Community structure in Congressional cosponsorship networks
Abstract
We study the United States Congress by constructing networks between Members of Congress based on the legislation that they cosponsor. Using the concept of modularity, we identify the community structure of Congressmen, as connected via sponsorship/cosponsorship of the same legislation, to investigate the collaborative communities of legislators in both chambers of Congress. This analysis yields an explicit and conceptually clear measure of political polarization, demonstrating a sharp increase in partisan polarization which preceded and then culminated in the 104th Congress (1995-1996), when Republicans took control of both chambers. Although polarization has since waned in the U.S. Senate, it remains at historically high levels in the House of Representatives.
Additional Information
© 2007 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. Received 14 August 2007; revised 21 October 2007. Available online 9 November 2007. PACS classification codes: 89.75.-k; 89.65.-s We thank Thomas Callaghan, Diana Chen, Aaron Clauset, Justin Howell, Eric Kelsic, Tom Maccarone, and Mark Newman for useful discussions. We also thank an anonymous referee for useful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. YZ was funded by Caltech's SURF program; AJF (VIGRE grant) and ALT (NSF HRD-0450099) were funded by the NSF; MAP was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Caltech's Center for the Physics of Information (where he was a postdoc during much of this research); and PJM was supported from start-up funds provided by the Institute for Advanced Materials and the Department of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We obtained the committee data from the web site of the House of Representatives Office of the Clerk.Attached Files
Accepted Version - ZHApha08preprint.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 14756
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20090731-102747667
- Summer Undergraduate Research Foundation, Caltech
- HRD-0450099
- NSF
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Created
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2009-08-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-10-18Created from EPrint's last_modified field