Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T13:11:19.088Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

James H. Fowler
James H. Fowler*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
*
e-mail: jhfowler@ucdavis.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networks of all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S. House and Senate from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directional link can be drawn from each cosponsor of a piece of legislation to its sponsor. I use a number of statistics to describe these networks such as the quantity of legislation sponsored and cosponsored by each legislator, the number of legislators cosponsoring each piece of legislation, the total number of legislators who have cosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and network measures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality. I then introduce a new measure I call “connectedness” which uses information about the frequency of cosponsorship and the number of cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about the social distance between legislators. Connectedness predicts which members will pass more amendments on the floor, a measure that is commonly used as a proxy for legislative influence. It also predicts roll call vote choice even after controlling for ideology and partisanship.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , Autumn 2006 , pp. 456 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Author's note: I would like to thank Tracy Burkett, Diane Felmlee, Jeff Gill, Ben Highton, Bob Huckfeldt, Jonathan Kaplan, Mark Lubell, Mark Newman, Mason Porter, Brian Sala, and Walt Stone for helpful comments and Skyler Cranmer for research assistance. This paper was originally prepared for presentation at the 2005 Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association annual conferences. A copy of the most recent version can be found at http://jhfowler.ucdavis.edu.

References

Beck, P. A., Dalton, R. J., Greene, S., and Huckfeldt, R. 2002. The social calculus of voting: Interpersonal, media, and organizational influences on presidential choices. American Political Science Review 96(1): 57–73.Google Scholar
Bernard, H. R., Killworth, P. D., Evans, M. J., McCarty, C., and Shelley, G. A. 1988. Studying social relations cross-culturally. Ethnology 2: 155–79.Google Scholar
Birnbaum, Jeffrey H., and Balz, Dan. Case bringing new scrutiny to a system and a profession. Washington Post, January 4, 2006, 1.Google Scholar
Bonacich, P. 1972. Factoring and weighing approaches to clique identification. Journal of Mathematical Sociology 2: 113–20.Google Scholar
Burkett, Tracy. 1997. Cosponsorship in the United States Senate: A network analysis of Senate communication and leadership, 1973-1990. Ph.D. dissertation. Columbia, SC: Sociology, University of South Carolina.Google Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A., Clark, John A., and Patterson, Samuel C. 1993. Political respect in the legislature. Legislative Studies Quarterly 18(3): 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, James E. 1982. Cosponsoring legislation in the U.S. Congress. Legislative Studies Quarterly 7(3): 415–22.Google Scholar
Cormen, T. H., Leiserson, C. E., Rivest, R. L., and Stein, C. 2001. Introduction to algorithms. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
de Nooy, Wouter, Mrvar, Andrej, and Batagelj, Vladimir. 2005. Exploratory social network analysis with Pajek, structural analysis in the social sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ebel, H., Mielsch, L.-I., and Bornholdt, S. 2002. Scale-free topology of e-mail networks. Physical Review E 66(035103).Google Scholar
Fararo, T. J., and Sunshine, M. 1964. A study of a biased friendship network. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
Faust, Katherine, and Skvoretz, John. 2002. Comparing networks across space and time, size and species. Sociological Methodology 32: 267–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, James H. 2005. Turnout in a small world. In The social logic of politics, ed. Zuckerman, A. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University.Google Scholar
Freeman, L. C. 1977. Set of measures of centrality based on betweenness. Sociometry 40(1): 35–41.Google Scholar
Freeman, L. C., Borgatti, S. P., and White, D. R. 1991. Centrality in valued graphs—A measure of betweenness based on network flow. Social Networks 13(2): 141–54.Google Scholar
Galaskiewicz, J., and Marsden, P. V. 1978. Interorganizational resource networks: Formal patterns of overlap. Social Science Research 7: 89–107.Google Scholar
