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mysociety
Tools for analysing MPs' votes
If TheyWorkForYou wants to serve expert users and journalists better perhaps it could offer a series of tools for sorting / comparing / analysing MPs' votes.
Comparisons
- Compare two (or more) MPs' voting records
- Show differences in the voting record between two (or more) votes. eg. make it easy to see which MPs have voted a different way on the third reading of a Bill than they did at the second. Or eg. show up which MPs voted one way in opposition and a different way on the same subject when in power. Providing the facility might lead to users finding interesting things and citing / linking to the site to share them or act on them.
Finding interesting votes
- Enabling the sorting of the list of all votes by eg. turnout; turnout corrected for whole party abstentions (used by mySociety to prioritise vote descriptions); how close the vote was; the number of "rebels".
- Enabling the identification of close votes with high turnouts.
- Listing just votes where a particular party, or groups of parties, abstained.
A use-case for this may be coming up in Cambridge if a recently ex MP for whom TheyWorkForYou/PublicWhip has a voting record stands against the sitting MP. There would be two voting records to compare.
This was pointed out at: https://twitter.com/Puffles2010/status/750672766714650624
Graphic designer Louie Woodall has used the PublicWhip voting analysis to compare potential Labour leadership candidates' stances on a range of matters using a traffic light system:
https://twitter.com/LouieWoodall/status/751961422402297856
Perhaps I shouldn't mentioned expert users and journalists when I started this issue; a well designed comparison tool/feature could serve all users.
cc @garethrees @wrightmartin @MyfanwyNixon
That's very nicely done - @zarino and @wrightmartin will also be interested.
Via Twitter:
Is there a way to compare the voting record of two MP's side by side?
A user writes:
I would like to make a suggestion. I think it would be useful if your site had a way of comparing MPs and giving them a score between 0-100 for how right wing/left wing they are, based on their voting history.
I tried doing something like this. It basically involved running the matrix of MP votes from PublicWhip through Multidimensional Scaling and TSNE to get a map of MPs based on their similarity to one another's voting records. However, the problem with this is that it doesn't take into account parliamentary procedures, the process of whipping MPs, etc, so the end result is interesting (it clearly separates MPs by party and very approximately by faction), but not terribly useful for comparing how left/right wing MPs are. You would have to also have additional information about whether they abstained because they were away or sick, or intentionally, and whether they voted because they believed in the motion, or because of party politics.
A user writes:
The media do not hold our MP's accountable on their voting record and so we need to equip people to do this instead - They work for you is a start. But it doesn't allow you to, say, compare how Anna Soubry, Chuka Umunna and Diane Abbot voted on policies that led to the hostile environments (it also doesn't reflect users language)
It needs discovery research and tweaked user needs.
Another plea for being able to compare MPs' voting records https://twitter.com/mynnoj/status/1126197805448597505
Related: a user wrote to express his desire to answer the question "How did the Tory leadership candidates vote in the climate emergency debate?".
The question itself is of less importance than the motivation behind it of the kind of questions our users come to the site hoping to answer.
Is there any way that one can compare/contrast the records of different politicians, like a sort of side-by-side grid? It would be really interesting to have a visual representation of their similarities/differences when it comes to their voting records, i.e. do they think for themselves, or always toe the party line, etc?