Paper Reading #5

Comments:
Reference:
Title: Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight
Author: Peter Kinnaird, Mario Romero, Gregory Abowd
Venue: CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia
Summary:
This article discusses a new piece of software titled Connect to Congress (C2C).  This application is web-based and is designed so people can keep track of politicians and their voting habits.  It uses a vertical slider with two arrows to designate a time frame.  From that, it displays a scatterplot of voting habits.  On the horizontal axis, it plots liberal -> conservative scale based on the widely accepted Poole-Rosenthal scores.  The vertical axis plots a follower -> leadership scale that the developers generated.  The scale is based on sponsorship of a bill.  If the representative sponsored the bill, he/she gets 1 point.  If the representative cosponsors the bill after it is released, he/she gets a fraction of a point based on how quickly the co-sponsorship was made in respect to the bill's life cycle.  For example, if the last action on a bill occurs 30 days after its introduction and the representative joins as a cosponsor after 20 days, that representative gets .333 points.  The example interface is below.

The purpose of this application is to provide voters with an easier and more intuitive way of tracking political candidates.  This way voters are more informed and can sift through the hearsay that is thrown out during an election. The application provides news, information, animations, a growing window, and a running window in addition to the information about the representatives' voting histories on the two scales mentioned above.
Discussion:
I really liked the idea of this application.  This article really made me want to try this out.  To me it seems like voters are incredibly uninformed and rely too much on political advertisements and what the media tells them. For instance, Obama was the most liberal senator in 2008, as was John Kerry in 2004, but yet some people believed these men were the best fit to run our country, when it's proven that a more centric candidate more ideal (regardless of political affiliation).  This article didn't discuss their qualitative analysis, but frankly I would have been bored reading that and trust that these guys used the proper techniques.  I also think that providing more information to educate voters would help stimulate interest and increase voter turnout because the voters would feel more connected to the candidates and platforms.