I quite agree that spectra breaks down when applied to anything nontrivial, but I’m curious as to how you could graphically visualize this alliance structure. The strength of a political spectrum is that it allows for easy visualization and categorization.
Great example, by the way.
Given enough data, this can be done automatically. A simple way to do it self-organizing maps (SOMs). On the top of this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map there is an example where members of congress are grouped based on voting patterns.
Superficially it might seem that the SOM has created a left-right spectrum of sorts. Actually this is not the case, as the clustering distances show. Instead, what has been done is just that members have been grouped on a 2-d plane such that members with similar views are closer to each other.
I quite agree that spectra breaks down when applied to anything nontrivial, but I’m curious as to how you could graphically visualize this alliance structure. The strength of a political spectrum is that it allows for easy visualization and categorization. Great example, by the way.
Given enough data, this can be done automatically. A simple way to do it self-organizing maps (SOMs). On the top of this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map there is an example where members of congress are grouped based on voting patterns.
Superficially it might seem that the SOM has created a left-right spectrum of sorts. Actually this is not the case, as the clustering distances show. Instead, what has been done is just that members have been grouped on a 2-d plane such that members with similar views are closer to each other.
The axes between the centroids of the alliances become ‘left’ and ‘right’, whichever weird way that ends up pointing.