Explorations into the Visualization of Policy Networks

Visualization is an important aspect of both exploration and communication of categorical as well as relational data. Graphical displays of policy networks are particularly attractive, since they enable authors to display in a compact way the relevant actors in a network, how they are related to each other, and what the overall structure looks like. Sociograms were early companions of social network analysis, but have received surprisingly little attention during the following decades. Only in the last few years has easy accessibility to quality computing and graphic equipment revived a now rapidly growing interest. In this paper, we analyze the problem of visualizing policy networks. We first argue why network visualization is important and non-trivial. Then we show that current methods are somewhat ad hoc in their attempt to convey information contained in a network. Our main contribution is a systematic approach to network visualization, closely following the general principles of information visualization. It provides a generic formalization which may serve as a guideline for further developments.

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