U.S. Senate Voting Patterns 1991-today

Here's an article called A Facebook-style visualization of the Senate: http://www.slate.com/id/2217204/
It presented a graph visualization technique to reveal voting patterns by connecting senators if they vote together over 65% of the time. The picture is really worth 1,000 words! You can immediately see that Specter (as well as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine) are more aligned with the Democrats than other Republicans.

Here's an example of what social graphs have looked like in the past:

Using data from Govtrack, one of the many great sites devoted to increasing transparency in government (a theme being explored at the Government 2.0 Summit in September), Andrew Odewahn was able to pull this information fairly quickly. The results are shown in the following Slideshare document:

Presentation: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/us-senato-social-graph-1991--.html
This is an interesting presentation that visualizes U.S. Senate voting patterns. It would be nice to get the data set, though.

Here is another interesting article that explains the Senate's voting patterns as described by a blogger:
http://analyticalvisions.blogspot.com/2006/04/senate-voting-patterns-part-2.html

Interestingly, he also takes a look at the voting changes after 9/11 by plotting how often senators voted within their party vs. outside their party.

These visualizations seem really useful for voters. For instance, a voter could easily compare his opinions with the voting patterns of his representative and make an informed decision of whether to re-elect the existing representative or elect a new one with voting patterns reflecting his own opinions. Voting records of candidates are always given much attention in elections, and this type of representation would provide voters with a clear map of this. In the case of Arlen Specter, this visualization shows how his voting records aligned more closely with Democrats than Republicans, so perhaps his shift to the Democratic Party need not be considered an outright defection as much as it is a change in priorities.