Motivation

SWEThePeople.me aggregates information about members of the House of Representatives and the districts they service. Frequently, political discourse revolves around singular figures: the Speaker of the House, the Minority Leader, or the head of a powerful caucus. The motivation behind our website is to demonstrate the connection between individual representatives, the people in the districts they serve, and the parties they represent. Thus, our three models – Representative, Party, and District –naturally connect and seamlessly lead a visitor through our site.

In creating our site, we were pleasantly surprised by the wealth of data available through public RESTful APIs and intrigued about the opportunity to connect information from disparate sources. The political APIs we used – ProPublica and GovTrack – focused exclusively on representatives and their activity in Congress, the Census API used congressional districts only as a way to split collected data, and the standard WebHose API was far too general to be useful on its own. Linking the two fields – politics and demographics – presented an exciting opportunity to learn more about the intersection between the American political system and data from the decennial census.

We decided to focus on the members of the House of Representatives because of our group’s affection for the institution known as “the People's House.” Created by Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, the House is vested with powers of which the Founders, in response to British tyranny, deemed essential that the people be in direct control. The House initiates bills for raising government revenue, can impeach Presidents, and is given the responsibility of choosing the President if no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College. The House is composed of 435 members directly elected by their districts. House members are accountable to their constituents and the pressure never eases. Every two years, members must stand for reelection – far more frequently than their peers in the Senate. Thus, members of the House are truly members of their district: of the people, by the people, for the people.