Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a network-based methodology to study how political entities evolve over time. We constructed networks of voting data from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, where deputies are nodes and edges are represented by voting similarity among deputies. The Brazilian Chamber of deputies is characterized by a multi-party political system. Thus, we would expect a broad spectrum of ideas to be represented. Our results, however, revealed that plurality of ideas is not present at all: the effective number of communities representing ideas based on agreement/disagreement in propositions is about 3 over the entire studied time span. The obtained results also revealed different patterns of coalitions between distinct parties. Finally, we also found signs of early party isolation before presidential impeachment proceedings effectively started. We believe that the proposed framework could be used to complement the study of political dynamics and even applied in similar social networks where individuals are organized in a complex manner.
Highlights
In recent years, the availability of information in the form of open datasets together with the capabilities to store and process data have been promoting the rise of many new studies in a variety of disciplines, including Biology [1], Social Sciences [2], Linguistics [3,4,5,6] and Physics [7, 8]
Many of these systems can be regarded as being too complex for traditional methodologies in which each of its components is isolated and studied individually. This includes the political dynamics of a country, which may depends on many aspects such as economic factors, culture, mass media, social media, etc
While we focused on the analysis of the Brazilian case, we advocate that the methods are robust enough to be applied in other democratic systems and even in other social networks
Summary
The availability of information in the form of open datasets together with the capabilities to store and process data have been promoting the rise of many new studies in a variety of disciplines, including Biology [1], Social Sciences [2], Linguistics [3,4,5,6] and Physics [7, 8] Many of these systems can be regarded as being too complex for traditional methodologies in which each of its components is isolated and studied individually.
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