James S. McDonnell Grant awarded to Dr Mason Porter

A $418,038 grant has been awarded to CABDyN's Mason Porter for a 4 year research project called, "Coevolution, interconnections and communities of social and political networks in the United States Congress."

Mason Porter will be the Principal Investigator on this research award which falls within the James S. McDonnell Foundation's prgramme area of 'Studying Complex Systems'.

"Networks, or graphs, provide a powerful tool for representing and analyzing complex systems of inter¬acting agents. Individuals and organizations are embedded in numerous types of networks whose structure plays an important role in explaining their behavior. Connections between agents in a network can thus be represented by many different quantities that each yield different estimates for the strength of the tie between two agents. For example, individuals communicate through multiple media (in person, by telephone, online, etc.) and scientists collaborate via both coauthored papers and social interactions at academic conferences. The goal of this project is to apply this "multinetwork" perspective to legislators in the United States Congress, who are connected both politically and socially through membership of the same committees and subcommittees, common voting behavior, cosponsorship of legislation, repre¬sentation of geographically proximate constituencies, and so on. The presence of many different types of connections (which are inter-related and that evolve in time), in this and other networks, raises the question that our research will address: How do the various social and political connections of legislators in the United States Congress influence each other and change dynamically in time as a result of their interconnections?"
[Full Abstract]