Daniel Kühnhenrich (daniel.kuehnhenrich@destatis.de)
Federal Statistical Office (Destatis)
Sylvana Walprecht (sylvana.walprecht@destatis.de)
Federal Statistical Office (Destatis)
Abstract
Making data understandable via visualisation is an objective of many types of publications. While R offers a vast amount of packages for the task, new R coders may find themselves overwhelmed by the possibilities. This article presents three easy applications. As part of the Federal Government’s Better Regulation programme, the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis) conducts surveys on the satisfaction of citizens and companies with public authorities every two years since 2015. In 2019, Destatis modernised data visualisation in its print publications. A Sankey diagram informs about the usage of digital devices, a word cloud displays reasons of dissatisfaction and a network diagram highlights essential and secondary agencies. They were generated with the R packages networkD3, wordcloud2, and igraph. During the 9th International Conference on the Use of R in Official Statistics (uRos2021), the authors presented these diagrams as part of the “Scientific Session Dissemination and visualization”.
Keywords: public administration, better regulation, Sankey diagram, word cloud, network diagram, life-events surveys, satisfaction
JEL classification: H (Public Economics) + Y (Miscellaneous Categories)
