SchneeWorld All masculine pronouns used in this blog include the feminine

The Decline of American Politics

The Founding Fathers created the United States with the concept of citizen servants in mind. Men (originally, and land-owners at that) would represent constituents for a time and then return to their lives.

After being elected to two terms of the Presidency, George Washington decided to not run again, not wanting to create a democratic monarchy. Soon, the  government codified Presidential Term Limits in the US Constitution. Those term limits never trickled down to the Senate or the House.

This figure (pops out to a much larger version) shows the durations of all the men and women who, as of Feb 20, 2010, have ever served as a Senator of the United States. The x-axis begins on (anyone? anyone?) March 4, 1789 with 21 Senators launching their arcs. The x-axis scales appropriately so the lengths of the arcs are proportional to the actual duration of the Senators' length in office. The height is related to the length of the arc.

The right end of the image shows several arcs cut off in the middle. As I cannot predict the future, I decided that the durations of sitting Senators should be twice the time-served. Unrealistic, since that predicts that Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) will serve for over 100 years. And, since he is over ninety, serving an additional 50+ years puts him at over 140 years old when he retires. While I wish him a long and healthy life, this seems unreasonable. The flip-side is likely true as well - I suspect Scott Brown will serve a bit longer than 34 days.

This image assumes that currently sitting Senators will not serve past the current Legislative Session (ends on Jan 3, 2011). Unrealistic as well, but at least not leading to Methuselaian Senators.

One can see that over time, the heights of the arc have increased as Senators serve more and more terms. The next image shows a crop of the larger image which reveals vertical plateaus, corresponding to one-, two-, three-, and four-term Senators.

Finally, I wanted to see if Party Affiliation shows anything interesting.

Red is Republican. Blue is Democrat. Black is Other (while historically relevant, coloring the "American (Know-Nothing)" and the "Farmer Alliance" parties doesn't seem useful) . We've polarized into a two-party system (no duh) over time, and the visualization shows a Democratic bias to serving longer term at the moment, but I haven't performed any analysis to draw any definite conclusions. Similar breakdowns are possible: state or region (North, South, South West, etc) come to mind, but weren't created.

The electoral cycle becomes evident on the bottom of the time line - the arcs tend to begin and end on concentrated points which are probably 2 years apart (1/3 of the Senate is elected every two years). Random data sets may not show this periodicity: employment duration at a company, call-center call times, and engineering compile times would all likely reveal different patterns. However, some trends may emerge if, for example, companies instituted retention policies or made a concerted effort to reduce compile times.

I extracted the base data from the PDF file located on the US Senate Art & History site. The author of this data did not make it easy to extract, but fortunately, I know a thing or two about programming. A few hours of Java hacking later and I created a little application that parses the textual data and outputs drawing commands used by ImageMagick to create the actual image.

Information is Beautiful inspired the visualization. I find this site well-worth the time to read.

The images are hosted on Flickr and are licensed under the Creative Commons "Attribution" license. Various sizes of the images are available at Flickr.

Posted at 05:24PM Feb 20, 2010 by schnee in General  |  Comments[1]