The Senate Social Network

By Chris Wilson

April 28, 2009

No one disputes that partisanship is alive and well in Congress, but precisely measuring where individual members stand can be tricky. Here, we took the approach of arranging all 100 senators in a social network. Using data from Senate.gov, we calculated which senators had voted alike with each other senator at least 65 percent of the time. If they passed this threshold, they were connected in the network.

We then plugged the data into Flare, an Actionscript library with a variety of cool visualization tools, including a network layout. As you can see with the page loads, the network begins chaotically and gradually resolves as the program finds the optimal arrangement in real time.

While the nodes are colored according to the senator's party for visual effect, the network itself has no knowledge of partisanship. The divide is a natural consequence of a highly partisan legislature.