Andrew Odewahn on Visualizing The Senate's Social Graph

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The U.S. Senate's legislation is the result of ever-shifting alliances. Using data from Govtrack you can get every Senator since John Adams. You also get their roll call votes. By summing the amount of times Senators voted together and dividing it by the number of sessions in a given year, Andrew Odewahn was able to calculate Senatorial affinities. He then plugged the affinities into GraphViz to visualize each year's social network.

These graphs reveal a lot about the state of bipartisanship at the time. For example in 1991 there was some cross-party voting. However, by the time 1994 rolled around with the "Republican Revolution" there was almost no cross-party voting. During the Clinton impeachment, the Democrats show a distinct rift, while the Republicans are solid (with the notable exceptions of future party-switchers Jeffords and Specter). This excellent talk reveals some of the secrets hidden in public data.

Andrew Odewahn works for O'Reilly in Cambridge. You can read more about his Senate graph research on our Broadcast blog. This talk was filmed at Ignite Boston. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.