Extraction and partition of voting networks

These were designed for three purposes:

1. Generate a variety of plots and statistics based on some raw data describing the voting activity of a population.
2. Extract so-called vote networks from these data.
3. Perform various analyses on these networks, in particular: estimate good partitions of the network, according to different measures.

Our tool was applied to data representing the activity of the members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the 7th term (from June 2009 to June 2014), as described in [MFL’15a, MFL’15b]. The raw data describing this activity were first retrieved from the VoteWatch website. However, these data were incomplete, so we later switched to another source: the It’s Your Parliament website. There were also some minor issues with these data, which we had to correct: some MEPs were represented twice, some profiles were incomplete, the policy domains were not defined for all vote texts, etc. These cleaned data are available on Zenodo here and there.

• URL: https://github.com/CompNet/NetVotes
• Production date: 2014–2018
• Related publications:
  • Nejat Arınık, Rosa Figueiredo et Vincent Labatut. « Signed Graph Analysis for the
    Interpretation of Voting Behavior ». In : International Conference on Knowledge Technologies
    and Data-driven Business (i-KNOW) – International Workshop on Social Network
    Analysis and Digital Humanities (SnanDig). T. 2025. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
    Graz, AT, 2017. i-Know ⟨hal-01583133⟩ (cite this paper if you use the software)
  • Israel Mendonça, Rosa Figueiredo, Vincent Labatut et Philippe Michelon. « Relevance
    of Negative Links in Graph Partitioning : A Case Study Using Votes From
    the European Parliament ». In : 2nd European Network Intelligence Conference (ENIC).
    Karlskrona, SE : IEEE Publishing, 2015, p. 122-129. DOI: 10.1109/ENIC.2015.25.
    ⟨hal-01176090⟩
  • Israel Mendonça, Rosa Figueiredo, Vincent Labatut et Phillipe Michelon. « Informative
    Value of Negative Links for Graph Partitioning, with an application to
    European Parliament Votes ». In : 6ème Conférence sur les modèles et l’analyse de réseaux
    : approches mathématiques et informatiques (MARAMI). Nîmes, FR, 2015, 12p.
    MARAMI ⟨hal-02055158⟩