Paths to Power: How Every Member Got to Congress

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An interesting visualization from the New York Times, showing the education and career path of each member of the 116th congress. It outlines how a large number of representatives go through similar milestones, which are divided in three categories (education, career, government). 

I was surprised to see that party affiliation does not appear to make a big difference in a representative's career path. With the exception of a few steps like non-profit work, milestones are distributed equally between democrats and republicans.

The horizontal axis is not meaningful: I wonder if this would be easier to read as a simple parallel coordinates visualization. The large number of paths also makes it difficult to unveil relations between milestones: did more representatives with career in private law attend public or private college? It would be cool to be able to select a single milestone and see all paths going through it (the visualization allows to hover and view a single path at a time).

Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/26/opinion/sunday/paths-to-congress.html

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