See Congress polarize over the past 60 years, in one beautiful chart

[Recursion]

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-visualization

The growth of partisan polarization has transformed US politics in recent decades, and the effects are especially visible in Congress. Earlier this year, a new paper in PLOS One demonstrated this transformation in a particularly cool way.

Six researchers — Clio Andris, David Lee, Marcus Hamilton, Mauro Martino, Christian Gunning, and John Armistead Selden — created a visualization of how likely the House of Representatives' Democrats (in blue) and Republicans (in red) are to vote with their own party, or to cross party lines. The change over the past six decades is remarkable.

You can see here that in the 1960s and 1970s it was actually quite common for members of one party to vote with the other party. The blue dots and red dots are intermixed. But gradually in the 1980s and especially in the early 1990s, partisan voting behavior grew much stronger.

By the 1993-'94 Congress — just before the Republican takeover of the House — the overlap on votes between the two parties had almost completely vanished; you can see the two groups of dots self-segregate into homogeneous clusters. Since then, the gap between the parties has remained large — and very few members of Congress have frequently crossed it. Check out the researchers' full paper here.

[davidpdx]

1. It is interesting how from 1993 on there is some middle, but then it quickly disappears

I think when they look at the last two years it will be highly polarized since many of the D's who were center lost in 2014

[SoapBox]

2. ...wow.

[Oldtimeralso]

3. My observation...

It seems to me that historically there was more blue to red crossover than red to blue. Can we ever see compromise and concern for the American public out weigh party ideology.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

4. This is probably not the right discussion site to raise that concern...

...just sayin'.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community