A few years ago , some mathematician take apart the US Congress using mesh hypothesis , trying to determine which citizens committee were join by share appendage . They discovered that the connection between committee and subcommittees changed markedly when Congress was master by Republicans .
What you see above is a web diagram that show connections between committees in the Republican - prevail 107th House free-base on how many citizenry are shared between each commission – the dark the line , the more connections . ( These connection have been normalized so that larger and small committees do n’t make off the numbers . ) In addition , each committee has been assigned a colour for extremism , which Oxford mathematician Mason Porter and his co - source define as Democratic or Republican partisanship in price of how members vote . So committee with the least partisan member are blue , and the most super partisan are ruddy . Basically this is a snapshot of the societal meshing in Congress in 2001 - 2003 , after Bush gain as President and during the 2001 terrorist attacks .
What was different about this House , as compared to Democratic star sign ?
We sing to Porter via e-mail , and he say io9 :
We found change in terms of the overall structure of the meshwork . . . [ there was ] an additional hierarchical level that seemed to arise . The interesting affair there is that such a tier — if it really exist — is not one that is imposed by the structure of the soundbox itself . The trunk itself has individuals , subcomittees , committees , and the full House — so the most interesting things to seek to examine are ( in my opinion ) things like connections between different subcommittees and connection between dissimilar committees .
That “ additional stage ” that Porter is referring to are the connections between committees . He tot up :
The close connecter between committees like Rules and the Select Committee on Homeland Security was pretty outstanding .
In a paper that Porter co - authored with fellow worker in 2007 [ PDF ] , the researcher drop a line :
Some of the connections . . . are unsurprising . For representative , sets of subcommittee of the same standing committee typically share many of the same members , thereby forming a group or ingroup in the connection . The four subcommittees of the 107th Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence , for case , each include at least one-half of the full 20 - extremity citizens committee and at least one third of each of the other subcommittees . These tight connections result in normalized interlocks with values in the range 14.4–23.6 , causing these five client to be drawn close together in the visualizations , forming the small pentagon in the middle right of Fig . 2 and lower right of [ the image at the top of this post ] . The Intelligence Committee and its subcommittees are also tightly connected in the 108th House , appearing again as a small pentagon in [ the paradigm below ] .
They continue :
Some connections between committees , however , are less obvious . For instance , the 9- member Select Committee on Homeland Security , formed in June 2002 during the 107th Congress in the aftermath of the terrorist onslaught of September 11 , 2001 , has a secure connection to the 13 - member Rules Committee ( with a renormalize interlock of 7.4 from two uncouth penis ) , which is the committee charged with deciding the rule and purchase order of clientele under which legislation is considered by other committee and the full House . The Homeland Security Committee is also tie to the 7 - member Legislative and Budget Process Subcommittee of Rules by the same two vulgar members .
In other words , under the Republicans , newfangled connections ( and unexampled citizens committee ) grew into existence . This is n’t too surprising , though some of the connections are discover .
What ’s new is that under Republicans , commission appointments reduce , but connections between commission and subcommittees tightened . In another newspaper [ PDF ] , Porter and colleagues write , “ The committee reorganization following the Republican Revolution produce a sharp declination in the typical numbers game of committee assignments per Representative compared to the 101st–103rd Houses [ and ] seems also to have tightened the compartmentalization of the House committee assignments . ” There may have been fewer commission appointment than under Democrats , but it was much more likely that committees and subcommittees would share members . This create more modular mesh , with areas of tightly link up nodes .
As a result , a new level of the connection hierarchy in the House was born . Not only were there the hierarchy of citizens committee , but there was also a power structure of links between committee . Porter tell io9 :
[ A situation like this ] could arise if there is for instance a more cohesive lot of connections across committee ( or a more cohesive set of connection across subcommittees within a larger citizens committee ) . More specifically , the algorithm we used start with a connection and had a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ( a “ dendrogram ” ) as an output and the profoundness of the tree being longer is what “ more levels ” is .
Below you could see one of the dendograms Porter and his colleagues create , demonstrate the hierarchy of link between committee .
Porter cautions that these models are not predictive . Just because there seems to have been more back - scratching between committees during a old Republican House does n’t think of that will bump if the House goes Republican on Election Day today . “ I seek to be cautious about translate it , ” he say . “ I prefer when possible to let the output speak for itself . ”
you could learn more about Porter ’s researchvia his home page .
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