Implicit in our work is the assumption that public judgements of legislative acts are possible, and that individual legislative acts usefully reducible to data points, allowing legislative intent to be discerned. In a system dominated by parties and negotiations, this reduction of complex acts within a market-like system is tricky (or even sometimes impossible), but increasingly sophisticated metrics and judgement procedures are themselves valuable, especially when votes and positions are politicized in bad faith by both sides. While public evaluations aren’t a precise instrument, they’re far better than outright coordinated manipulation of legislative acts. Coordinated public scrutiny can serve as a counterbalance against party-based manipulation of perceived intent, and even if that scrutiny doesn’t do a perfect job of assigning intent or influence, it has positive effects on the incentives that govern future action.

Clay Johson’s recent post On Baseball and Congress on the Sunlight Labs blog neatly imagines new political data points, suggesting that our perception and evaluation of legislators should look to the business of sport for inspiration, and to suggest that Congress would benefit from “decent, predictive and objective statistical methods.”

Tom Bruce, writing to the Open House Project google group, describes a menu of criteria that might be useful in devising standards for which legislation might merit public attention:

A post, from the Freesteel blog, gives a detailed walk through searching down the data behind a political ad’s claims, making a strong case that deriving legislative intent is used to rather recklessly construe individual votes’ meaning.

I’ve even seen recent examples of letters from lawmakers explaining that their votes shouldn’t be construed as cast, that their intent was political and they wouldn’t have voted that way if they had known it would have passed.

I think the lesson from these examples is that deriving legislative intent from congressional data is difficult, but setting up systems that create meaning from (what looks from the outside like) legislative noise. The better job we do at ascribing meaning to legislative acts, the better job we’ll do in exerting electoral pressure that reflects a realistic view of voters preferences.