Voting Networks in the Danish Parliament [2004-2011]
From the post:
One of my Christmas presents was the book Beautiful Visualization. Chapter 8 by Andrew Odewahn is a very nice piece on visualizing the U.S Senate social graph. Odewahn basically builds an affinity network, where ties represent whether two senator have voted in the same manner during a given time period. The rules for creating the network are nicely broken down to the following steps:
- Nodes represent senators
- Nodes are colored according to party affiliation
- Nodes are connected with an edge if two senators voted together more than 65% of the time during a given timeframe
Based on the above rules Odewahn builds a series of interesting graphs, showing that there are a few consistently bipartisan senators on both sides in almost every session of the Congress.
But rather than just grousing about American politics (don’t get me started), the author produces voting network graphs of the Danish Parliament!
I leave it for you to decide if the results signal hope or despair. 😉