The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives
Name
Andris-2015-The rise of partisan.pdf
Size
2.05 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1ac2031d71fe1690e5de974580c20927
Author(s)
Andris, Clio
Lee, David
Hamilton, Marcus J.
Martino, Mauro
Gunning, Christian E.
Selden, John Armistead
Date Issued
April 2015
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Andris, Clio, David Lee, Marcus J. Hamilton, Mauro Martino, Christian E. Gunning, and John Armistead Selden. “The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Edited by Rodrigo Huerta-Quintanilla. PLOS ONE 10, no. 4 (April 21, 2015): e0123507.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
It is widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high. Given that individuals are persuaded to follow party lines while having the opportunity and incentives to collaborate with members of the opposite party, our goal is to measure the extent to which legislators tend to form ideological relationships with members of the opposite party. We quantify the level of cooperation, or lack thereof, between Democrat and Republican Party members in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949–2012. We define a network of over 5 million pairs of representatives, and compare the mutual agreement rates on legislative decisions between two distinct types of pairs: those from the same party and those formed of members from different parties. We find that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing. Yet, a group of representatives continue to cooperate across party lines despite growing partisanship.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SENSEable City Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0123507
