

Show HN: Find members of Congress with similar voting records - saucow
http://www.congressbuddies.com/static/start.html

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bcoates
It's not symmetric! None of Henry Waxman's friends are friending him back, but
they're mostly in a clique with each other.

Lonely little CA-33, nobody understands you...

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protomyth
I'm not sure I get how it couldn't be symmetric? Is there an explanation or I
guess I don't get the definition of like.

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Retric
It's based on how similar someone is to someone else and some people have
closer matches than others. Fictitious Example where your listing top 5:

    
    
      Adam and Bob are a 80% match.
      Bob and Ted are a 90% match.
      Adam has 1 match better than 75%, but Bob has 5 matches better than 85%.  
    

Thus Adam links to Bob as his #1, but Bob does not link to Adam in his top 5.

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nealb
yep! for a great example, try out Rush Holt
([http://www.congressbuddies.com/?name=Rush%20Holt](http://www.congressbuddies.com/?name=Rush%20Holt))

None of his top-5 "buddies" have him anywhere in their own top-5 lists, which
is pretty unusual.

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jmilloy
Cool! I would love to be able to "vote" on a couple (dozen) bills and see who
I vote like.

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msane
This is fantastic. We need more sites like this. There are so many simple /
enlightening / controversial patterns that are just waiting to have some light
shed.

I've always thought we need a Congressperson "report card" that just
summarizes their voting history. I mean it's really the only thing that
matters about them.

Say there are some important arching issue "dimensions":

    
    
      - Collective bargaining
      - Obamacare
      - Education
      - Gun Control
      - Civil Rights
      - Same-Sex Marraige
      - Finance Industry Protection
      - Tort Reform
      - Raise Taxes on Rich
      - Raise Taxes on Middle Class
      - Lower Taxes on Rich
      - ...
    

Each dimension has it's own scale, _[strongly pro, pro, neutral, anti,
strongly anti]_

If each bill in Congress is tagged with relevant dimensions and placed
somewhere for each, then a Congressperson's record can be grouped on issues...
That's what I want. I think the only thing stopping anyone from doing this is
having this schema and maintaining the record of where each bill stands on all
the important issues. Figuring out how to collate that information is a
challenge, but it's definitely doable. In fact I think there are a lot of
trustworthy people and orgs willing to pitch in on that. Personally I wouldn't
even care about bills very far into the past if we were only capturing this
sort of schema for forward-looking data so it can be useful in the future.

I wonder what Taubere / Govtrack.us thinks about that sort of information and
how it can be organized. I'm sure he has ideas about it and could give
insight. Obviously any analysis beyond yae/nay records has an inherent
partisanship, if even slight, which I assume is part of the reason isn't on
Govtrack, but he has to have thought about how those kind of data fit to the
govtrack schema.

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octaveguin
Awesome idea: Let's make it pleasant and fun to understand how your congress
reps really vote!

Historically, these kinds of things don't get much interest because of the
lack of money that can be generated.

That's why crowd funding is exciting. I'd love to see this project as a
kickstarter.

A quick search doesn't show any sorts of projects like these already existing.
I wonder the reason.

Edit: while kickstarter doesn't have these projects (against the rules?),
indiegogo seems to.

For instance, an app that allows you to vote alongside your congressman.

[http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/capitol-bells-mobile-
congr...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/capitol-bells-mobile-congress-
real-democracy)

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Patrick_Devine
I took a Coursera course this summer on linear algebra which showed how to
compute this in one of the labs. It gives you a data file with each of the
votes of each of the senators in the 109th congress, and you use vectors and
dot product for determining most/least similar voting, mean dem/repub voting,
bitter rivals, and whether John McCain is really a maverick.

This was probably one of the most fun labs in any course I've ever taken. The
course materials are still online: [https://spark-
public.s3.amazonaws.com/matrix/politics_lab.zi...](https://spark-
public.s3.amazonaws.com/matrix/politics_lab.zip)

EDIT: Forgot to mention the course material is all in python. It's worth
checking out.

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VintageCool
I get a 500 Internal Server Error on Congressman Raúl R. Labrador (R-ID).

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cynwoody
Looks like it's a unicode problem, because, if I manually fix the URL to
eliminate the accented character, it works:

[http://www.congressbuddies.com/?name=Raul%20Labrador](http://www.congressbuddies.com/?name=Raul%20Labrador)

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epa
Cool idea, it would be nice if you could provide a little bit more information
about why the results are the way they are, or the percentage that they match,
maybe recent bills that they agreed on. As someone from Canada I have no idea
who these people are or why the relationship would be expected/unusual.

~~~
saucow
Thanks for the feedback. We plan to add a relative index to represent how
closely a congressperson votes with respect to one another. The main idea of
the map is to show geographic voting trends among congress members. In the
future we want to expand on the recent bills idea you gave and provide an in-
depth analysis of the different bills people voted on.

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ghayes
I'm additionally interested in who never vote together. Do some Congressmen
just never agree? Are there aggregate patterns here that change over time
[e.g. partisanship]? I believe there's a ton of interesting data in this area,
and this is a good starting point.

~~~
saucow
Thanks for the comment. I agree it's a good starting point but theres a lot
that can be done. One plan we wanted to implement was a filter to match
congressman based on different topics they voted on. Ex funding, etc. For
aggregate patterns we would have to look at prior voting records as well, but
it seems like a great idea. All our code is on github, and we'll slowly list
all the features we want to add on the wiki there.

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loceng
Implementing what I wrote in comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575348)
would give great insight too. I'm sure a lot is blatantly obvious, but
visualizing data is always helpful to reenforce it in someone's mind.

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morgante
Cool tool, but the search interface could use a little work. Some sort of
autocomplete would make it easier to find congressmen by name (I typed "Bernie
Sanders" when I had to put in "Bernard Sanders").

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gbhn
I'd like to see a principal components projection. Are there clusters? The
buddies are interesting, but it seems like there's more here! :-)

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james3
my feeble mind does not understand "See who votes like who in congress". there
is no explanation of the site other than those few words.

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daveidol
You guys finished it! Come a long way since the FB hackathon.

P.S. Love the title

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nealb
thanks! Yea it's gotten a lot better looking (and hopefully more stable) since
then.

