theme but also how it compared to their available workforce in parlement.

This visualization is updated depending on wich circles you clicked on before. Here you can also click on a bar to update the pie chart of the next section.

Party repartition

This pie chart represents the involvement of a party across different categories. We can quickly see which category they are most represented in.

Toogle to show sub-branches:

The name of the category and its value can be seen while hovering the chart. Also you can change the party using the search bar above, and switch between the category types using the toggle.

Data

The data was taken from Lobbywatch.
Lobbywatch was an indispensable tool for this projet and generally transparency in Swiss politics.
They provided crucial insights into the affiliations and lobbying activities of members of the National Council and the Council of States.
Their work allowed us to better understand the relationships between politicians and lobbyists who have access to the Federal Palace.
Using their robust database contains over 48,000 data points, revealing connections to various lobbies, associations and organizations.
This data served as the foundation for the visualizations you see on this website, enabling a deeper understanding of political advocacy and engagement across different lobbies.