I was interested to see if there was a visual way to get a feel for how members of congress arrayed across the political spectrum.
To do this, I thought it would be useful to mash up ratings of sitting US House and Senate members, by various interest groups. Looking for data, I found a site called votesmart.org, a tremendous resource– they keep track of voting records, have a searchable position papers database, and (most relevant to what I was looking for) ratings data from dozens of different advocacy and interest organizations. I loaded the data into Visual i|o and found patterns you would expect, but also some interesting insights and a few surprises. (If you’d like to see the application yourself, it’s here. To see it, you’ll need a visual i|o login, which you can request at beta.visual-io.com by clicking the top “Try it” button.)
Looking at the histogram filters can give you a good idea of how polarized an organization’s ratings are. Look at the distribution of ratings for the League of Conservation Voters (an environmental advocacy organization), for example:
Distribution of lawmaker ratings by League of Conservation Voters, 2007-08
The histogram is shaped like a bowl– with lots of lawmakers rated at the top and bottom of the range, not too many in the middle.
Contrast the distribution of ratings from the US Chamber of Commerce:
Distribution of lawmaker ratings by the US Chamber of Commerce, 2008
I was interested to see how different organizations’ ratings would correlate. Does the American Conservative Union align with the Christian Coalition in their ratings? How inversely correlated are the ratings of, say, the NRA and the League of Conservation Voters? Here are lawmakers (Senate + House members) plotted on American Conservative Union vs. Christian Coalition ratings:
Lots of red dots (Republicans) in upper right– rated highly by both ACU and the CC. Not surprising. Mostly blue dots (Dems) in the bottom left– low on both organizations’ scales. Also not too surprising. But the alignment between the two organizations is not as strong as one might have thought. Some dots in the bottom right represent a few lawmakers– mostly Democrats– that get high ratings from the Christian coalition (80+) but low ratings from the Conservative Union. A few Republicans, like Rep. Michael Castle of Delaware, look more like Democrats– a red dot in a sea of blue:
One thing that gets hidden in a view like this is how many dots are stacking up directly on top of each other. You can see this to some degree in the darkness of the dots, since they are somewhat transparent. It’s hard to know just from looking at the chart, though, that 27 people have perfect 100 ratings from both the ACU and the Christian Coalition. Conversely, 39 people get zeros from both organizations. This blind spot can be avoided in a view that sorts items into columns and rows so that no items overlap:
Lawmakers are plotted by American Conservative Union ratings on the vertical axis, and grouped into columns by office– House or Senate. Judging by this, the House appears more divided than the Senate. Why do I think that? A lot more dots at both the top of the chart (high ACU ratings) and the bottom (low ACU ratings). In the Senate there are fewer 0’s and 100’s, relatively-speaking. Again, a few red dots seem out of place:
Olympia Snowe and her fellow Senator from Maine, Susan Collins, both seem more like Democrats than Republicans in the eyes of the Conservative Union.
The NRA, unlike most organizations, gives letter grades rather than numbers. I mentioned before that I wondered how differently the NRA and the League of Conservation Voters viewed lawmakers. I plotted League of Conservation Voters on the vertical axis:
…then changed to color by each lawmaker’s NRA rating (dark green highest, dark red lowest):
Among all the red dots–congresspeople getting F’s from the NRA– atop the Conservation Voters chart are two green dots with perfect 100 scores from the LCV and bright green A/A-minuses from the NRA:
If you don’t think it’s possible to please both the environmentalists and the NRA, just ask Albert Chandler and Paul Hodes. They figured out how.
