What do we care about?

Perhaps you saw the Stephen Colbert segment about his Super PAC word clouds.  Drawing inspiration from that idea, I made a word cloud (thank you wordle) of the top words in all bills, state and federal, for 2011-2012.  Take a look:

Let’s compare that to bills passed:

Pretty similar, with Health and Education slightly larger, and “physician” entering the mix.  Now, drawing from Colbert for inspiration, I did a cloud of what bills have been pulled up and read on www.BillTrack50.com.  This gives quite an interesting variation:

Not surprisingly health is enormously dominant, and school is very important.  But now we get abortion, charter schools, voter identification, natural gas, collective bargaining.  Issues in the news, issues people care about, issues people are seeking to understand.  So the people and their representation are aligned on the which are the biggest issues, but maybe not on everything.

For fun, a list of the top 5 most read bills on our site to date, an interesting collection of state legislation, I think you’ll agree:

CA SB1002 – Public records: electronic format.  https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/172391

NH HB310 – Relative to the use of open data formats https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/132475

CA SB397 – An act relating to online voter registration. https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/7751

CO HB1048 – End CBI Instacheck Duty For Firearm Transfers https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/140292

NY S06779 – Provides that a web site administrator shall remove any comments posted upon request unless the poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post. https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/198453

 

 

About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 offers free tools for citizens to easily research legislators and bills across all 50 states and Congress. BillTrack50 also offers professional tools to help organizations with ongoing legislative and regulatory tracking, as well as easy ways to share information both internally and with the public.