How to create a Political Policy chart
If you find voting to be a confusing responsibility, you're not alone. Trying to untangle political rhetoric can be the work of a lifetime. A political policy chart you can gain a better understanding of your nation's politics, and help you make a more informed voting decision. In addition, political policy charts can be used as tools to track popular political attitudes for the sake of satisfying a political science objective.
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Instructions
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Prepare To Make The Chart.
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Research existing models of political values. For nearly a century, professionals in the field of political science have attempted to express the results of their theories and research in an easily-digestible format. Charts are a novel way to express trends in political policy, and political policy charts have been used by such social scientists as David Nolan, Jerry Pournelle, Dr. Ronald Inglehart and most recently by Brian Patrick Mitchell. Before creating your own chart, surely you should refer to some of their work. Doing so will probably inspire you to develop your own ideas of how a political policy chart should be made.
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Establish your own theories about political trends, forces and popular political behavior. One of the hardest things for most people to do is to examine their own feelings about political concepts. It is much easier to listen to someone else, and then weakly respond to political events only when they affect us directly. However, by taking the time to observe our own lives from a political science perspective, we can understand the cause-and-effect nature of political policy. This is likely to give us a sense of empowerment and to prevent us from feeling like pawns in a capricious system.
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Consider how to visually represent your theories. Choose the materials you'll need to create this chart and whether you want to communicate these theories explicitly or implicitly (focusing more attention on how others feel about political policy).
Begin To Make The Chart
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Decide if you want to express a political bias with your chart. Political bias is usually not very appealing to the average person. However, many if not most political policy charts radiate a bias. If you are creating your political policy chart for the mighty cause of political science, you will certainly want to avoid the pitfalls of expressing a bias so that you can instead create a chart that is as neutral as possible, for the sake of putting people at ease.
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Solicit participants to answer survey questions. The way in which you ask your survey questions can greatly determine the answers you will receive. If you are interested in hearing the candid political feelings of survey participants, be careful to create questions in your surveys that will permit these participants to answer with a meaningful range of responses. Don't try to browbeat your participants into adopting values that you clearly favor.
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Visually represent the results of your surveys In a chart. Simplicity is the watchword here. You should graphically design the chart to permit viewers to absorb as much information as possible without overwhelming them. Consider using one of several forms of graphic representation for your data, including a diagram format, spectrum, graph or even a cluster of circles. Your policy chart should explain itself, rather than require a great amount of explanation to get a viewer involved.
Respond to Criticism
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Modify your theories based on survey input and/or outside criticism. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own ideas. Participants may find your survey questions stimulating even if they cite weaknesses in your ideas. Often, survey participants can help you to further develop ideas that you did not have the time or energy to do earlier. Political science is not an exact science; it relies on human beings taking the time to communicate with each other.
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If your chart needs extreme revision, consider putting it aside and starting from scratch. In some cases, you may find that the way you have chosen to express your ideas in your political policy chart is failing to accurately represent these ideas. In this case, you may want to simply be brave and start over. There is no sense in trying to stick with a format that is a proven failure. Focus on the type of result that you are trying to achieve and make this the purpose of your work.
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Recognize potential allies in your critics. Our gut response when our ideas are criticized is to lash out and to defeat our opponent. This is not a mature or even a necessary response. We need to train ourselves to spot opportunities for mutual agreements whenever they are possible. There are very few issues related to our work or our values which will not benefit from criticism, whether it is friendly or harsh. Often, people who find our ideas intriguing will criticize them just to see if they are valid enough to overcome criticisms. Whenever possible, treat critics with respect and listen to what they are saying before responding.
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Tips & Warnings
Consider this exercise a great opportunity to learn more about the views of others, rather than to simply foist your own views upon others. People are more likely to share with you if you don't express a pronounced bias with your theories and your methods of research. Get interested in what others have to say, and why they feel as they do about certain issues.
Keep your political policy chart visually simple and logically organized. Ideally, you should try to design a chart which will both be interesting and understandable in a glance. If this seems impossible, consider how red, yellow and green traffic lights influence the behavior of millions upon millions of citizens on a daily basis. These lights, of course, are signals that convey several books worth of rules about traffic behavior, simply by flashing routinely and in order. A simple glance can provide much useful information.
