Dimensionality Reduction and Visualisation Tools for Voting Record

Recorded votes in legislative bodies are an important source of data for political scientists. Voting records can be used to describe parliamentary processes, identify ideological divides between members and reveal the strength of party cohesion. We explore the problem of working with vote data using popular dimensionality reduction techniques and cluster validation methods, as an alternative to more traditional scaling techniques. We present results of dimensionality reduction techniques applied to votes from the 6th and 7th European Parliaments, covering activity from 2004 to 2014.