Bridge Grades debuts collaboration grades for 119th Congress
Seven months into the 119th Congress, August marked the debut of Bridge Grades for the 119th Congress—a near real-time polarization scorecard for every Senator and House Representative.
We’ve compiled impartial data from five objective 3rd party data sources to grade each member of Congress on how collaboratively or divisively they govern relative to their peers. The top half of each chamber earns A and B grades (“bridgers”) while the bottom half earn Cs and Fs (“dividers”).
Bridgers build win-win consensus solutions through collaboration and coalitions for the benefit of bipartisan interests
Dividers pursue zero-sum game governance, engage in personal attacks, and demonstrate predictably partisan legislative records
Bridge Grades are calculated using public data from trusted 3rd party sources that measure observable behaviors including what a person says (rhetoric: public statements, speeches, social media), and what a person does (legislative record: authoring and sponsoring bipartisan bills).
This short video explains how it all works.
Why Bridge Grades?
Bridge Grades aims to shift incentives toward a more collaborative Congress to write laws in our common interests by leveraging public data to (a) increase accountability of our elected officials, and (b) draw attention of citizen voters and campaign funders.
Our quest is to build a durable public utility which is open source, crowdsourced, and independently governed that can remain protected from big money special interests. This will be a multi-year, multi-election cycle vision and we are in it for the long haul.
Our ambition is to deliver an evidence-based tool to help de-escalate political discourse – both amongst legislators and also amongst citizen voters who can bring empirical data to emotional discussions with each other that are too-often rooted in ineffective “he-said, she-said” exchanges and divisive partisan talking points.
By rewarding bridgers over dividers, over time we believe we can systematically change political incentives, nudge the composition of our legislative bodies, and maybe even shift the culture of our country to a more pluralistic nation.
For more general information on Bridge Grade’s work, please visit their project page.
