Monday Feb 22, 2010
American Politics, Redux
Visualizing the length of time that US Senators spend in office exposed some not-altogether unexpected details: Senators are serving longer. But what about the men and women who serve in the US House of Representatives?
The viz shows pretty much the same obvious conclusion: more Representatives hold office for longer as the United States gets older. Some notes about this data:
- Approximately 2700 Legislators are represented, which I don't believe is the complete list, but the complete list may not exist. That's too bad.
- The data I found has a minimum resolution to the year, e.g. '(1865-1867)'. Inter-session appointments are thereby masked, as are the specific dates of service. To simplify the data a bit, I assumed that Representatives served from Jan 1 on the first year to Dec 31 on the last year and trusted the Law of Large Numbers to smooth over any lies that may tell.
The simplification in the 2nd note reveals a couple of nice things:
- The striations are more easily seen. 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-term Reps are identifiable
- Party Revolutions stand out
Posted at 03:11PM Feb 22, 2010 by schnee in General | Comments[1]
This is cool. Thx for sharing.
Posted by Dtexidor on February 22, 2010 at 08:10 PM CST #