Community Structure in Congressional Cosponsorship Networks

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, who are connected via sponsorship/cosponsorship of the same legislation. 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 of Congress. Although polarization has since waned in the U.S. Senate, it remains at historically high levels in the House of Representatives.

• Publication year

  2007

• Venue

  Physica A-statistical Mechanics and Its Applications

• Publication date

  2007-08-08

• Fields of study

  Physics, Political Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.physa.2007.11.004arXiv 0708.1191
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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