Cosponsorship Network Analysis
Cosponsorship network analysis treats legislative collaboration as a social network: when legislators cosponsor one another's bills, they form ties, and the resulting web of connections can be measured with the tools of network science. Introduced to congressional studies by James Fowler in 2006, it turns the public record of who signed on to whose bills into a graph among lawmakers, revealing who is central and influential, how connected the chamber is, and which clusters of legislators form coalitions. With inferential network models such as ERGMs, researchers move from describing the network to explaining why ties form.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Fowler, J. H. (2006). Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks. Political Analysis, 14(4), 456–487. · DOI 10.1093/pan/mpl002
- Cranmer, S. J., & Desmarais, B. A. (2011). Inferential Network Analysis with Exponential Random Graph Models. Political Analysis, 19(1), 66–86. · DOI 10.1093/pan/mpr032
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.