Looking for input on ideas for a political web site.

I am considering putting up a political web site that mostly will involve people in, or running for a US house or senate seat. A key element of the site will be a ranking of political experience. I was wondering if any one here had any input on how that ranking might work.

What I have come up with so far is to have a database that lists all political offices someone has held, and how long they have held that office. Each type of political office would have a weight. To do the ranking, you would simply take each political office someone held and multiply the weight of that office times the number of years they were in that office and then add the result of those calculations to get the ranking.

That seems like the most straight forward way to do it to me. The questions come in in the details. How do you classify various political offices, and what weight do you give each office. Since politics is mostly about power and influence, my thought is to assign weight based on how much power any given political office has. Below is a list of the classifications I have come up with along with a number representing the rank of that office. That rank is just used as way to sort the list from least powerful office to most. The actual weight I give each office is something I haven't decided on yet.


rank Office
1 Other Local Office
1 City Council
1 Mayor Small City
2 Other State Office
2 State House
3 Mayor Medium City
3 State Senate
4 Governor (Small State)
5 Governor (Medium State)
5 Mayor Large City
6 Governor (Large State)
6 Other National Office
7 US House
8 US Senate
9 US Vice President
10 US President


Since someone who has been a US President is very unlikely to ever run for any other office, that one probably isn't going to be relevant for my web site. What I would really like input on is if the rank I have assigned seems reasonable and what weight would be appropriate for each office. When sorted by rank or weight the order would be the same but weight would most likely not be a simple linear scale.


Obviously some way of classifying Small, Medium, and Large cities and states has to be decided. Below is my thinking on that but is not set in stone. I'm not even sure if maybe one more level of might be appropriate such as very small or very large.

After looking that the population chart of US cities from this page...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_...opulation#cnote_a

I think the classifications would me like this

Large City >= 500,000
Medium City >= 50,000 < 500,000
Small City < 50,000

After reviewing state population chart on this page...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_...tes_by_population

I think the classifications would me like this

Large State >= 8 Million
Medium State >= 2 Million < 8 Million
Small State < 2 Million.


I look forward to reading what others think of this ranking system.

Chris W

 

Great idea. Why another site? We could do this right here. That way we could talk about the ranking and discuss. I've been wanting to do something about voting records as well as it is difficult to simply go through and make sense of the yes/no votes.