The Story Behind the U.S. Constitution's 27th Amendment

The story behind the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is really cool!

I wasn't aware of the historical path. I can't wait to see what results from some of the grades I give! Also, never underestimate the power of being bloody-minded...

(Tip of the cap to Nicholas Christakis and others.)

"Time-Dependent Community Structure in Legislation Cosponsorship Networks in the Congress of the Republic of Peru"

One of my papers just came out in final form. (Also, you can download our data.) It has been available for quite a while in the journal, but we finally have our coordinates (page numbers, etc.). Here are the details.

Title: "Time-Dependent Community Structure in Legislation Cosponsorship Networks in the Congress of the Republic of Peru"

Authors: Sang Hoon Lee, José Manuel Magallanes, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: We study community structure in time-dependent legislation cosponsorship networks in the Peruvian Congress, and we compare them briefly to legislation cosponsorship networks in the US Senate. To study these legislatures, we employ a multilayer representation of temporal networks in which legislators in each layer are connected to each other with a weight that is based on how many bills they cosponsor. We then use multilayer modularity maximization to detect communities in these networks. From our computations, we are able to capture power shifts in the Peruvian Congress during 2006–2011. For example, we observe the emergence of 'opportunists', who switch from one community to another, as well as cohesive legislative communities whose initial component legislators never change communities. Interestingly, many of the opportunists belong to the group that won the majority in Congress.

Quantum Political Science

I love this new article in The Onion.

The headline is "Quantum Political Scientists Hypothesize Country Headed In Both Right And Wrong Directions Simultaneously", and there are also other highly amusing comments in the article.

Beautiful Visualization of the Time Evolution of Ideology in the United States Congress

This visualization of the time evolution of ideology in the United States Congress, which constitutes today's xckd, is absolutely gorgeous.

(It reminds me of a visualization that Jim Moody and my collaborator Peter Mucha are publishing in the journal "Network Science". I don't think they have posted that one on a website yet. It also reminds me of Martin Rosvall's "alluvial diagrams".)

The calculations of political ideology were done using DW-Nominate, by the way. I am biased, but I happen to know of a better method to do this. :)

Facebook and Voting

Check out this new paper that was just published in Nature about voter participation and Facebook friendships. It was a collaboration between Facebook Data team, my collaborator James Fowler (who is a political scientist by training), and others at UC San Diego.

This paper is in the process of making waves. For example, here is what the New York Times had to say about it in its article. By the way, the research for this paper was funded in part by a joint grant that James and I have from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, though please note that I was not part of this project. (I did read an early draft of this paper over 1.5 years ago and gave some comments on it, and that is the extent of my involvement.) It is really cool that we get to mention this paper in our report to the funding agency, though!