The first ever WriteToThem MP responsiveness league tables will be published this coming Monday. Building on the FaxYourMP tradition these’ll be bigger, better and more shiny than ever. Gasp at your own MP’s miserable/impressive results; wonder at the varying response rates of different UK assemblies; bite your nails in nervous excitement about the LibDem leadership candidate standoff. Can you wait?

Next version, following more comments from Chris:

I had a couple of problems with this. Firstly I couldn’t make the ytics have “lt 1” – they came out as black, whereas the plot line comes out as red. So I changed them to use “lt 2” and “lt 3” instead (green and blue).

Secondly, the marker for “official launch” looks a bit nasty. The ilne gets jammed up against the vertical spike of the event. I think it might look better if it was layered on top of the spike on the section where they overlap exactly, but I’m not sure.

Thirdly, what was the spike in late June? I completely can’t remember.

After following nearly all of Chris’s advice, I’ve ended up with a much prettier graph.

Ah gnuplot! Love of my life. Scourge of Excel. Well, OK, maybe I don’t feel exactly like that, but if you’re comfortable with the shell it’s much easier to make a graph than in Excel.

Since no day is complete without a graph.

(As you can see I’ve been learning gnuplot, although I’m not as good as Chris yet. gnuplot is actually quite good.)

Just a brief one today. MORI has recently done a poll chiefly on the subject of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Now, here at mySociety we don’t have any political views, so no comments on The Bomb itself; but MORI did ask another question which intrigued me:

And which, if any of the things on this list have you done in the last two or three years?

What	How many
Presented my views to a local councillor or MP	14
Written a letter to an editor	6
Urged someone outside my family to vote	16
Urged someone to get in touch with a local councillor or MP	12
Made a speech before an organised group	11
Been an officer of an organisation or club	8
Stood for public office	1
Taken an active part in a political campaign	3
Helped on fund raising drives	20
Voted in the last general election	68

So, 14% of British adults have “presented [their] views to” a councillor or MP in the past 2–3 years. I presume most people will have interpreted the question as including writing to their MPs; that gives us something like 6 million letter-writers over that period. On WriteToThem, about 75% of messages are for MPs, so if those 6 million people sent one letter each over the three years, that works out as about 2,000 messages/year/MP, or about ten per working day.

That’s a lot lower than typical estimates I’ve heard (~50/day/MP). Of course, the poll asked about people rather than letters, so doesn’t account for people sending several letters over the given time period. However, judging by the WriteToThem data, that’s not all that significant an effect:
[Plot of number of letters per author in WriteToThem, image gone]
— something like 90% of letters sent through WriteToThem to MPs and councillors are the only ones sent by that author. (Note that this measurement is quite crude; in particular, I have identified two letters as being from the same author if they share a common email address. Also, since we remove all personal data about authors from messages after a little while, it only shows a few weeks’ worth of data. A further complication is that if an MP or councillor responds by email and the constituent sends a further email, they’re likely to do it by replying to the email, so not showing up as a further communication on that plot.)

Anyway, if the crude data from WriteToThem are characteristic of all mail received by councillors and MPs, then MORI’s estimate of the number of people communicating with their MPs seems pretty low. Thoughts?