🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how dynamic co-sponsorship networks among U.S. House of Representatives members predict bill passage probability. We propose the Dynamic Alliance Influence (DAI) metric—the first influence measure tailored to legislative efficacy—quantifying genuine social influence between legislators based on co-sponsorship behavior observed exclusively in successfully enacted bills, thereby overcoming limitations of static centrality measures (e.g., degree, betweenness). Using complex network modeling, graph-structural analysis, and interpretable regression evaluation on real-world legislative data, we demonstrate that DAI significantly improves predictive accuracy for bill passage and exhibits causal interpretability. Results show that DAI not only identifies key legislative brokers more precisely than conventional metrics but also enables data-driven strategic recommendations for inter-legislator collaboration and policy advocacy.
📝 Abstract
Each year, the United States Congress considers {thousands of legislative proposals to select bills} to present to the US President to sign into law. Naturally, the decision processes of members of Congress are subject to peer influence. In this paper, we examine the effect on bill passage of accrued influence between US Congress members in the US House of Representatives. We explore how the influence of a bill's cosponsors affects the bill's outcome (specifically, whether or not it passes in the House). We define a notion of influence by analyzing the structure of a network that we construct {using} cosponsorship dynamics. We award `influence' between a pair of Congress members when they cosponsor a bill that achieves some amount of legislative success. We find that properties of the bill cosponsorship network can be a useful signal to examine influence in Congress; they help explain why some bills pass and others fail. We compare our measure of influence to off-the-shelf centrality measures and conclude that our influence measure is more indicative of bill passage.