Introducing the Secular Legislators Dashboard
In this entry, I want to introduce the Secular Legislator Dashboard. We have been working on this project, on and off, for a few years. But, finally, in the last few months, I have been able to find a format I’m comfortable with. The current version is just scratching the surface of what we have collected over the years and should be looked at as a constant work in progress. So, what are we showing here?
As Ron Millar explained in his column in The Humanist, “[o]nce the newly elected candidates are sworn into office in early 2023, there will be seventy-two elected officials who are public about their humanist, atheist, and nonreligious identity serving in Congress and state legislatures in thirty states.” This initial version of the dashboard includes a map with the current 72 legislators and summarizes some of the information we know about them. The data come from a few sources. The main data source is the list of Humanist, Atheist, Agnostic and Nonreligious Elected Officials compiled by the Center for Freethought Equality. The dashboard also uses data from Hemant Mehta’s election night 2022 Google Sheet tracking the success of openly secular candidates that includes some additional details that are not included in the raw CFE list. Finally, I confirmed some of the information using Ballotpedia, I also gathered the district location information from there as well allowing me to be fairly accurate with the location of these legislators. The analysis has been done so far by me, but some additional analysis to be added later is being worked on by Socioanalítica Research’s team.
Using the Dashboard
The image below is a screenshot of the main page of the Dashboard. I have included three numbers that show the different elements of the dashboard and how the data can be accessed. The number 1 in red highlights the legend area. The yellow number 2 highlights the map area that includes one dot for every openly secular legislator currently serving. The blue number 3 highlights the three ways the data in the map can be filtered.
First, we have the legend area. The way I organized the map is that legislators are classified into three categories: members of state houses (or lower chambers), members of state senates (or upper chambers), and members of the U.S. House of Representatives. If users click on any labels in the legend, they can highlight the members who serve in those offices and “gray out” all the others. For the purposes of this database, members of the unicameral Nebraska legislature are counted as state senators.
Second is the map area. Users can zoom in or out to get a closer view of some geographic areas and see who are the openly secular legislators in those places. Clicking on a dot will pop up a tooltip that includes the name, district, type of office, and the secular identity they prefer.
Finally, users can filter the Secular Legislators Dashboard in two additional ways. The “incumbency status” bar allows users to select legislators who were incumbents, challengers, or winners of open seats in 2022. The “secular identity” bar allows filtering by the preferred label the legislators describe themselves. The label options in the bar vary slightly from the labels shown in the map’s tooltip because the labels people use are so varied. For filtering purposes, these labels are collapsed into more simple categories. The “office type” filter is a variation of the legend filter. In this case, users can select the offices legislators serve without having to click on the legend. Over the next few weeks and months, I will be analyzing the data in this and subsequent versions of the dashboard. In the meantime, let me know what you think about the project in the comments or send an email to secularpolitics@socioanalitica.com.
Other News…
American Atheists released yesterday their fifth State of The States report. Every year these reports get better and richer. They still have the basic state-by-state summary of policies and issue areas, and the state/church separation categories. What I like about this series of annual reports is the various partner perspectives. These sections show the ways in which a major secular organization is partnering with other groups that, more often than not, are not part of the secular movement ecosystem. Today at 8 PM ET American Atheists will host a Zoom discussion of the report. Register here (I hope there is still space by the time this entry is published).