31–40 of 50 posts
Either way, it's surprisingly easy to get access to this data, and fun to analyze. I have the scraping code on github (described in my blog) for anyone who is interested.
There's probably some cool insights in here, but I'll need some help understanding it. For instance, what does an edge in the graph represent? What can I tell from the boldness of the line? @DavidChoinard can you give us a key?
The thickness of edges represents the number of times the pair of senators voted the same in the Senate (only edges above a threshold are shown). The two tightly coiled clusters shows just how weak the relationships are between the two parties. The closer the nodes are to the center, the more bipartisan those Senators are. In the current Congress, Sens. Murkowski and Collins really stand out as by far the most bipart…
For those interested, I believe the underlying data is from DW-NOMINATE ( http://voteview.com/dwnomin.htm ).
The data is actually from GovTrack.us, which I suspect is also where DW-NOMINATE gets it. My script for querying GovTrack is on Github: https://github.com/DavidChouinard/congressviz
Can someone make a glass app that covers a politicians face with the logos of their largest interests? That would make politics bearable for me.
Their suits could have logos on them, sort of like boxers' robes.
Awesome work!
http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/x1.pdf http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentHouse/x2.pdf
Nice work David. For anyone interested in this type of analysis, Harvard has a new Data Science course this semester that had this node relationship analysis as a HW using the same data sources. You can check out the course site at: cs109.org
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 If the author could get data from 1980-2013, and make it into a 60 second animation, it would be really interesting to see.
I've definitely considered that, but it's computationally difficult to make it in the browser. This animated gif is as close as it comes: http://i.minus.com/ibi7p66VbETpnU.gif
There's probably some cool insights in here, but I'll need some help understanding it. For instance, what does an edge in the graph represent? What can I tell from the boldness of the line? @DavidChoinard can you give us a key?
The thickness of edges represents the number of times the pair of senators voted the same in the Senate (only edges above a threshold are shown). The two tightly coiled clusters shows just how weak the relationships are between the two parties. The closer the nodes are to the center, the more bipartisan those Senators are. In the current Congress, Sens. Murkowski and Collins really stand out as by far the most bipart…
This algoritm pragmatically computes how far left/right a senater's polical views are by placing them in the corresponding place on the page
1) How are abstentions counted? Does a senator that abstains more get pushed out towards the edge for having less connections in general?
2) If a party member votes 100% along the party line, then they will be towards the center of the blob. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting WITH bipartisan consensus then that person is gets put in the center. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting AGAINST bipartisan consensus then they would be on the edge far from the center.