The Widening Divide by Ken Flerlage

To understand the historical polarity of our two major US political parties—Republicans and Democrats—this visualization uses data from voteview.com and leverages DW-NOMINATE scores, a multidimensional scaling technique that uses various data to score legislators’ ideological positions (i.e. liberal/conservative or left/right). The scores assigned run from -1 (far left/liberal) to +1 (far right/conservative). Using data back to the 25th Congress (1837 – 1839), this visualization shows the trends over time and analyzes the findings.