Geographic Patterns of Legislative Collaboration

• In Event: Legislative Behavior across the United States

Abstract

Legislative politics scholarship increasingly recognizes the importance of social relationships and networks in shaping outcomes. Within this literature, one important observation is that collaboration across groups can be especially impactful, with work highlighting this dynamic, for example, across partisanship (Harbridge-Yong et al. 2023) and gender (Holman et al. 2021). We know little, however, about the importance of geography and regionalism in state legislatures, despite an increasing focus on place and political geography in contemporary work in public opinion and voting behavior (e.g., Cramer 2012; Gimpel et al. 2020; Jacobs and Munis 2022). In the study of state legislatures, within-state regional divisions are often common knowledge (e.g., Chicago vs. downstate; northern vs. southern California) but few multi-state studies have incorporated such information, let alone analyzed regionalism’s impact in comprehensive studies of legislative relationships and outcomes. In this paper, I analyze state legislative cosponsorship patterns to assess whether in-state regional divisions serve as important predictors of collaboration in legislatures. First, I assess the geographic structure of legislative networks, considering three conceptions of geography: (1) divisions among urban, suburban, and rural districts; (2) divisions across metropolitan areas; and (3) geographic diversity using continuous distance metrics. Second, I ask whether legislators who attract a more geographic diverse set of cosponsors have higher levels of legislative effectiveness, and if so, whether the linkage between geo-diverse cosponsors and legislative success differs by policy area.

Author

• Todd Makse, Florida International University