Congressional Close Up: Automatically exploring anomalous voting behavior in the U.S. Congress

The United States Senate has become increasingly partisan through the years; in fact it is quite unusual for a Senator to vote against his or her party. The Congressional Close Up system automatically reports on factors that might have influenced a bipartisan vote. The system begins by assigning a topic to the legislation on which a Senate or House vote was focused. The system then uses this assigned topic to find possible influences which might have changed a Senator's vote. These influences are campaign contributions, effects on local industries and general pressure from the Senator's constituency. The system concludes by generating a report in HTML format.