Visualizations of Rebel Alliances In the UK Government

An anonymous reader writes: I just published an article and thought it might be of interest to Slashdot readers. It's about a collection visualizations I created based on public voting data from The Public Whip project, which collects and normalizes voting data from the UK House of Commons. The visualizations show relationships between MPs, with a focus on agreement rates, and more interestingly — rebellion.

Comments

Re:Rebellion? Against what?

[AmiMoJo]

Not really. They have specific "free votes" where MPs can vote however they like on matters of conscience. On everything else they are supposed to tow the party line and vote as instructed, or be kicked out. That's how the party system is supposed to work, in order to create strong and stable governments.

It would be much better if we had consensus politics with coalitions of multiple parties, say with a PR system to elect MPs. The system we have now always results in most people not having their views represented in government. Although AV was not ideal either, it would have been a step in the right direction, but people openly admitted that they were too thick to understand that extremely simple concept, so we lost our chance and have to accept this is the way things are now. The majority (of idiots) has spoken.