Posts

Showing posts from May, 2015

Visualizing Rebel Alliances in the UK Government

Image
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