Computational Legal Studies™

In the days and weeks to come we will turn our attenion away from Congress in favor of other institutions and substantive questions. However, given our prior posts focusing upon the structure of the 110th Congress, we thought it proper to highlight some relevant realted scholarship. James Fowler from the UCSD Political Science Department and leader of the Networks in Political Science movement has published several papers exploring the strucutre of legislative co-sponsorship.  You can find a link to these papers here. My favorite of these papers is Community Structure in Congressional Cosponsorship Networks published in Physica A by Yan Zhang, A. J. Friend, Amanda L. Traud, Mason A. Porter, James H. Fowler & Peter J. Mucha. The above figure, drawn from the paper, is a dendrogram for the legislative cosponsorship network of the Senate of the 108th Congress.