Today’s Congress seems incapable of accomplishing much of anything, and a new visualization gives a hint as to why: utter lack of bipartisanship.
The data viz designer Mike Cisneros has mapped out the political positions of every member of Congress ever, starting with the first Congress in 1789 up until the 115th Congress that’s currently filling the news cycle with so much anguish. The central visualization is a giant scatterplot, where positions are mapped based on how conservative or liberal each Congress member is economically and socially. The data, analyzed by UCLA’s Department of Political Science and Social Science Computing, measures every historical Congress member’s political beliefs based on their voting record, with the two central factors being economic forces and social issues. The average for today’s Congress is more economically conservative and–surprisingly–slightly socially liberal.
The viz points to how the parties have become more entrenched in their belief systems, with the breath of the spectrum along which Congress members’ positions lie decreasing over time on both sides of the aisle. It’s “almost like a cell dividing into two,” Cisneros writes. “Is it any wonder that there is a historically small amount of bipartisan governance?”