Adding summary charts such as correlations between MEP votes

[joelostblom]

Thanks for maintaining this useful site! It was really helpful for me when deciding how to vote in this year's election.

In addition to the results for the individual votes, I think some summary visualization would be really helpful. For example, this article includes a chart that shows the correlation between the votes of MEPs, which is a helpful indication of how often they vote with other party members in their block:

Having something like that which could be filtered based on e.g. tags, EU blocs, countries, and parties would be useful as it would help communicate which MEPs are not voting with their bloc/party and which are largely aligned with party lines.

I saw that you are still working on a complete data dump; if there is ever a URL that points to the full data set I think this type of correlation chart would be relatively simple to create using e.g. Vega-Lite, and I could try to help out if this is something you are interested in.

[tillprochaska]

The chart you shared is indeed pretty cool! So far, we’ve been focused on integrating data from multiple sources in a (mostly) reliable way and making it searchable. And to be honest, there’s still a lot to do in this area :)

For this reason, we haven’t spent a lot of time exploring ways to analyze, aggregate, or visualize the dataset as a whole. However, we encourage others to work with data from HowTheyVote, and we are indeed working on providing a full, automated exported of the dataset to make this as easy as possible. I’ll post a link here once it is available!

[tillprochaska]

Just a quick update: We’re now publishing CSV exports of the HowTheyVote.eu dataset here: https://github.com/HowTheyVote/data