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Vital Statistics on Congress, first published in 1980, long ago became the go-to source of impartial data on the United States Congress. Vital Statistics’ purpose is to collect and provide useful data on America’s first branch of government, including data on the composition of its membership, its formal procedure (such as the use of the filibuster), informal norms, party structure, and staff. With some chapters of data dating back nearly 100 years, Vital Statistics also documents how Congress has changed over time, illustrating, for example, the increasing polarization of Congress and the diversifying demographics of those who are elected to serve.
Vital Statistics began as a joint effort undertaken by Thomas E. Mann of Brookings and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, in collaboration with Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute. The datasets were published in print until 2013 when the project migrated online for the first time. This year, Brookings’ Molly E. Reynolds spearheaded Vital Statistics’ most recent update. The eight chapters [...] contain more than 90 tables of data which were collected through the years of this project and updated most recently in January 2017.
Source: The Brookings Institution
https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/vital-statistics-on-congress/#datatables
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday January 15 2017, @08:52PM
Vital Statistics also documents how Congress has changed over time, illustrating, for example, the increasing polarization of Congress
Indeed. This table [brookings.edu] and this table [brookings.edu] are particularly sobering. The percentage of "party unity votes," i.e., votes where at least 50% of Democrats oppose at least 50% of Republicans has risen to 75% of all votes in the House and ~70% in the Senate. Aside from the past 4 years or so, the closest we were ever to THAT many partisan votes as a percentage of all votes was back in the 1995 era with Gingrich's "Contract with America" after the 1994 midterms.
And when you look at the second linked table, you see that in those "party unity votes," we're now well above 90% on average for both parties in terms of members voting with their parties on these votes. (There's always been quite a bit of party loyalty, but historically the table shows that these party-line votes traditionally would receive an average of somewhere in the 70-85% range of loyalty for each party. The past 20 years or so shows a significant trend upward though. Not a lot of room for "independent thinking" in Congress these days.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @05:26PM
Not a lot of room for "independent thinking" in Congress these days.
Term limits would fix that.