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Voting Patterns in the Constitutional Council of Iceland 2011

pawelbartoszek@gmail.com
Voting Patterns in Icelandic Constitutional Council of Iceland. Those close to one another in views appear close on the map.

The above pictures was made by combining the voting results within the Icelandic Constitutional Council in 2011. Those representatives who voted in similar ways are shown close to one another. Connections symbolize that the representatives in question voted similarly more than 70% of the time. The darker the lines, the larger the conformity. DISCLAIMER: I, the author of this blog, Pawel Bartoszek, was a member of the Constitutional Council of Iceland. This does kind of disqualify me as an “impartial observer” :). Keep that in mind.

How the picture was made

I took data from all the voting in the last days of the Council (the 17th and the 18th meeting). This is official data, the file I assembled from different documents can be downloaded here: allvotes. First, I ignored all unanimous votes. Then I calculated how much each two representatives agreed on average,

  • 0 meaning full agreement in a particular vote
  • 1 meaning that one abstained and the other voted yes/no and
  • 2 meaning that one voted “yes” where the other voted “no”.
This is how I calculated the “distance” between each two representatives, and this was used to draw a so called Spring Graph (The bulk of the code came from this example by Joris Dormans). So, representatives close to one another in views appear close on the graph.
Thus, we get the following applet: (You can drag the circles around. SPACE resets the applet).

[processing file=”http://pabamapa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/votingConstitutionalCouncil25.jar” width=500 height=500] In fact the person with whom most representatives agreed was Ástrós Gunnlaugsdóttir. This is (probably) due to the fact that she only took part in the second reading of the proposals (due to maternity leave), where the voting was much more uniform, since most of the “hottest” topics had been agreed upon. If we only take into account the votes during the 1st reading of the final proposals, then the patterns are a bit more clear. [processing file=”http://pabamapa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/votingConstitutionalCouncil24.jar” width=500 height=500] [You can drag the nodes around, and reset by pressing SPACEBAR] The Constitutional Council was rather special, since the representatives did not run on party labels and did not, at least not formally, organize themselves in party-groups. As one can see though, there were some divisions. The cluster seen on the right in the top picture, consisted mostly of the Board (Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Council and Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen of the committees), perhaps this being the more “conservative” side, whereas the other visible cluster consisted of more “radical” members of the Council. But, as said before, that judgment should maybe be passed by someone other than myself.