Visualizing Rebel Alliances in the UK Government
The UK will shortly go to the polls for the 2015 General Election. However there's currently no clear front-runner, and in fact no clear coalition on the cards for a new government. The "new normal" of hung parliaments and coalition forming as part of UK politics appears to be here to stay. Click here for full size version As such, I decided to take a look at the open dataset provided by The Public Whip project, with a view to visualizing the relationships between MPs (members of parliament) in the 2010 to 2015 UK government, using a tool called Gephi . The idea was to analyse how MPs are related through their voting patterns in the house of commons , and in particular how they are related through agreement or rebelliousness. Also I'll admit it: I wanted to write an article with "Rebel Alliance" in the title because I like Star Wars . In the rest of this article, I'll describe several visualizations that were created from that public whip data...