congress_bills — US Congress legislation cosponsorship (1973-2004)

Description

Bipartite networks of members of the US Congress and the legislation they sponsored or cosponsored, from the 93rd to the 108th Congress (1973-2004). The data were compiled by James Fowler (with later contributions by Andrew Scott Waugh and Yunkyu Sohn) by retrieving the records of legislation (bills, resolutions and amendments) from the Library of Congress THOMAS legislative database, and matching its sponsor and cosponsors to legislators. Each piece of legislation is connected to its sponsor and all of its cosponsors. The data are known to contain some errors from the original database and from the matching procedure.

congress: legislation from both chambers, with the date when it was introduced. A few dates fall before 1973 (from 1971-04-29), likely errors in the source data. Legislators are identified by name only, and older members appear by surname only.
house: legislation from the House of Representatives, with the party of each legislator.
senate: legislation from the Senate, with the party of each legislator.

The house and senate networks are subsets of the same data, prepared separately from the congress network (so their legislator nodes do not correspond one-to-one to those of congress, and they carry no dates). All legislation in them has at least one cosponsor; the selection criteria are otherwise not documented in the source. Different pieces of legislation can have exactly the same sponsor and cosponsors; they are kept as separate nodes.

The networks have the following properties:

is_bill: whether the node is a piece of legislation, otherwise a legislator.
Legislator nodes: name, the name of the legislator, as it appears in the source: either a surname only (mostly for older records), or "Last, First [State-District]" (state only for senators).
congress: time (legislation only), the date when the legislation was introduced, in days since 1970-01-01.
house and senate: party (legislators only), the political party of the legislator, "Democrat" or "Republican" (the source data only distinguish these two parties).

Tags

Political Social Governance Unweighted Timestamps Metadata

Citation

J. H. Fowler, "Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks." Political Analysis 14(4), 456-487 (2006) 10.1093/pan/mpl002 Sci-Hub
J. H. Fowler, "Legislative cosponsorship networks in the US House and Senate." Social Networks 28(4), 454-465 (2006) 10.1016/j.socnet.2005.11.003 Sci-Hub
A. R. Benson, R. Abebe, M. T. Schaub, A. Jadbabaie, J. Kleinberg, "Simplicial closure and higher-order link prediction." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(48), E11221-E11230 (2018) 10.1073/pnas.1800683115 Sci-Hub
P. S. Chodrow, N. Veldt, A. R. Benson, "Generative hypergraph clustering: From blockmodels to modularity." Science Advances 7(28), eabh1303 (2021) 10.1126/sciadv.abh1303 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~arb/data/congress-bills/
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~arb/data/house-bills/
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~arb/data/senate-bills/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
congress	283,767	2,441,799	17.21	155.80	501.89	25.65	-0.51	10	1.00	Undirected	Bipartite	is_bill name time	2.7 MiB	6.6 MiB	6.4 MiB	7.0 MiB
house	62,481	1,248,666	39.97	180.32	360.26	7.56	-0.47	7	1.00	Undirected	Bipartite	is_bill name party	1.4 MiB	3.1 MiB	3.1 MiB	3.3 MiB
senate	29,451	232,147	15.76	101.16	165.86	6.76	-0.59	6	1.00	Undirected	Bipartite	is_bill name party	290 KiB	643 KiB	740 KiB	653 KiB