Change We Can Visualize

To narrow down our focus for our lo-fi prototype, we spent quite a bit of time researching others’ political visualizations. We used them to brainstorm how they could be improved, and discussed where there were opportunities for us to build off of what has already been done.

Here are our favorites:

Nate Silver’s “Mapping the New Congress”, fivethirtyeight.com

Nate Silver, a statistics guru best known for his PECOTA baseball performance prediction method and for his analysis and predictions of the presidental election polls, has come up with several visualizations with the goal of showing how Congress votes on a bill. The strength of this visualization is primarily in how it shows the party affiliation and geographic distribution of a vote. Silver is representing several things in this visualization, each with its own tradeoffs:

• Senator’s state. Silver represents this using a distorted map, which is perhaps less legible than a standard geographical map, but has the benefit of making each senator appear of equal size. Many commentors write that they prefer a standard map but perhaps are not considering the tradeoffs; I prefer the distorted map beacuse it does not give an advantage to the larger Western states at the expense of the smaller Eastern ones. Though, showing a light outline of the states behind the distorted map could help in readability.
• Republican or Democrat. This is shown using the standard red and blue, though choosing a color to represent Independents is an additional factor.
• Junior or Senior senator for that state. Silver shows this spatially, by placing the senior senator either above or to the left of the junior senator. However, I believe there are clearer ways of doing this, such as capitalizing or bolding the state name for the senior senator (i.e. WV versus wv)
• Aye or Nay for the vote. Silver shows this by crossing out the squares for no votes, though I believe this causes a bit too much distraction in the visualization. Many commentors felt the same, and offered suggestions such as making the color bright red or blue for a yes vote, and transparent red or blue for a no vote.

Overall, Silver’s visualization is interesting, though I still don’t know if it is that great at expressing an idea quickly to the user. It might be better to have separate visualizations for geographic voting vs. party affiliation voting, for example.

Congressional Quarterlies’ Vote Studies of the 110th Congress, http://innovation.cq.com/multimedia/cqvotestudies08

Another interesting visualization is Congressional Quarterly’s interactive info viz of the votes from Congress last year. Using what appears to be Flex, they allow you to select either the Senate or the House (or an individual senator), and to show Party Unity, Presidential Support, or both. As seen from a writeup about this visualization on OpenCongress.org it is easy to learn many interesting facts from this simple visualization, which I believe is what makes it successful. For example:

• Senators from Maine are not loyal. Both of them, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, voted with their party, the Republicans, less than half of the time. They are the only two members of the Senate with party-unity scores under 50 percent.

• Rep. Nick Lampson (D-TX), who lost his re-election bid in November, is a major outlier among House Democrats. He was by far the least loyal Democrat,voting least often with his party and most often with Bush.

• Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) voted with President Bush less often than at least 19 House Democrats.

• Evan Bayh (D-IN) has the lowest party-untiy rating of any Democrat in the Senate – 65 percent.

• Joe Lieberman (I-CT) votes with Bush as often as the least loyal Senate Democrat, Mary Landrieu (D-LA). But he votes with Democrats more often than at least six Democratic Senators.