Partisan Politics in the US Congress

In brief, the Economist this week had a great graph in the print edition that showed the partisanship of Congress in an extraordinary way:


 Picture: Renzo Lucioni, Imgur.com 

A Harvard Computer science student created a graph that shows the relationships between members of the Senate, indicating who is more bi-partisan, and who is not. Each dot is a member of the Senate, and the lines indicates a similarity between them and other members of the Senate.

Rather like a single cell dividing in biology, it is very clear over time that the two parties are separating, with fewer members of the Senate "crossing the floor" to cooperate with their opponents.

Compare the Senate voting behaviour of 1989 and 2013. Very useful for any G&P student contemplating the nature of Congress for Unit 4C, and whether it is effective or not. Is a Senate whose members do not cooperate with eachother, but instead behave as though they were in a parliamentary system, what the Founding Fathers wanted?

The Economist posted a video which discusses it: