Frequently Asked Questions (And Their Answers)
Here are some frequently asked questions about GovTrack, and their answers.
Why are cosponsorship lists sometimes out of date?
This is a known and very difficult or impossible problem to fix. Congress does not itself publish a database of legislative information, and so GovTrack has to reconstruct the data by scanning THOMAS and other official websites on a periodic basis for the information. Currently there is no way to know which bills' cosponsorship have changed since the bill's introduction, and it is impossible to update all bills on more than a monthly basis or so, which means GovTrack has no way to keep this information current. The only real way around this is to get THOMAS and the official websites to publish their legislative database more directly for reuse by sites like ours, which we are trying to encourage them to do.
How do you classify members of Congress as far-left/right, moderate, or rank-and-file?
These labels come from the Political Spectrum statistical analysis that we have carried out. The statistical analysis puts members of Congress on a scale based on patterns of bill sponsorship, and is blind to party affiliation and the content of bills. From there, I have somewhat arbitrarily divided the image into regions to label as far-left/right, moderate, and rank-and-file, separately for the House and Senate and based on party. For each party, the most extreme 23% of members of Congress are labeled far-left or -right. The most centrist 30% (i.e. those closest to the other party) are labeled moderate. The remaining 47% are labeled as rank-and-file.
What's the logo about? Is it a Masonic symbol?
GovTrack's logo is the eye on the back of the dollar bill. The standard explanation of the eye on the dollar is that it is God overseeing a great nation. GovTrack flips this around: The eye is YOU, keeping a close watch over Congress. While we're told that this is a Masonic or occult symbol that we ought to distance ourselves from, we think our perversion of the logo as a symbol of government oversight is just fine.
