Analysis of Legal and Political Data

With the abundance of publicly available data registering the judgements at supreme courts and parliamentary votes, we can employ various data mining techniques to identify interesting patterns. For example, we can identify explicit and implicit voting blocs, which may or may not agree with official party affiliations. We can assess the political strength of those blocs. We can examine the vote of which particular senators is the most representative of the final outcome of the vote. We can employ text mining and visualization tools to cope with a large number of issues discussed in parliaments. While the paper primarily acts as a survey, it demonstrates the utility of several techniques that have not yet been used in the context of law.