Design Niko Elsen, Concept Michael Herrmann.
An excellent example of visualisation in Political opinion mapping is the Sotomo Research Project (in German) lead by Michael Hermann from Zurich University. They were asked by the European Union to create a way for voters in European Parliamentary elections to more easily understand the where both political parties and individual candidates stood on the broad political topics. Hermann’s “SmartSpider” has gathered a significant amount of interest as “the next best thing” in Visualizing Politics and spectrums. 
As Hermann explains in his 2010 TEDx talk in Zurich the value of this Spider is that it is able to very effectively and visually explain not only the broad dimensions of “Political Difference” but also the the ways in which they can combine to describe the more subtle differences within politics. Two more “right wing” parties for example might be very similarly placed similarly on Fiscal Conservatism but might stand very differently on Environmental issues- the kind of difference that would be easily overlooked and easily lumped together in categories as described by traditional political spectrums.
Crucial to their use however is that the dimensions are ordered around the chart in a way that still matches traditional political cleavages the more right wing conservative ideas being placed on the right and the more left wing and socially liberal ideas on the left.
Hermann bases these “dimensions” on 20 years of data from Swiss referendums and while other more specific issues can obviously take hold in elections- these categories represent the most salient of political difference in recent and current times and include what are often referred to as the post-materialist issues- such as the environment and immigration.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Smart-spider however is its take-up. As Hermann explains the smart spider has somewhat of a cult following with people using them in newspaper profiles
Facebook account profiles
and even parodied by cartoonists!
