A Needs Assessment for Measuring Geographic - Legislative Associations in the U.S. House of Representatives

2026-07-23

AI Summary

This study addresses the relationship between U.S. House representatives’ voting behavior and the geographic characteristics of their districts to evaluate how legislation differentially impacts constituents across regions. To this end, the project integrates roll-call voting records from the 118th Congress with district-level geographic information system (GIS) data, systematically combining human-annotated bill topics with multidimensional spatial features for the first time to construct a scalable analytical framework. An interactive map prototype was developed to visualize the association between legislators’ decisions and district attributes by policy topic. The results not only demonstrate the feasibility of this approach but also illuminate the key technical pathways and challenges involved in building a comprehensive, accessible platform for analyzing congressional representational dynamics.

Abstract

Political legislation affects the well-being and livelihoods of constituents. In the U.S. Congress a representative's voting record on bills and legislation is public. These bills have themes associated with them, such as veterans' affairs, coastal monitoring, agricultural appropriations, etc. A bill on veterans' affairs may affect a constituency differently if they have a high percentage of veterans. In this work, we demonstrate how congressional vote outcomes can be merged with typical geographic information systems (GIS) data to help compare a legislator's votes with the geographies of their constituencies to measure the association between district features and legislators' decisions. We retrieved and tagged bills from the 118th U.S. House of Representatives (Jan. 2023 - Jan. 2025) by manually assigning each bill a set of themes. We then retrieved spatial data at the congressional district level related to each theme. We built a backend database to connect bill information and spatial data, and an interactive map prototype displayed the spatial data related to each theme associated with each bill. Our work helps identify challenges to creating a more accessible and complete system that would facilitate the visualization and analysis of the nature of contemporary Congressional representation. This technical report is primarily written for members of the data science community, and specifically those interested in legislative and geographic data.

Problem

• legislative representation
• geographic information systems
• congressional voting
• constituency analysis
• spatial data

Innovation

• geospatial analysis
• legislative voting
• GIS integration
• congressional representation
• interactive visualization