March Meeting abstract

I'll copy Gazebo and show my March Meeting abstract:

Session V33: Focus Session: Social Networks
11:15 AM–2:03 PM, Thursday, March 16, 2006
Baltimore Convention Center - 336

Sponsoring Unit: GSNP
Chair: Alessandro Vespignani, Indiana University

Abstract: V33.00006 : A Network Analysis of Committees in the United States House of Representatives
12:39 PM–12:51 PM

Author: Mason Porter (Caltech)


Network theory provides a powerful tool for the representation and analysis of complex systems of interacting agents. Here we investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with committees connected according to ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the House's community structure using several algorithms and reveal strong links between different committees as well as the intrinsic hierarchical structure within the House as a whole. We show additionally that structural changes, including a tighter community structure, resulted from the 1994 elections, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. In this work, we combine our network theory approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition and successfully uncover political and organizational correlations between committees in the House without the need to incorporate other political information. This is joint work with A.J. Friend, Peter Mucha, Mark Newman, and Casey Warmbrand.



The chair of the session is actually somebody well-known in the field who it would be extremely good for me to meet. There are also plenty of other relevant people who will be at the meeting and likely at this session, so this should be quite productive. (I think many of them have actually heard about our first paper on this topic, but the conversations will still be very important.)

Because of lack of time, I won't actually be saying much about the so-called "Republican Revolution" of 1994 (this is pretty much for the official name of it at this point; we're stuck here; I think Newt coined the phrase), but one can see mathematically that there were changes and one can even track certain trends over time for each subsequent Republican-controlled Congress. You can see the short version of this paper here. We hope to submit the archival sequel to this short paper soon (perhaps as early as this month); we are in the final drafting stages.