Community structure in the U.S. House of Representatives
- 1 December 2006
- journal article
- other
- Published by AIP Publishing in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science
- Vol. 16 (4), 041106
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2390556
Abstract
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 forty years. We also combine our network approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.Keywords
Other Versions
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
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- Community structure in social and biological networksProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2002
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