Part of a whole
Parliament / hemicycle chart
Shows discrete seats or units in a parliamentary layout, coloured by group.
- Chart
- Composition
- Seat allocation
What it answers
How are seats divided among groups?
- Shape
- Seat dots in a semicircle
- What it shows
- Seat share and majority position.
Example
The question
How are the 41 seats on the works council split between groups?
Seats by group on the works council (parliament chart)
Illustrative data. It belongs to no company.
When to use it
Use it when
Assemblies and other discrete seat allocations.
Avoid it when
Continuous quantities or exact comparison obscured by curved packing.
How to read it
Read each dot as a seat and use direct group labels or the legend.
Note
Use whole-number counts and define group order.
The data you need
- Layout
- Long table
- Fields
- Group: text; Seats: nonnegative integer
- One row is
- One group and its seat count. What is the grain?
- Rules
- Use whole-number seats. Sum must match the represented assembly.
- Optional
- Optional group order and party colour.
- Preparation
- Check nonnegative components, reconcile the represented whole and aggregate duplicate categories. Define whether records are counts or already normalised shares.
- Units
- Whole-number seats or units; seat share divides by all represented seats. Majority threshold depends on the rules.
Worked example
Seats A45, B32, C23 total 100. Draw 100 dots. A is largest but below the 51-seat majority threshold.
| Group | Seats |
|---|---|
| A | 45 |
| B | 32 |
| C | 23 |