Unity

I came across this graphic, here, in an article about the use of social network visualization tools to indicate linkages and similarity of purpose. In this case, the blue ovals are Democrats or allied, the red ovals are Republicans or allied, and the lines indicate similarity of voting records in 2007. The density of the links shows greater party loyality among Democrats than Republicans during that period, which I find remarkable since I tend to view Republicans as more likely to subsume individual differences, and Democrats more likely to go their own ways, even to the detriment of their common goals.

The tool used to aggregate and classify the voting patterns, Social Action, can be found here. The article also expands a bit on those commonalities of voting patterns.