DC Council Votes

How Much Do Councilmembers Agree on Votes?

Since the composition of the council didn't change in the 2018 election, we've had the same members for council periods 22 and 23 (from the beginning of 2017). I've analyzed all the votes from that period (obtained from the Legislative Information System API) to determine how often each pair of legislators votes the same way.

More than 95% of the votes in the council during this time were unanimous (had no "no" votes), so I excluded those noncontroversial votes from the analysis, leaving 128 votes. I also considered only cases where a person voted yes or no (so not abstentions or recusals, for example). For each pair, I took the number of times they voted the same way and divided by the number of times they were both present and voting. The results are in the table below.

I also included a column with the average for each member of how often their vote agreed with each of their colleagues. A high average might indicate members who are more cooperative or more pliant, depending on your point of view, while a low average might mean someone is more independent or more disagreeable. Note that the two independents (Grosso and especially Silverman) have the lowest averages.

Bonds
Todd
Nadeau
Allen
Grosso
Silverman
Evans
McDuffie
Cheh
Mendelson
R White
T White
Gray
Average
Bonds 100 89 72 81 63 50 84 88 77 86 80 72 84 77
Todd 89 100 63 74 57 42 81 83 69 79 77 68 83 72
Nadeau 72 63 100 81 71 59 59 65 68 62 75 66 66 67
Allen 81 74 81 100 70 60 69 71 82 72 80 73 77 74
Grosso 63 57 71 70 100 58 49 58 62 52 67 70 65 62
Silverman 50 42 59 60 58 100 41 44 55 43 57 64 46 51
Evans 84 81 59 69 49 41 100 82 68 88 67 63 75 69
McDuffie 88 83 65 71 58 44 82 100 63 78 85 74 83 73
Cheh 77 69 68 82 62 55 68 63 100 69 69 60 70 68
Mendelson 86 79 62 72 52 43 88 78 69 100 68 59 74 69
R White 80 77 75 80 67 57 67 85 69 68 100 76 82 74
T White 72 68 66 73 70 64 63 74 60 59 76 100 76 69
Gray 84 83 66 77 65 46 75 83 70 74 82 76 100 73