Τhe relationship between a politician’s salary and the effectiveness of the government they are running

 With all the scandal surrounding the salaries of MPs and the misuse of government coffers, particularly in Greece, this type of data are very revealing.

Designed by Ryan Bowman at http://www.shakeupmedia.com/, this interactive graphical tool displays the relationship between a politician’s salary and the effectiveness of the government they are running. This effectiveness is represented by a so-called Good Governance Metric, calculated by taking The Democracy Index (DCI) published by The Economist, the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and the Perception of Corruption Index (PCI) by NGO Transparency International.

The larger the angle from the dot representing the country to the thick yellow line, the worse the governance.  Some of the countries positioning may surprise you, others surely won’t.  Obviously this is not an exact science, but nonetheless, it’s an interesting and effective way to present such data. Data from this analysis have been used in my top in popularity article  in Greek, that appeared in BHMA newspaper on 20/02/2010. You can see the full article here. You can interact with the data in the above picture  here.