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Cited by 532

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks

Fowler, James H.·2006·Political Analysis

Abstract

Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networks of all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S. House and Senate from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directional link can be drawn from each cosponsor of a piece of legislation to its sponsor. I use a number of statistics to describe these networks such as the quantity of legislation sponsored and cosponsored by each legislator, the number of legislators cosponsoring each piece of legislation, the total number of legislators who have cosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and network measures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality. I then introduce a new measure I call “connectedness” which uses information about the frequency of cosponsorship and the number of cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about the social distance between legislators. Connectedness predicts which members will pass more amendments on the floor, a measure that is commonly used as a proxy for legislative influence. It also predicts roll call vote choice even after controlling for ideology and partisanship.

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Metadata

Authors
Fowler, J. H.
Venue
Political Analysis
Published
2006
Volume
14
Issue
4
Pages
456-487
ISSN
  • 1047-1987 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4989
OpenAlex
W2100342913
Cited by
532
References
33
FWCI
10.46
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/pan/mpl002
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Fowler, J. H. (2006). Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks. Political Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpl002

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