Centrality in Policy Network Drawings

We report on first results of a cooperation aiming at the usage of graph drawing techniques to convey domain-specific information contained in policy or, more general, social networks. Policy network analysis is an approach to study policy making processes, structures and outcomes, thereby concentrating on the analysis of relations between policy actors. An important operational concept for the analysis of policy networks is centrality, i.e. the distinction of actors according to their importance in a relational structure. Matching structural with geometric centrality we incorporate the aggregated values of centrality measures into a layout model of the network.