Effectiveness

If one were asked to distill Congress’s primary responsibilities down to a single act, it would have to be passing bills into laws. Therefore, it makes sense to evaluate today’s Congress by comparing it to the Congress of years past. What matters here is not just sheer volume: Just because a single session of Congress sees an abundance of bills passed doesn’t necessarily mean that it has been particularly effective. What’s more telling is an analysis that takes into account both the quantity and significance of those bills. To the right, you’ll see the trend in bills passed over the last nine election cycles. Click on a year to see a breakdown of the types of bills passed during that Congress, based on the congressional committee they were introduced by.

The Money Trail

It’s often noted that one of Congress's most glaring ineffiencies is its willingness to bend principle for profit—the general public believes Congress sucks because it cares more about its donors than the constituents. This might be true, but to what extent? On this page, you'll see every industry that has donated to a politician (size is proportionate to amount of money spent on electioneering). Click on an industry to see which party and politicians have been its greatest benefactors. This is money contributed to a certain campaign by a member of that industry. (Data courtesy of OpenSecrets.org, obtained using the InfluenceExplorer API.) Then, click on a politician to see a breakdown of the types of bills they have sponsored in Congress. Select a different year to see a new set of data.

Partisanship

So maybe Congress hasn't been as effective lately as it has in the past. Naturally, the follow up question is “Why?” As Norman Ornstein points out, a lot of it has to do with the current Congress's penchant for crippling partisanship. There are fewer independents now than ever, a worrisome trend that indicates that the representatives' recent habit for redistricting has led to locally entrenched parties dominating their Congressional races for the forseeable future. It's gotten to the point where the candidates in these districts are more worried about their primaries than the actual election, making it almost impossible for a third party to win the race. Looking back at the past ten terms of Congress, it's clear that the Independent faction is slowly dwindling. Nate Silver’s research shows that in just the last 20 years, the number of swing districts in the House has shrunk from 103 to just 35. Perhaps some more diversity in the voices of Congress would make it suck just a tad bit less.

Public Opinion

Perhaps the most telling evaluation of Congress comes from its constituents. As citizens of the United States, we are given the right to elect these representatives to their positions, and, when we see fit, gripe to no end about their shortcomings. Take a live look at Twitter commentary on how our fellow compatriots feel about Congress.

About

I believe that there is a great need for simple, accessible data visualizations. There’s plenty of data out there, but unless we collect, organize, and simplify it, we’ll never unlock its true potential. The purpose of this site is to take a simple question, find the kind of data that might be helpful in answering it, and present it in a way that’s easy to understand and looks clean on every device, for any person. I make no conclusions on my part—I leave that up to the reader.

The DCRS project was prepared for Bicoastal Datafest 2013 where it won the “Best in Insight” award. All research, writing, and development was done by Nilkanth Patel. If you like what you see here, please visit my site for more of my work. I’d also like to thank the wonderful Kristina Budelis and Sarah McDonough for their help brainstorming and copy editing.

The visualizations you see on the site couldn’t have been possible without the amazing data available at GovTracker.us and the Influence Explorer API. Specifically, both Andrew Pendleton and Tom Lee from the Sunlight Foundation were essential for helping me find the data I needed. Anyone interested in statistical research (political or otherwise) should consult both these projects—they are absolutely tremendous.

As for the nuts and bolts, DCRS was built primarily using jQuery, a few neat CSS tricks, some helpful APIs, and a couple resources from Matteo Spinelli’s Cubiq.