Controversy Analysis

US Senate and the House are venues of political debate for the legislature. Similarly, social networking sites and blogosphere play an increasingly important role as forums for public debate. Disagreement among entities lead to opposing camps. This work provides a model to analyze the relationship between the entities and the underlying topics. The model provides a scale of partisanship to identify moderate and extreme senators/blogs within each camp, and polarizing versus unifying issues. The web based interactive user interface www.PartisanScale.com provides visualizations for longitudinal analysis. US politics is most often polarized with respect to the left/right alignment of the entities. However, certain issues do not reflect the polarization due to political parties, but observe a split correlating to other characteristics of the senators such as their demographics, or simply receive consensus. A hierarchical clustering algorithm is developed to identify groups of bills that polarize entities in the same way. Resulting clusters are visualized at www.ControversyAnalysis.com providing a synopsis through distribution charts, word clouds, and heat maps.