New GIS tool maps U.S. House votes to district demographics
Researchers link congressional voting records with geographic data for the 118th House
Deep Dive
The research team built a prototype system that merges U.S. House voting records from the 118th Congress (Jan 2023–Jan 2025) with GIS data at the congressional district level. They manually tagged bills with themes (e.g., veterans' affairs, agriculture), then connected each theme to relevant spatial data. An interactive map prototype visualizes how district characteristics correlate with representatives' votes.
Key Points
- Manually tagged every bill from the 118th House (2023-2025) with thematic categories like veterans' affairs and agriculture
- Integrated spatial GIS data at the congressional district level to match each bill's theme
- Built an interactive map prototype and a backend database to visualize district-vote correlations
Why It Matters
Brings quantitative transparency to how well representatives' votes align with their constituents' geographic realities.