The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives
Fig 2
Division of Democrat and Republican Party members over time.
Each member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949–2012 is drawn as a single node. Republican (R) representatives are in red and Democrat (D) representatives are in blue, party affiliation changes are not reflected. Edges are drawn between members who agree above the Congress’ threshold value of votes. The threshold value is the number of agreements where any pair exhibiting this number of agreements is equally likely to comprised of two members of the same party (e.g. D-D or R-R), or a cross-party pair (e.g. D-R). Each node is sized relative to its total number of connections; edges are thicker if the pair agrees on more votes. The starting year of each 2-year Congress is written above the network. The network is drawn using a linear-attraction linear-repulsion model with Barnes Hut optimization [33].