Christoph Gote


2023

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Helping a Friend or Supporting a Cause? Disentangling Active and Passive Cosponsorship in the U.S. Congress
Giuseppe Russo | Christoph Gote | Laurence Brandenberger | Sophia Schlosser | Frank Schweitzer
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In the U.S. Congress, legislators can use active and passive cosponsorship to support bills. We show that these two types of cosponsorship are driven by two different motivations: the backing of political colleagues and the backing of the bill’s content. To this end, we develop an Encoder+RGCN based model that learns legislator representations from bill texts and speech transcripts. These representations predict active and passive cosponsorship with an F1-score of 0.88.Applying our representations to predict voting decisions, we show that they are interpretable and generalize to unseen tasks.