Politics is the set of activities related to strategic decision-making in groups. Political scientists study the strategic interactions between states, institutions, politicians, and citizens; they seek to understand the causes and consequences of those decisions and interactions. While some decisions might alleviate social problems, others might lead to disasters such as war and conflict. Data visualization approaches have the potential to assist political scientists in their studies by providing visual contexts. However, political researchers' perspectives on data visualization are unclear. This paper examines political scientists' perspectives on visualization and how they apply data visualization in their research. We discovered a growing trend in the use of graphs in political science journals. However, we also found a knowledge gap between the political science and visualization domains, such as effective visualization techniques for tasks and the use of color studied by visualization researchers. To reduce this gap, we survey visualization techniques applicable to the political scientists' research and report the visual analytics systems implemented for and evaluated by political scientists. At the end of this paper, we present an outline of future opportunities, including research topics and methodologies, for multidisciplinary research in political science and data analytics. Through this paper, we expect visualization researchers to get a better grasp of the political science domain, as well as broaden the possibility of future visualization approaches from a multidisciplinary perspective.

翻译：政治是围绕群体战略决策的一系列活动。政治学家研究国家、制度、政治人物和公民之间的战略互动，旨在理解这些决策与互动的成因及后果。某些决策可能缓解社会问题，而另一些则可能导致战争与冲突等灾难。数据可视化方法通过提供视觉语境，有望辅助政治学家开展研究。然而，政治研究者对数据可视化的认知尚不明确。本文考察了政治学家对可视化的看法及其在研究中应用数据可视化的方式。我们发现，政治学领域期刊中图表的使用呈增长趋势；但同时也发现政治学与可视化领域之间存在知识鸿沟，例如针对任务的有效可视化技术以及可视化研究者研究的色彩运用问题。为缩小这一差距，我们综述了适用于政治学家研究的可视化技术，并报告了为政治学家开发并经由其评估的可视分析系统。在本文末尾，我们提出了跨学科研究（涵盖政治学与数据分析）的未来机遇框架，包括研究主题与方法论。通过本文，我们期待可视化研究者能更深入理解政治学领域，并从跨学科视角拓展未来可视化方法的可能性。