All of Congress, One Interest Group

The first one shows each member of congress (or a subset thereof) on a set of axes that show the dollar amount of contributions from a particular special interest group and the percentage of bills that each congressperson voted in alignment with the preferences of the interest group in question. Although it ignores the question of causation, when real data are plotted we hope to show that donations from an interest group and alignment with that interest group are positively correlated.

The size of the point is proportional to the number of bills a congressperson voted on that the interest group has a stance on. If the point is larger, the correlation (or lack thereof) may be considered stronger. Without actual data, it is hard to know whether the numbers of votes differ substantially enough to warrant different sized points, so this may change in the future. Color simply indicates party affiliation.

When a point is clicked, a balloon pops up that visualizes the party allegiance of the congressperson in question for the votes opined upon by the selected interest group.

One Member of Congress, All Interest Groups

The second scatter plot we developed retains the same axes, percent alignment with an interest group and dollars contributed from an interest group, but instead of showing all members of congress and one interest group, we show all interest groups for one member of congress. This allows the viewer to see which interests hold the most sway over their congressperson. The color of each point represents industry group, and size represents the number of bills that group is interested in.

The balloon for each interest group will show a grid of bills for that interest group and use color to indicate whether the selected member of congress voting with, or in opposition to, the interest group.

Process

To develop our prototype visualizations, we first made a list of all variables we may want to consider.

While looking at the list, we discussed what types of relationships we might want to show. The key relationship, we decided, is the relationship between between the size of political donations from special interest groups and the voting record of the recipients of the donations.

Watchdog.net conveniently provides a metric called Interest Group Alignment, which is the percentage of votes on which a particular congress member voted in agreement with an interest group, which we knew immediately we wanted to include in at least one of our prototypes.

With these specifications in mind, we each sketched 2–3 prototypes on our own, some of which are show below.

We reconvened to discuss each others’ sketches. Two of the prototype sketches, from two different people, were basic versions of the two plots shown above. The smaller visualizations in the bubbles also started out as individual sketches.

Once the final ideas for the prototypes were solidified on whiteboards, we turned to OmniGraffle to create the higher fidelity versions shown earlier.

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.

We have some low-fidelity prototypes in the works and will post them soon, so you can find out more about what we’re doing very shortly!

• Sunlight API : Legislator listings and districts, Lobbyist filings
• Follow the Money : Contributions to candidates, ballot measures
• Open Secrets: More contribution data by industry
• Also: expectmore.gov, usaspending.gov,  govtrack.us

Where our data will come from

One of our first decisions we made was that we would like to target a wider range of the population than just the small group of people who are interested in governement transparency issues. We would like our visualization to be understandable and interesting to a wide range of people. Thus, our personas reflect this goal.

Overall, after creating these personas, a few things about our users were made clear to us:

• Our users are lay users who do not possess detailed knowledge about data analysis or visualization; as such our visualization will need to be easily understandable and easy to manipulate
• Our users will likely use our visualization for short periods of time and only occasionally; thus we want the “big idea” to be clear at a glance, and methods for data exploration to be obvious.

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Marie Park
Age – 24
Occupation – graphic designer

Education – Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design, Rhode Island School of Design
Family – Single, no children

Goals
•    Learn about how the government operates
•    Learn how her taxes are being spent
•    Get involved with politics and make a difference

Marie is a recent college graduate, and has been working as a graphic designer since she graduated.  She spent a lot of the past year transitioning from her college lifestyle to an adult, fully employed lifestyle.  The biggest difficulty for her has been learning how to budget her money, especially setting aside enough for taxes.  When she received her first paycheck, she was shocked how much her income tax was.  She now understands why her parents complain so much about taxes.

Marie’s understanding about the “real world” has been coupled with a growing interest in politics.  She was entirely apathetic politics during college and didn’t even vote in 2004, but she started following the 2008 presidential campaign very closely.  She was thrilled to follow Barack Obama’s path to the White House, and feels that by voting for him, she helped make a difference in the history of America.

Now that Marie understands a little bit about politics and the way that government works, she decides that she wants to know more.  In particular, she really wants to know where her tax dollars are going, especially after hearing so much campaign rhetoric about bridges to nowhere.  If she has to pay so much to the government, she wants to make sure that it’s going to programs that are worthwhile.  She also wants to be able to get in touch with her Congressmen if she’s not happy with it, and make a difference.

Marie is firmly within the Internet generation, and is used to turning to Yahoo and Google for her news, even at work.  Outside of work, Marie enjoys knitting and painting.  She loves playing with her pet Daschshund, Miley.  She spends her weekends either with her boyfriend Michael, or visiting her brother Richard in the East Village.

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Alan Marsters
Age - 58
Occupation - Production Line Manager at General Motors

Education - Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Wayne State University
Family - wife, Sharon, 53; children, Heather, 29, and Monica, 27

Goals

• Plan for early retirement
• Get as much data as he can about the financial crisis
• Follow the auto industry bailout and learn how the money is being spent

Alan, a long-time employee of General Motors, has recently been forced into early retirement due to GM’s financial difficulties.  He had been planning to retire in the near future, but isn’t quite as ready for retirement as he had wanted to be.  He has become quite unsure about his own future and the future of his whole family.  If GM fails, his pension could dry up entirely.  He needs to know how the auto industry bailout is progressing, and perhaps most importantly, what restrictions are placed on how GM can spend the money.

Alan is also uncertain about the economic climate in general.  He wants to know more about what his taxes have been paying for, and the latest on what measures Congress has introduced to alleviate the economic crisis.  He is upset that he has paid so much in taxes over his lifetime, only to see it all go to banks that couldn’t keep their accounts straight.  He wants to make sure his voice is heard and that hardworking folk like him don’t slip through the cracks.

Alan is a dedicated family man, and is very close to his two daughters, even though they are now married and starting families of their own.  He volunteers to maintain his church and do minor repairs as needed, and is also an amateur boat-builder.  He has had a lot of exposure to computers, but still has trouble understanding them sometimes.

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David Goldstein
Age - 32
Occupation - Congressional Aide

Education - Bachelor of Science in Political Science, Columbia University
Family - wife, Naomi, 27; son, Ari, 1

Goals

• Handle communications (phones and e-mails) from constituents
• Keep his Congressman informed as to the current opinion of constituents
• Get data to help his Congressman make the right decisions

David is the main aide to Representative Donald Bishop of New York State.  David handles most of the day-to-day operations for Representative Bishop, including speaking directly to constituents and helping him set an agenda.  David’s day consists of doing a lot of research about the status of the district in upstate NY that Bishop represents.  David himself was born and grew up in this district, so it means a lot to him personally to have such an in-depth understanding of everything that’s going on locally.

David has only been working in his current position for a few years, and this is his first presidential transition.  He’s finding it difficult to keep up with all the changes that are going on in Washington, and he wishes there were an easier way to keep track of everything that’s happening in Congress.  In particular, Representative Bishop has made it a priority to help out with the economy.  David must learn about the government’s current budget and what programs are underperforming.

Although David did not grow up with the Internet and computers the same way his younger friends did, he has learned to use computers with a high degree of proficiency as part of his job.  He loves the feeling of always being in touch.  David loves ice skating and biking around the hills of his district.

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