It's not symmetric! None of Henry Waxman's friends are friending him back, but they're mostly in a clique with each other.<p>Lonely little CA-33, nobody understands you...
This is fantastic. We need more sites like this. There are so many simple / enlightening / controversial patterns that are just waiting to have some light shed.<p>I've always thought we need a Congressperson "report card" that just summarizes their voting history. I mean it's really the only thing that matters about them.<p>Say there are some important arching issue "dimensions":<p><pre><code> - Collective bargaining
- Obamacare
- Education
- Gun Control
- Civil Rights
- Same-Sex Marraige
- Finance Industry Protection
- Tort Reform
- Raise Taxes on Rich
- Raise Taxes on Middle Class
- Lower Taxes on Rich
- ...
</code></pre>
Each dimension has it's own scale, <i>[strongly pro, pro, neutral, anti, strongly anti]</i><p>If each bill in Congress is tagged with relevant dimensions and placed somewhere for each, then a Congressperson's record can be grouped on issues... That's what I want. I think the only thing stopping anyone from doing this is having this schema and maintaining the record of where each bill stands on all the important issues. Figuring out how to collate that information is a challenge, but it's definitely doable. In fact I think there are a lot of trustworthy people and orgs willing to pitch in on that. Personally I wouldn't even care about bills very far into the past if we were only capturing this sort of schema for forward-looking data so it can be useful in the future.<p>I wonder what Taubere / Govtrack.us thinks about that sort of information and how it can be organized. I'm sure he has ideas about it and could give insight. Obviously any analysis beyond yae/nay records has an inherent partisanship, if even slight, which I assume is part of the reason isn't on Govtrack, but he has to have thought about how those kind of data fit to the govtrack schema.
I took a Coursera course this summer on linear algebra which showed how to compute this in one of the labs. It gives you a data file with each of the votes of each of the senators in the 109th congress, and you use vectors and dot product for determining most/least similar voting, mean dem/repub voting, bitter rivals, and whether John McCain is really a maverick.<p>This was probably one of the most fun labs in any course I've ever taken. The course materials are still online: <a href="https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/matrix/politics_lab.zip" rel="nofollow">https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/matrix/politics_lab.zi...</a><p>EDIT: Forgot to mention the course material is all in python. It's worth checking out.
Cool idea, it would be nice if you could provide a little bit more information about why the results are the way they are, or the percentage that they match, maybe recent bills that they agreed on. As someone from Canada I have no idea who these people are or why the relationship would be expected/unusual.
I'm additionally interested in who never vote together. Do some Congressmen just never agree? Are there aggregate patterns here that change over time [e.g. partisanship]? I believe there's a ton of interesting data in this area, and this is a good starting point.
Cool tool, but the search interface could use a little work. Some sort of autocomplete would make it easier to find congressmen by name (I typed "Bernie Sanders" when I had to put in "Bernard Sanders").