EU Membership

The EU is two months into the 2-year process of the negotiating the UK exit. The June 2016 referendum made global headlines not only for the result, but also for the story about the spike in Google searches of “What is the EU?” following the vote. Brexit continues to be the top trending news topic in the UK as Britons contemplate the impact of the historic 2016 referendum. To provide some context for this process, I created this marimekko to show the EU population by country and entry date. You can see that the original 6 members account for almost half of the EU population, pre-Brexit. Membership has grown to 28 countries over the past six decades and EU population has grown to more than 508M. The UK is the 3rd largest member and is 13% of the EU population.

It is somewhat unusual to see dates in a marimekko chart. In this case, however, the dates are used not as a time series but to show entry timing. I sorted the series in this chart to show the largest on the bottom and I used one of the new Smart Color features, color by bar,  to emphasize the waves of entry into the EU versus the individual member countries. I also added a data row to show the total member nations at each point in time. This data row was calculated directly in the Mekko Graphics data sheet by using the count formula for the column and adding that to the previous column total.

There are several small countries in the EU so I needed to manipulate the labels for these countries to improve readability. I used the Label Manager to multi-select the 4 small countries added in 2004 and annotated them (on the right click) as a group. This saved time versus manually dragging and adjusting each label.

You can download this chart on SlideShare.