After the longest formation period ever (approximately 300 days) the Netherlands has a government once again. Sworn in on January 10th, the fourth Rutte cabinet features several new positions (like a minister for climate and energy), a fair amount of women (14 out of 29) and the youngest state secretary in 48 years. Since the (nearly) 50% of women was a first for Dutch politics I became interested in the long line of the former Dutch cabinet members. Since I am trying to learn more about web scraping and data visualization I decided to create a dataset of all Dutch members of cabinet ever (or since 1877).
Creating this dataset was quite an interesting process, from setting the gender of all members before 1952 to male to discovering cabinet members that had no less than four positions. Truly, it was quite the project and it involved way too much manual work. If you want to see the specifics, feel free to look at my code on GitHub.
And then came the fun part: data visualization! I thought the ideas would come up in my head on a whim but to be honest, they simply didn’t. Or they did, but it just didn’t work out. I made a simple plot of the percentage of women in cabinets but further than that I didn’t leverage my dataset as much as I wanted to. I thought about it for a few weeks but I can’t come up with a way to visualize the data in a meaningful way. Perhaps in the future, I should start with a why instead of: let’s gather this pile of data and see where it takes us!
So perhaps you know what to do with it? I decided that instead of sitting on it for even longer I should finish up my work and publish it to see if anyone else has cool ideas for using the data. I think there is a cool data visualization in there somewhere. I have added the links to CSV and Excel files and code below, I’m sure there are still some mistakes in the file (manually checking all 1106 people was a bridge too far). So I would say good luck, delve into some data and see what you can find in this pile of information!