Agreement Groups in the United States Senate by Adrien Friggeri.
From the webpage:
The United States Senate is the upper house of the United States legislature and contrary to the House of Representative which seats are up for election every two years, Senators serve terms of six years each. Those terms are however staggered so that approximately one-third of the Senate is renewed every two years. This means that each pair of consecutive sessions of the Senate share a large number of common Senators.
Being interested in social networks and communities, it was only natural to look at how those Senators were linked one to another and the natural community structure which emerged from their interactions. Thanks to GovTrack.us, we were able to construct for each session of the Senate an agreement graph between Senators.
We then clustered the Senators into overlapping groups of agreement using a new community detection algorithm called C3. This page presents supplemental material to our submission to ESA 2012. We provide a visualization of those groups for the last eight Congresses and discuss various aspects of the results.
From Jack Park, notice of an interesting visualization of the United States Senate.
Makes me wonder what a mapping of donor or special interest group would look like against this visualization?
Certainly computing resources have developed to the point that visualization, unless the data sets are quite large, need not be static.
That is to say that the age of visual and interactive exploration, not static display, of data sets may be upon us.
I know there has been some work along those lines in bioinformatics but am unaware of examples political science. That may simply be due to inattention on my part. Suggestions?