Show HN: Voting Relationships in the US Senate

There&#x27;s probably some cool insights in here, but I&#x27;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?<p>@DavidChoinard can you give us a key?

1) How are abstentions counted? Does a senator that abstains more get pushed out towards the edge for having less connections in general?<p>2) Is this correct: 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 (e.g. voting for hugely consensus PATRIOT act) then that person is gets put in the center. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting AGAINST bipartisan consensus (e.g. voting against hugely consensus PATRIOT act) then they would be on the edge far from the center.

Interesting analysis, David. I actually got strikingly similar results looking at voting matrices and using SVD to turn them into two dimensions: <a href="http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/how-divided-is-the-senate/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vikparuchuri.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-divided-is-the-senate&#x2F;</a> and <a href="http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/the-danger-and-power-of-visualizations/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vikparuchuri.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-danger-and-power-of-visuali...</a> . I assume you did something similar.<p>Either way, it&#x27;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.

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

Ok, so while I wish I had the time to create a cool web app to analyze political data, I def think it would required not to overload the user&#x27;s CPU. I launched the site and immediately my MAC slowed down to crawl. I checked top and it at at 100%+<p>I do not recommend you clicking on any of the dots.

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.

If you like this, you may also be interested in Simon Jackman&#x27;s ideal-point estimates for both the Senate and House:<p><a href="http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/x1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackman.stanford.edu&#x2F;ideal&#x2F;currentSenate&#x2F;x1.pdf</a> <a href="http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentHouse/x2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackman.stanford.edu&#x2F;ideal&#x2F;currentHouse&#x2F;x2.pdf</a>

Really cool! In addition to the comments others are making, I would recommend making the intensity of the base blue and red colors match. The democrats look more intense than the republicans just because of the color choice when given how interlocked they are, I assume the average blues are probably about the same as the average red. (Also a legend would help.)<p>Awesome work!

I think it&#x27;s fascinating watching how the parties have split up more over the years.

This would be even cooler if it was somehow combined with the data from opensecrets.

If you&#x27;re into that kind of things, here is a similar project I did last year: <a href="http://friggeri.net/research/senate/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;friggeri.net&#x2F;research&#x2F;senate&#x2F;</a>

For those interested, I believe the underlying data is from DW-NOMINATE (<a href="http://voteview.com/dwnomin.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;voteview.com&#x2F;dwnomin.htm</a>).

It would be helpful to see an animation to clarify this, but it&#x27;s interesting to quantify how increasingly polarized this has become, starting in the early &#x27;90s.

This algoritm pragmatically computes how far left&#x2F;right a senater&#x27;s polical views are by placing them in the corresponding place on the page

Is data for pre-90s years available? I am really curious to see the 60-70-80s progression.

A legend&#x2F;key would be nice.

This is absolutely fascinating.

what&#x27;s the story on Miller (D-GA) 2003-2004?