What's the difference between the left and the right? David McCandless goes back to the future

What do the left and right actually stand for? I created this visualisation with London-based designer Stefanie Posavec in 2008 to try to better understand political perspectives. I had a vague sense, but no real detail. No sense of the cartography. So I roved through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, cross-referenced with Wikipedia, and delved through sites like conservative-resource.com to shape up and create a flowing 'concept-map' of these two blocs.

See the image

Of course, the political spectrum is not quite so polarised. Actually it's more of a diamond shape, apparently. But this is how it's mostly presented in the media - left wing vs right wing, labour vs conservative, democrat vs republican. And perhaps in our minds too…

Version 1.5

The image appeared in my book Information Is Beautiful in Feb 2009 and was immediately set upon by right-wing bloggers. They drubbed it for its left-wing bias. Fair play, I thought. They made some good points. As a left-leaning journalistic type, I had clearly - and unconsciously - biased the diagram to make the Left seem better than than the Right.

So I got into lengthy (and sometimes heated) discussion with my right wing critics. Taking in their feedback - and no small-amount of fireballs in the comments - I updated the image, refining the wording and changing a few other subtle elements for a hopefully more balanced end result.

(If you're curious, you can see the original images on my Flickr)

Remember though: this is an attempt to depict the idealised versions of the political spectrum. It's as if I'm stretching it tight, like a piece of rubber, so the details and forms are exaggerated. The reality is more subtle and multi-faceted - a shape I hope to tackle in a future version.

A couple of thoughts

I love this diagram. Not just because it's constructed from a particularly rarified form of data - the concepts and ideas we might use to form our worldviews. So it can act as a lens to literally *see* what others think.

But also because, perhaps, it points to one potential of information visualisation. That is, that seeing ideas allows us to hold apparently contradictory value systems in our minds simultaneously. In common parlance, to f**k with our heads.

Get a print

If you like this image, you can order a beautiful A2 print of it on gorgeous FSC-certified Munken art paper here

About Me

I run InformationIsBeautiful.net, dedicated to visualising information, ideas, stories and data. Twitter @infobeautiful

This a new and updated image from my book of infographic exploria, Information Is Beautiful. (HarperCollins 2009). In the US, the book's called The Visual Miscellaneum

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