"Comparison of Congressional Social Media and Cosponsorship Networks in the 112th House of Representatives." Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Political Networks Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) (original) (raw)
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Politial Networks Conference, 2013
This paper compares congressional networks within the 112 th House of Representatives in order to examine the similarities and differences between social media networks and job-related networks within organizations. An understanding of the dynamics between social media networks and job-related networks becomes more and more important as social media networks gain importance in the day-today activities of political leaders. The paper compares Twitter and cosponsorship networks to analyze and compare coalitions that form within the body. The results indicate that while congressional cosponsorship networks are structured by committee, state of representation, and ideology, congressional Twitter networks show little evidence of social media relationships grounded in committee or state. Congressional Twitter networks tend to be structured by ideology and the leadership hierarchy of the parties. Both data sets can be useful, but not sufficient, for ideological prediction of the members' voting patterns.
Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks
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.
Many researchers have assumed that social media will reduce inequalities between elite politicians and those outside the political mainstream and that it will thus benefit democracy, as it circumvents the traditional media that focus too much on a few elite politicians. I test this assumption by investigating the association between U.S. Representatives using Twitter and their fundraising. Evidence suggests that (1) politicians' adoptions of social media have yielded increased donations from outside their constituencies but little from within their own constituencies; (2) politicians with extreme ideologies tend to benefit more from their social media adoptions; and (3) the political use of social media may yield a more unequal distribution of financial resources among candidates. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for political equality, polarization, and democracy.
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, 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.