Create "The Economist" Style Plots in R?

Question

This question has two parts, one more general and the other a specific case:

1. Is there a theme or template in R for producing plots that have similar appearance to the charts published in "The Economist" magazine? Examples in other contexts include: Create "The Economist" style graphs from python for python and set scheme economist for Stata.

2. Specifically, what would be the syntax (e.g., in ggplot2) to produce a groups bar plot that would look like the example below, colored shaped markers with bold lines spanning the range between them (left panel), or rectangular confidence intervals (right panel)?

Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/01/covid-19-may-be-far-more-prevalent-than-previously-thought

Golightly

Answer 1

Yes you have it in ggthemes (extension of ggplot2) with theme_economist and theme_economist_white.

For the bar plot, you will need to play with geom_bar and coord_flip (here)

Examples from ggthemes doc (here)

library("ggplot2")
library("ggthemes")

p <- ggplot(mtcars) +
     geom_point(aes(x = wt, y = mpg, colour = factor(gear))) +
     facet_wrap(~am) +
     # Economist puts x-axis labels on the right-hand side
     scale_y_continuous(position = "right")

## Standard
p + theme_economist() +
  scale_colour_economist()

## White
p + theme_economist_white() +
  scale_colour_economist()

How to reproduce the plot given in example

Since I cannot install SciencesPo package in my computer, I propose you a ggplot + ggthemes approach.

A good starting point might be the following approach. I use as an example the diamond dataset.

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggthemes)

df <- diamonds %>%
  group_by(cut) %>%
  summarise(mean = mean(price), sigma = sd(price),
            n = n())
df <- df %>%
  mutate(int_minus = mean - 1.96*sigma/sqrt(n),
         int_plus = mean + 1.96*sigma/sqrt(n))

And then the plot

ggplot(df) +
  geom_segment(aes(x = int_minus, xend = int_plus, y = factor(cut), yend = factor(cut)), size = 2L, alpha = 0.4) +
  geom_point(aes(x = mean, y = factor(cut)), shape = 15, color = "blue", size = 4L) +
  theme_economist_white()

Guzman

that fully resolves 1. For 2., I think geom_segment is more appropriate than bar, just figuring it out. – Golightly

even better: geom_dumbbell from the SciencesPo package, otherwise one needs to combine segments and points. – Golightly

I made an edit to show something that can be used as a basis for the plot. The confidence intervals are manually computed in my case, don't know how the economist proceeds in the COVID case – Guzman