  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.
