I was invited by the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation to present my paper at the University of Waterloo. The paper, "Partisan Infighting among House Republicans: Leaders, Factions and Complex Networks of Interest" is a joint work with William Bendix.
Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican Party. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party’s factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest-group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro-business, and ethno-radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno-radical subgroups, and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction.