

Clustering US Senators with k-means - vikp
http://blog.dataquest.io/blog/plotting-senators/

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phkahler
I was wondering how hard it is to get actual vote data. I want a tool that
lets me vote on issues I care about and compare my own preference against
actual representatives to see how well I'm actually represented on issues that
have actually come before them.

There was a tool out prior to the last election that tried to do this, but it
compared your preference on divisive issues (like abortion or immigration) to
parties - not actual vote records and individual congress critters.

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pjungwir
I co-founded a startup to do that for 2012, called ElectNext. It was kind of
like OkCupid: We let you rate your issues, and we asked you questions, then we
showed your similarity score to your candidates for President/Senate/House. We
were even starting to support state-level offices too. It never got much
attention, and we never figured out the revenue model. After a year I left,
and my partner took it in a different direction.

The thing I was most proud of wasn't the matching part, but the part to
determine candidate positions. If you just ask them, most will not answer.
Using past votes is a tough approach, since you need to decide what each bill
"means", and bills have lots of stuff attached. More importantly, that only
tells you about incumbents, not challengers. In fact almost any signal works
better for incumbents. Our most fruitful source of information was FEC donor
data, because every serious candidate had information there. Also "follow the
money". :-)

~~~
vikp
Using the donor data is a really smart idea. How did you get from donor data
to candidate positions? Did you assign manual positions to different kinds of
donors and then aggregate them by candidate? I'd love to know more about how
you got and analyzed the data.

I worked on this at YC Hacks last year --
[http://www.hipvote.us/](http://www.hipvote.us/) . The idea was to get a push
notification when a bill came up for vote, read a summary, and then vote on it
yourself. After deciding, you got to see how your congresspeople voted, and
you could check your similarity to them over time. We also ran into the
"meaning" problem with bills, and the incumbent problem.

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mayneack
Anyone interested in this sort of thing should check out voteview.

[http://voteview.org/](http://voteview.org/)

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caf
If you're interested in this you might also be interested in Simon Jackman's
ideal point estimates for the Senate and House:

[http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/d3/long.html](http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/d3/long.html)
[http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentHouse/d3/long.html](http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentHouse/d3/long.html)

His blog (which among other things has links to the roll call data in RData
form):

[http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/](http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/)

