Wp Tables Figures

---
name: wp-tables-figures
description: Use when building tables and figures for a World Politics manuscript so exhibits are self-contained, accessible, and placed correctly relative to the word limit. At World Politics tables, figures, and appendixes are excluded from the 12,500-word count, but online supplementary material is capped at fifteen pages, so exhibits must still earn their place. Designs exhibits; it does not run the analysis.
---

# Tables & Figures (wp-tables-figures)

Exhibits are where an expert reviewer checks whether a cross-case result is real. At World Politics
**tables, figures, and appendixes are excluded from the 12,500-word count** — but **online
supplementary material cannot exceed fifteen pages**, so you cannot dump everything into an appendix.
Every exhibit must pull its weight and reproduce from the deposited Dataverse package.

## When to trigger

- Designing the main results table/figure or a key descriptive/comparative exhibit
- Deciding what belongs in the article vs. the (≤ 15-page) online supplement
- A reviewer found an exhibit unclear, mislabeled, or non-self-contained
- Visualizing cross-national variation, durations, or comparative-historical sequence

## Principles

1. **Self-contained.** A reader should understand each exhibit from its title, axis/column labels, and
   note alone. State units, the cases/sample, N, time span, data source (e.g., V-Dem, COW), and what
   the estimate is.
2. **Figures over dense tables for effects.** Coefficient/forest plots, marginal-effects and
   predicted-probability plots, event-study and RD plots, and survival curves communicate magnitude
   and uncertainty better than a wall of coefficients. Show intervals.
3. **Accessible.** Colorblind-safe palettes; legible in grayscale; no chartjunk, no 3D. Reviewers and
   readers must parse it quickly.
4. **Main text vs. online supplement.** Keep the few exhibits that carry the argument in the article;
   move balance tables, full specifications, and robustness grids to the **online supplement (≤ 15
   pages)** — used judiciously for material central to the argument, not as an overflow dump.
5. **Reproducible.** Each exhibit is generated by the master script; numbers match the deposited
   World Politics Dataverse package exactly.

## Comparative + IR exhibits
- Maps for cross-national/spatial variation; network diagrams for alliances, trade, or diffusion.
- Survival/hazard plots for regime duration or conflict onset; event-study plots for shocks.
- For comparative-historical work: timelines, causal-process diagrams, and **evidence tables** linking
  each claim to its source (documents, interviews) — these double as qualitative transparency.
- QCA truth tables / set-relation plots where the design is set-theoretic.

## Anti-patterns

- Tables that require the prose to be intelligible (not self-contained)
- Reporting significance stars with no effect size or interval
- Treating the ≤ 15-page supplement as an unlimited dumping ground (it is capped)
- Color-only encoding that fails in grayscale or for colorblind readers
- Exhibit numbers/values that don't match the deposited code output

## Output format

```
【Main exhibit】what it shows + why a figure/table
【Self-contained?】title + labels + note + N/units/cases/source present? [Y/N]
【Accessible?】grayscale-legible + colorblind-safe? [Y/N]
【Article vs supplement】split decided; supplement ≤ 15 pages respected? [Y/N]
【Reproducible?】generated by master script, matches Dataverse package? [Y/N]
【Next】wp-writing-style
```

## Supplementary resources

- [`../../resources/external_tools.md`](../../resources/external_tools.md) — plotting/mapping/network/survival packages and QCA tools
- [`../../resources/official-source-map.md`](../../resources/official-source-map.md) — word-count exclusions and the 15-page supplement cap