Hall, Richard L. 1992. Measuring legislative influence. Legislative Studies Quarterly 17(2): 205–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Highton, B. 2000. Residential mobility, community mobility, and electoral participation. Political Behavior 22(2): 109–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindman, Matthew, Tsioutsiouliklisz, Kostas, and Johnson, Judy A. 2003. Googlearchy: How a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics on the web. Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Huckfeldt, R., Beck, P. A., Dalton, R. J., and Levine, J. 1995. Political environments, cohesive social-groups, and the communication of public-opinion. American Journal of Political Science 39(4): 1025–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, Daniel, and Krehbiel, Keih. 1996. Dynamics of cosponsorship. The American Political Science Review 90(3): 555–66.Google Scholar
Koger, Gregory. 2003. Position taking and cosponsorship in the U.S. House. Legislative Studies Quarterly 28(2): 225–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krehbiel, Keith. 1995. Cosponsors and wafflers from A to Z. The American Journal of Political Science 39(4): 906–23.Google Scholar
Mariolis, P. 1975. Interlocking directorates and control of corporations: The theory of bank control. Social Science Quarterly 56: 425–39.Google Scholar
Mayhew, David R. 1974. Congress: The electoral connection, Yale studies in political science. Vol. 26. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
McGrory, Mary. 1995. Mccain, Gramm a strange pairing. Omaha World Herald, November 18, 1995, 17.Google Scholar
Moody, J. 2001. Race, school integration, and friendship segregation in America. American Journal of Sociology 107: 679–716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, Mark E. J. 2001a. Scientific collaboration networks: I. Network construction and fundamental results. Physical Review E 64(016131).Google Scholar
Newman, Mark E. J. 2001b. Scientific collaboration networks: II. Shortest paths, weighted networks, and centrality. Physical Review E 64(016132).Google Scholar
Panning, William H. 1982. Blockmodels: From relations to configurations. American Journal of Political Science 26(3): 585–608.Google Scholar
Pellegrini, P. A., and Grant, J. T. 1999. Policy coalitions in the US Congress: A spatial duration modeling approach. Geographical Analysis 31(1): 45–66.Google Scholar
Polsby, Nelson W., and Schickler, Eric. 2002. Landmarks in the study of Congress since 1945. Annual Review of Political Science 5: 333–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, K. T., and Rosenthal, H. 1985. A spatial model for legislative roll call analysis. American Journal of Political Science 29(2): 357–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, K. T., and Rosenthal, H. 1991. Patterns of congressional voting. American Journal of Political Science 35(1): 228–78.Google Scholar
Poole, K. T., and Rosenthal, H. 1997. Congress: A political-economic history of roll call voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Porter, Mason A., Mucha, Peter J., Newman, M. E. J., and Warmbrand, Casey M. 2005. A network analysis of committees in the U.S. House of Representatives. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102: 7057–62.Google ScholarPubMed
Proctor, C. H., and Loomis, C. P. 1951. Analysis of sociometric data. In Research methods in social relations, ed. Holland, P. W. and Leinhardt, S. New York: Dryden Press.Google Scholar
Rapoport, A., and Horvath, W. J. 1961. A study of a large sociogram. Behavioral Science 6: 279–91.Google Scholar
Rice, Stuart A. 1927. The identification of blocs in small political bodies. American Political Science Review 21(3): 619–27.Google Scholar
Rothenberg, R. B., Potterat, J. J., and Woodhouse, D. E. 1995. Choosing a centrality measure—Epidemiologic correlates in the Colorado-Springs study of social networks. Social Networks 17 (3-4): 273–97.Google Scholar
Sabidussi, G. 1966. The centrality index of a graph. Psychometrika 31: 581–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiller, Wendy J. 1995. Senators and political entrepreneurs: Using bill sponsorship to shape legislative agendas. The American Journal of Political Science 39(1): 186–203.Google Scholar
Sinclair, Barbara. 1989. The transformation of the U.S. Senate. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar
Smith, Steven. 1989. Call to order. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Straits, B. C. 1990. The social-context of voter turnout. Public Opinion Quarterly 54(1): 64–73.Google Scholar
Talbert, J. C., and Potoski, M. 2002. Setting the legislative agenda: The dimensional structure of bill cosponsoring and floor voting. Journal of Politics 64(3): 864–91.Google Scholar
Truman, David. 1959. The congressional party: A case study. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Wawro, Gregory. 2001. Legislative entrepreneurship in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Weingast, Barry. 1991. Fighting fire with fire: Amending activity and institutional change in the Postreform Congress. In The Postreform Congress, ed. Davidson, R. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Rick K., and Young, Cheryl D. 1997. Cosponsorship in the United States Congress. Legislative Studies Quarterly 22(1): 24–43.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Fowler supplementary material

Supplementary Material

Download Fowler supplementary material(File)
File 6.8 MB