"Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives"

One of my papers, Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives just came out in Physica A. (My coauthors on this paper are Peter Mucha, Mark Newman, and A. J. Friend.) Here is the abstract for the paper:

We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st–108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ‘‘interlocks’’ or common membership. We examine the community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than 40 years. We also combine our network approach with the analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.


I am currently very active in continuing this work, with a current focus on Congress that includes not just committee assignment networks but also legislation cosponsorship networks and roll call voting networks. I also have datasets for US Supreme Court case citations, and I am planning to find some UK political datasets to help entice some of the locals to work with me on this stuff.

If you are interested in this stuff, the paper that just came out is an archival (i.e., very long) sequel to this paper that appeared in 2005 in PNAS. (For those who participated in a certain discussion last Thursday, this 2005 PNAS paper is currently my favorite among all the research papers I've written.)

I will be talking about some of my work on US Congressional and American college football networks on October 30th in Oxford's complex systems seminar series. If nothing else, you can use this as a good excuse to go inside the business school and see how the other half lives.