American Politics, Redux, Redux
I have a dataset and I'm not afraid to use it. Over and over. Ad nauseam.
Two more quick riffs on the Legislative timelines (part one, part two). I decided to ignore the third parties and independents (because I'm an American, dammit - that's what we do!) and take a closer look at how the two dominant parties (Democratic and Republican) relate. I flipped the Democrats below the timeline so as to have a field of red and a field of blue. I also added decade markers to the timeline.
Senate
House
Both visualizations show initial Republican activity followed by a period of less activity (more pronounced in the Senate). Then, around 1860, the Republican party comes back to stay.
- 1860 - "the Party of Abraham Lincoln" indeed
- I'm guessing that the Republican party of the early 1800s has little in common with the latter incarnation. But I'm no Political Science / History major.
(there's a story here, leading all the way to Liz Claiborne - yes, THAT Liz Claiborne)
The two parties firmly establish themselves as the status quo in the 1880s and America has had them ever since. The 1930s (the Great Depression) shows a significant number of Democrats (in the Senate) launching their arcs but then in the 1940s (post WWII), the Republicans seem to answer.
The visualizations do not show the number of Legislators that "share an arc" - it is not possible to look at an arc and determine if it represents more than one Legislator. Further riffs on the viz may do this.
Posted at 09:15AM Feb 24, 2010 by schnee in General |
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]
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]
Election Night Dumb*sses, Redux
OK, Maybe I was a bit early in my rant. Now, 10 minutes after my last post, at 10PM CST, they are saying that Obama is the winner. Score one for mathematics.
Posted at 10:03PM Nov 04, 2008 by schnee in General |
Election Night Dumb*sses
I'm live-blogging from Schneeworld Corporate HQ. We have the nerve center tuned into national election coverage. As it stands, there are 207 Electoral Votes for Obama and 135 for McCain.
Montana, Indiana, Virgina, North Carolina and Florida are all "too close to call". Given that California is going to go for Obama (just like Texas went for Texas), that will put Obama at 207 + 55 = 262. Obama needs 8 EVs to clinch it. Probabilititically, this thing is OVER. This isn't a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment. This is pure probability. With the exception of Montana, any one of the "too close to calls" would put Obama over the top. And no one on the boob-tube has even mentioned this. Heck, Colorado has 9 EVs and is currently reporting 25% with a 56% to 42% Obama advantage.
I get probability. I understand distributions and the future isn't set in stone. But this thing is over and no one is talking about it. Even as a probability.
Dumb*sses.
Posted at 09:43PM Nov 04, 2008 by schnee in General |
Dumb*sses
I don't get too involved in politics. I have some ideas that may someday manifest (no, I'm not considering a run for office) but I usually vote in everything I can leave it at that.
No more. Of my three federal representatives, two voted for the Financial Bailout bill. Or, as the term I prefer: The Splurge. Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn both voted 'yea' for this bill; Representative Lloyd Doggett voted 'nea'.
I'm going to vote just the opposite for these politician's re-elections: "Yea" for Doggett, "nay" for both Hutchinson and Cornyn. While it happens to break this way, this has nothing to do with my political party preference. It has to do with a rash decision to vote for something, anything, to give the appearance of doing something.
Yes, America is facing a crisis. This crisis will mostly affect the people on the fringes: the homeless, the working poor. It is a big deal. I don't claim to understand it all, but do I understand that "perfect" is the enemy of "good", so I'm not advocating for a "perfect" solution. But the Splurge isn't even "good". It was flat-out evil when it was a three-page proposal from the Administration and time (and the addition of 448 pages) hasn't helped much. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my wife and mentioned that if people are concerned with money freezing up (a credit crunch) then maybe a tax-break could help with the money supply. As long as the break is paid for, perhaps out of the proposed $700 billion. And I'm not a knee-jerk tax-cutter.
Fast foward to this week and we got the tax-break. But IT IS UNPAID FOR. It did not come out of the $700 billion, which means it comes out of my children's future. Just like the $700 billion. Unconscionable. If the tax-break is an efficient means to help with the crisis, then pay for it. If it is not efficient, then DON'T DO IT. And, if the "tax-break" wasn't enough, they stuffed it with pork, to make the bill more palatable. The bill doesn't not effectively address oversight, foreclosure, executive compensation, &c. It does allow for the people who caused the problem (the FEDs) to give their buddies (the CEOs) a bunch my MY MONEY. Watch this, read this and this, and share in my outrage.
Who f*cking elected these jerks? Oh, that's right. WE DID. We're obviously the bigger idiots.
I would have liked to have a bit more time put into this bailout bill. Like ensuring that we, the taxpayers, don't get stuck with likely-to-remain worthless securities. Think about it, who knows more about the actual worth of the securities? The investment banks or the Federal Gov't? The banks are going to "sell" us the absolute worst of the securities. And Gov't talks about how this bill makes all of us "investors". If my financial investor tried to sell me this, I'd fire him. And I'm going to fire my representatives.
Fortunately for Hutchison, she has stated that she will not run for re-election (she's going to run for governor) so my lack of voting for her won't mean much. Cornyn, you lost my vote. Period. Hutchinson, don't expect my support for your future campaigns.
Posted at 11:31AM Oct 04, 2008 by schnee in General |
