A couple of days ago I did a little more analysis on Republican and Democratic Congresspeople on Twitter. Towards the end of the post, I realized that the unduplicated reach pareto chart that I’d built would only make sense if the US were a one-party state (or to be fair, if both parties had a single issue that they were united in wanting to promote.)

So — wanting to make this a little more representative — I went back and produced two charts; one showing Republican unduplicated reach (which follows a typical 80:20 distribution)…

And one showing the Democratic unduplicated reach (which clearly doesn’t)…

What the charts hint at but don’t show is that — while around 61% of “Republican” Twitter followers follow more than one Republican congressperson, this is true of only 29% of “Democratic” Twitter followers; that is — there’s much more duplication among the right than there is among the left.

I thought I might be able to draw some conclusions from the difference between the two charts, or at least suggest some theories to explain the differences. But I think my thoughts were best put by one of my correspondents, Kathryn Corrick who simply pointed out that the “left can never agree” (she also suggests that the political right in the UK blogosphere is more “clubbable” and co-operative than the political left – which rather fits the US maps I’ve been able either to draw or to get my hands on.)