Playing Ball: Collaboration in the U.S. Congress

Members of Congress, pundits, and scholars alike have emphasized the importance of personal connections in developing policy. Yet, in the modern era of leader-led lawmaking, there are few opportunities for rank-and-file members to develop meaningful connections, particularly bipartisan ones. As a result, the dearth of personal connections has made sources of collaboration difficult to study. This research note examines a seemingly simple—yet effective—source of congressional collaboration: the Annual Congressional Baseball Game. We apply a novel dataset of baseball rosters from the 114 th through the 117 th Congress to a network analysis of cosponsorship between all members, and find that membership on the Congressional Baseball Team increases the likelihood of intra-party and bipartisan collaboration at higher rates than other common areas of social connection. This research contributes to work on social connections in Congress, using novel data collection and network analysis.